Sales professionals are taught their entire careers to know and love their solutions and to constantly sell them as the answer to the customer’s needs. This can be effective, but not always. Why?

1. Many buyers lack true expertise and have no way of knowing what solutions are truly better for them than others. If they are provided with multiple options, all represented by smart, capable salespeople, how can they really discern the difference? This is how many solutions have become commoditized. The differences between options are simply not strong or obvious enough to the people making buying decisions about them. If all competing solutions are fairly similar, the next important factor becomes price. For companies that are not the low-cost provider, this can become a “going out of business strategy”.
2. Some buyers simply don’t care about the solution; they care about the outcome – the resolution of an issue or the attainment of an objective. This is typically the case, the higher up you go in an organization, where senior-level decision makers care more about their business and less about outside companies and their solutions.

In both situations above, we can enhance our odds of success by including more senior-level decision makers in our efforts and selling to them differently. Knowing that these buyers care less about us and more about their business, we should be selling the outcome of our work together, not the features and functions of our solution. To do this, consider these questions:

 "When you work with the customer and implement your solution, what impact does it have on the customer’s business? 

What business outcomes are you helping to create?"

The answers to these questions will be more compelling to some buyers than others. Thankfully, it will be more compelling to those who can buy our value.