Selling With Integrity

Solution Selling With Integrity
By Louis Columbus

The mantra of selling solutions has taken enterprise software by storm and nowhere is this more prevalent than CRM. Honestly, it seems like the more challenging and difficult it is to sell into specific sectors of CRM, the more solution selling is being invoked. All this newfound religion of selling solutions is truly transforming some companies away from being purely product-centric to being problem-centered on their customers’ broken business processes first. The most positive aspect of solution selling pervading the best-of-breed CRM community is that it is starting to make a difference.

These best of breed vendors who are walking the solutions talk also have generated a side benefit no one is really talking about when it comes to solutions selling, and that benefit is integrity. Amazing as it sounds I don’t think enough companies really stop and think about the long-term implications to their integrity of giving themselves the label of being a “solutions seller” without earning it. In fact it’s just as easy for a company to claim they are “customer focused” as being enlightened at solution selling without being either.

What’s unsettling and troublesome is that so many CRM vendors, in trouble with thinning pipelines on the one hand and competitors from the SaaS world nipping at their heels including Salesforce.com at the low-end and mid-range of the market on the other, jump to solutions selling without thinking about how to build integrity in the process. The bottom line is that solution selling for the troubled CRM vendors of today is just like the “Hail Mary” long pass in football often thrown in the last seconds of a half or game, hoping someone on their team will come down with a signed deal in the end zone. One of the many problems with seeing solution selling as the “quick fix” to major problems is that it comes across just like that to prospects and clients alike. The proof comes in the execution, not in landing the deal.