The companies getting the best results from solution selling are doing these tasks not just to get them done, but with a lot of focus and effort behind them to make their solutions trustworthy, and at the heart of solution selling with integrity is the earning of trust:

• Populate roadmaps with products you can WebEx today showing integration. A sure sign a company is solution selling with integrity is when they have reality-based roadmaps. Every application, whether licensed or hosted, can he demonstrated on WebEx and the systems integrated with can also be seen anywhere on the planet, anytime, through a simple WebEx window. That’s impressive, it’s solution selling and it’s making many companies practicing this worthy of trust. Finally, prospects say to themselves, a vendor who “gets it” and shows me what is shipping. Not to belabor the point, but you have to respect Steve Job’s quote “Real artists ship”, reminding his staff that delivering working products on time is as important as innovation and killer designs.

• Solution selling is not an excuse to jack up services fees to 10X or higher of license costs. There are those software companies that will announce solutions selling as their core focus with much fanfare only to surprise prospects and clients both with a revamped pricing model that takes services costs through the roof. Instead of focusing on selling more services with a solution selling label on it, try to deliver more services at the same license-to-services ratio, earning trust in the process. The bottom line is that by doing this you will be way ahead of competitors who will look to solution selling as a strategy to drive up deal sizes.