Any company still attempting to SELL a complex product as a “solution” is in trouble. So long as a CEO and his or her core coalition allow this behavior to continue, the company’s sales force will not learn how to explore with customers to bring higher-margin value beyond the fixed, immediate “product solution” they are pushing.
In our own presentations with clients, we sometimes use the classic metaphor of a sales funnel to illustrate this problem. Sales-driven companies want a big funnel that narrows quickly to close the sale. My firm helps companies re-engineer this funnel, so that it opens up just as widely on the customer’s side.
As we move out of this recession, longer term and more profitable relationships will not come from the selling and buying of today’s product, but from an understanding of where company and customer can continue to grow together.
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