HBR's 10 Must Reads on Sales (with bonus interview of Andris Zoltners) (HBR's 10 Must Reads)

The End of Solution Sales

by Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon, and Nicholas Toman

THE HARDEST THING ABOUT B2B selling today is that customers don’t need you the way they used to. In recent decades sales reps have become adept at discovering customers’ needs and selling them “solutions”—generally, complex combinations of products and services. This worked because customers didn’t know how to solve their own problems, even though they often had a good understanding of what their problems were. But now, owing to increasingly sophisticated procurement teams and purchasing consultants armed with troves of data, companies can readily define solutions for themselves.

In fact, a recent Corporate Executive Board study of more than 1,400 B2B customers found ...