Overcoming Solution Bias: Strategies for Elevating Your Sales Approach in 2024

Discover the pivotal shift from product obsession to strategic selling that can set you apart in the competitive landscape of 2024. Join us in unraveling the art of winning without the blinders of solution love.

Last week, I joined Nick and Armand on the “30 minutes to President's Club” podcast. Our conversation was about beating your competition, and we discussed capturing the client's mindshare and several displacement strategies, ending with triangulation strategy, a way to remove all your competitors from a contest for a client.

At the end of the live podcast, I was asked what salespeople should stop doing, and I answered: “Stop falling in love with your product.” Allow me to explain.

Reducing Your Influence: Avoiding the Pitfall of Product-Centric Sales Conversations

How you speak and what you talk about in the sales conversation can improve or reduce your status. When you are in love with your product, you sound like every salesperson your contact has ever met. When you talk about your solution, you reduce your status.

To be fair, this isn't your fault. When you were onboarded, you were taught that your company is better than your competitors. You were also taught that your product is the very best in the known universe. By building up your company and your product, you ensure your contact will see you as just another peddler, trying to sell their wares.

Self-Commoditization Traps: Escaping the Common Sales-Pitch Dilemma

You are a commodity selling a product that is also a commodity. When your talk tracks are the exact talk tracks your competitors use, you project that you are a run-of-the-mill salesperson, one that is easy for your contact to find by looking at the desperate emails that flood in every day.

When you start talking about your product, you give your contact a sense of déjà vu, as your competitors have already had this same conversation with them. The truth for most of us in sales is that our products provide parity. Your product can help your client, and your competitor's products can also generate results.

Capturing and Retaining Client Interest: Beyond Product Features and Benefits

Unless your client's main problem is a good night's sleep, a presentation pitching your product is unlikely to help them. Walking them through a demo or explaining all the features and benefits of your product is more potent than Ambien. You will bore your client to sleep by talking in depth about the product. No one wants to buy your solution. They want to buy the better results they need to succeed in improving their business.

There are more effective conversations to have than talking about your solution, and these better conversations don't mention your solution. One reason this shift is difficult for most salespeople is that they lack the business acumen they would need to present themselves as experts. Most low-status salespeople try to prove they have business acumen by delivering an ordinary pitch instead of acting like a consultant. We describe consultative salespeople as being One-Up, meaning they have high status and win at a high rate.

Elevating Your Sales Game: Strategies for Becoming an Irreplaceable Consultative Seller

No one wants to buy your solution. They want to buy the strategic outcomes they need to succeed in reaching their goals. Most salespeople are so in love with their solution that they don't recognize their contacts want the outcomes instead. If they could have the outcomes without having to buy your solution, they wouldn't consider buying it.

You improve your ability to win your client's business by learning to talk about the client's desired results. Consultative salespeople talk like businesspeople. They focus on the end, what needs to change to allow the client to produce the better outcomes they need to succeed.

Key Insights from Commodity Sales: Your Unique Value in a Saturated Market

If you sell a commodity, you may eventually recognize that your solution is no better than your competitor's, and no worse than theirs, either. You are the value proposition, and to fulfill that role, you must create value in and through the conversation you have with your contacts and their stakeholders.

By having a conversation about your client's strategic outcomes, you outflank your competitors, causing your client to recognize that you are a high-status consultative salesperson who knows what the client needs to change to accelerate the results they need.

Breaking Free from Solution Infatuation: Focusing on Client Outcomes for Greater Success

You may have a hard breakup with your solution, as the two of you have been together for a long time. But you will soon realize you should instead be in love with the outcomes you and your solution can provide. We need to be careful here because what matters is your ability to address the strategic outcomes.

This is how you beat a competitor with a better solution than yours. When you are talking about results and how to acquire them and your competitor talks about their solution, you have the advantage.

Leaving this article, focus on learning how to change your sales approach to one that is more consultative and one that begins with the result. This will improve your status and create a preference to buy from you. This is why we believe: You will never win every client you want, but you will win every client that wants you.