Selling Solutions Isn’t Enough

B2B companies need to focus on helping each customer achieve better outcomes.

Hannah Grove, Kevin Sellers, Richard Ettenson, and Jonathan Knowles

August 01, 2018

The word solution needs to be retired from the business vocabulary. What was once a meaningful, buyer-defined term that meant “the answer to my specific problem” is now generic jargon that sellers have co-opted to mean “the bundle of products and services I want to sell you.”

Management guru Peter Drucker made this observation nearly a half-century ago, when he said that customers are always more interested in their outcome than in your solution. “What the customer buys and considers value is never a product,” Drucker wrote. “It is always ...