Ask any marketing services salesperson if they solution-sell, and they invariably answer yes. Yet ask buyers the same question about the salespeople they meet, and they almost invariably answer no. Perhaps the two groups have different views as to the definition of solution-selling.

From the perspective of many salespeople, solution selling means finding a need to meet or a problem to solve, and of course there isn't a need or problem their product can't address. From the perspective of the marketing services buyer, the question is often bigger than which vendor to choose. Their first questions often center around which strategy or tactics make the most sense to achieve a particular goal. The salespeople who get in on the opportunity at the earliest planning stages often have the greatest chance of getting the business, but to get in at that level they have to deploy a level of solution selling that does not come naturally to all salespeople. Often, to get in on the high-level planning process, you have to display a level of objectivity that could eventually exclude your product or service from the strategy. The rewards: You have an inside shot at a strategy you helped devise. The risk: The zero-based approach could rule out the strategy that would best benefit your company.

The premise of solution-selling centers on the principle that clients prefer to do business with people they trust, and that a sales process that focuses on the needs of the client above all will yield greater long-term trust. Most people remember it when a salesperson says in complete honesty, "You know, now that I understand your needs, I don't think that makes sense for our company. I would recommend so and so…" Proponents of solution selling believe that the goodwill generated by such integrity creates valuable, positive, but impossible to measure, word of mouth. Often, the budgets involved with marketing services can reach into the six and seven figures, increasing the need for a client to trust a vendor. How a vendor sells a new prospect establishes the level of trust that the client will need to proceed.

Solution selling doesn't mean a proactive strategy to turn away business. It means targeting the types of companies most likely to benefit from your products and services so that you don't waste time selling to people who shouldn't buy anyway.

The sections specific to various marketing services sectors will address more granular approaches to solution selling. Below, you'll find the principles fundamental to all fields.

Solution Selling Definition
Solution selling involves an honest analysis of a prospect's objectives, needs and situation to impartially determine whether or not your product or service makes sense. Instead of spending much of the early communication time on selling, more preliminary time is spent asking questions that both help establish your credibility with the client and help you qualify the prospect in terms of true potential. Depending on the potential size of the client, or the stage of the selling process, solution selling also can involve research on the Internet or through other sources to substantiate your recommendations.

You cannot solution-sell unless your client truly believes you would walk away if your product or service does not make sense.

Four Steps to the Sale
Before covering the specific steps to solution selling, it helps to remember the four steps fundamental to every business sale.

1. Identifying a qualified prospect: Make them willing to talk.


2. Starting the relationship: Help, don't sell, to find the mutual benefit.


3. Building trust: Provide useful information, stay objective, establish the mutual benefit.


4. Close the sale: The client should feel as happy as you at having found, in his or her case, the solution.

Solution selling affects all four steps to the sale. 

Step 1: Getting Permission to Begin a Dialogue With Qualified Prospects

A prospect cannot be considered qualified unless he or she has a need that your product or service can meet in a budget range that makes mutual sense. While you can gather qualification information via the Internet or surveys, the information does not become reliable until confirmed by phone or face-to-face communication. That means accomplishing two goals, usually in a very brief phone call:

1. Explaining your company quickly enough to encourage the prospect to answer a few questions


2. Getting answers to qualifying questions in a way that demonstrates your expertise or at least makes the client feel like they could benefit by sharing such information with you

Explaining your company quickly means having a sound bite or slogan that both explains what you do as well as conveys your unique selling benefit. (See "Business Development Tactics.") If it takes too long, you won't get time to ask questions.

The questions themselves have to strike a balance between what you need to know and what the client will feel comfortable sharing. The best way to do that is for prospects to feel they will benefit by sharing this information, either because they want to determine whether they should continue a dialogue with you or because you might have some suggestions to a problem they have.

To accomplish this, the best questions start with identifying an area of pain related to what you sell—this both shows an interest in them and gets you information you need. Depending on what your organization sells, the question could be something like: "Do you expect that your sales team will achieve its goals this year?" rather than starting with an obvious question, like, "Are you in the market for an incentive or promotion program?" Put yourself in your buyer's shoes; identify the areas of pain or need that prompts your customers to use your company, and phrase questions to identify companies with similar areas of pain or need. Save the more self-serving questions, such as those trying to identify the budget, for the end of the process. Whatever questions you determine should be set up on your contact management system and on any other paper- or technology-based means of collecting information from prospects. You can rarely hope to get more than five questions answered at most in the first prospect contact, unless, of course, they have called you in need.

The desired outcome of the qualifying process: Clients feel you have objectively sought out their needs, and you have determined whether or not you have an immediate or future opportunity to help them.

At the end of that identification process, it often makes sense to send out some useful information to the individual. It could consist of a company white paper, Web site link, PDF—some sort of valuable information related to your field that makes a subliminal statement that you are poised to help, even if the client immediately discards it at the moment for lack of current need.

Getting to High-Level, High-Volume Decision Makers
Those who sell high-volume, complex marketing services such as advertising and promotion gain little from the type of cold-calling above, other than to find the precise name of the decision maker. The decision makers for large-scale programs receive more inquiries than they can respond to and tend to buy from trusted vendors anyway, so often the only way to break down the door involves knowing someone who knows someone, or developing a partnership with a related type of company that has access to these high-level big buyers.

Without such relationships, often the only hope of opening a door lies in doing research on clients in advance and presenting a tantalizing solution to a problem or goal you feel certain sits high on the prospect's priority lists. That means reading articles about them, conducting interviews with customers or employees who will talk, or obtaining other information that can substantiate your concept. Often, the best idea is off-base for a reason you couldn't predict, but the effort often demonstrates pluck and commitment that prospects admire enough to open the door to other ideas.

What If You Can't Get Through
RMP addresses this issue in depth in the section "Business Development Tactics." For the purposes of this section, the answer depends on how well you have qualified the prospect. If you feel certain that this organization's needs fits your capabilities and pricing levels, then you will have to begin the often drawn-out process of periodically sending out useful information, leaving some phone messages with useful ideas and otherwise attempting to demonstrate your willingness to help, not sell, until the prospect enters a buying or receptivity mode. Remember that most salespeople give up, or that, if you call too often, disinterested prospects will call and tell you not to bother. Those that don't respond at all often simply have nothing to say but will respond eventually if you keep calling until a time of need arrives.

Step 2: Starting the Relationship

This stage of the relationship officially begins when you make a formal presentation to a prospect, either on the phone or in person. Once gain, the marketing services salesperson has to overcome the instinct to start selling, and make sure time is left for listening. The start of the relationship often constitutes your most critical opportunity to build the trust and confidence of a prospect, and you can't do that by simply talking about your product. In many industries, particularly retail, it makes sense for a salesperson to focus on their product, since the product itself is the issue, and not necessarily a business problem or challenge that drives the need. A retailer either believes a product will sell or not at a desirable margin. For a marketing services buyer, who will use the product or service to achieve a business goal or meet a need, the buying process often involves understanding their own needs and the best way to address them. So, the salesperson who focuses specifically on the attributes of his or her product misses a unique opportunity to build confidence and trust by discussing the factors generating the need. On the other hand, a buyer might well resent a salesperson who has come in on the pretext of making a presentation but who then proceeds to ask a lot of questions before the prospect feels comfortable answering questions.

The Crossroads of Strategic and Tactical
So, the first sales call, whether by phone appointment or in person, has to begin with at least a brief presentation about your business that conveys the benefits you offer, establishes the context of the conversation and reinforces your credibility as someone worth spending time with. Generally speaking, this should take no more than five to 10 minutes, after which time you owe the individual an opportunity to indicate in one way or another that they feel receptive to further discussion. At this point, you can test their interest related to either knowing more about your products or services or talking about the specific needs related to your area. This critical junction creates the opportunity either to move to a strategic level and talk about their real business issues or move to the tactical level related to your products and services.

Many salespeople feel uncomfortable going into the strategic line of discussion because they feel an inadequate level of knowledge about the client's business. Once the client begins to talk and reveal issues, salespeople feel obligated to not only understand the prospect's discourse but to have potential ideas and solutions related to something that might nor might not pertain to the product or service. Without experience, knowledge, and confidence, the typical salesperson commonly will avoid a strategic discussion, even though these types of discussions often yield the most valuable relationships.

The strategic line of questioning goes beyond such self-service questions as, "Who is your current vendor?" or "What is your budget?" As in the first phase of getting permission to begin the dialogue, questions should center on the client's needs, not yours. You want to identify their objectives and areas of pain related to your product or service, rather than simply tactical issues, whenever possible.

The Strategic Opportunity
The strategic discussion usually lasts about 20 more minutes at most, until you attempt to bring things to a next step. Thirty minutes has become the time increment of choice for people with at least some interest, but these meetings usually stretch to an hour or even more if the prospect has begun to get things off his or her chest or senses that the relationship could provide a solution. If the individual shows a willingness to open up, you have entered a new realm of relationship and trust that you are now obligated to fully uphold if you hope to generate any long-term mutual benefit. That means your answers and ideas address their needs first, and then yours, to the point that a logical analysis of everything they have said could lead to the conclusion that you can't help. This is painful, even for a strategic salesperson, because the competitive edge, management pressure and/or desire for money often generate an enthusiasm for making almost any sale.

The good news: If an honest picture of the landscape favors the use of your product or service, you will have all of the information you need to make a convincing argument for the use of your product or service at the appropriate time.

The conclusion of this first call comes after the client has had an opportunity to talk about their areas of pain and the salesperson has had the opportunity to provide some immediate ideas or the promise to get back with some. This is the moment of truth feared by so many salespeople: What will they say after the prospect is done? Will they feel like an idiot? That's a risk most people don't want to take.

First-Call Outcomes
For the tactical salesperson, the best next step involves coming up with a proposal for a product, service or pricing, or at the very least an appointment to further discuss those issues. If the prospect doesn't have an immediate need, he or she might give permission to receive more information and a call sometime in the future. Strategic salespeople at best become viewed as a potential trusted source of good advice and information and someone who can potentially contribute a voice to strategic decision making, so the prospect's next step might include both requesting a proposal and extending an invitation to attend a planning meeting, or at least showing a greater willingness to stay in touch until a planning or buying opportunity arises. For the sellers of any type of higher-level sales or marketing product or service, making this leap between tactical and strategic defines their role in the marketplace as either a commodity or trusted adviser.

Confirming Permission
The outcome of every call should include a confirmation from the prospect as to what information they want to receive and how. Beyond having a next step related to a call date, do they want to receive your company's e-mail newsletter, or would they prefer it in print? Would they attend a seminar on a related topic if your organization uses education as part of its tool kit?

Why the Resistance to Strategic Selling?
The reason so many salespeople fail to go to the strategic from the tactical? One cannot fake strategic questioning and thinking. Even the most charming salesperson cannot easily disguise the inability to provide suggestions or ideas related to a strategic client need. Charm lends itself much more easily to discussions about personal interests, hobbies and families, which is why so much of today's relationship- and trust-building strategies involve entertainment and wining and dining rather than strategic collaboration. Everyone has golf, fishing, tennis or entertainment in common, but how many salespeople can provide strategic assistance?

Many marketing services organizations fail to formally evaluate their salespeople in terms of their ability to provide strategic or tactical insight, which leads often to deploying the wrong people to have the wrong face time. Your organization can have the best strategic thinkers on hand, but your top prospects won't have such an impression if their first contact with your organization involves a young, inexperienced salesperson, as is often the case. Many agencies also lack the resources or time to help salespeople make the leap and depend upon time and experience to work their inevitable magic with bright eager people. Most, though, can afford a greater investment in training to hasten the process, which actually is also a function of capability, of the autonomy needed to learn from mistakes and enough time spent experiencing the myriad scenarios that turn up in almost any marketing services area and how to head them off or address them.

Making the Distinction in Your Staff
The "Business Development Tactics" section goes into greater detail regarding when and how to develop a strategic sales staff and how to differentiate those players from the hunters seeking qualified prospects. In step 2, above, "Starting the Relationship," almost every moment going forward with a qualified prospect gets wasted if your salespeople cannot entertain an open-ended, strategic discussion about the client's overall objectives, needs, concerns, etc. By definition, strategic issues reside one step back from the tactical, meaning that resolution of the strategic question yields the specific best tactics, which may or may not favor your organization in the long run.

Why attempt a strategic role in marketing services? For the same reason advertising agency executives have done it for decades. Once you have a strategic role linked to critical business issues, you have far better relationships to get and keep business. Tactical providers forever risk commoditization because someone can almost always deliver a marketing service for less. Not everyone can deliver truly strategic assistance. 

What About Personal Banter?
Despite today's increasingly businesslike approach to selling, people still buy from people. Salespeople who dislike people do not belong in sales at any organization that insists on having positive customer relationships. Those who sincerely like people will want to share moments to find and develop personal connections, and many buyers are receptive to it, but personal banter, unless sincere, rings hollow. If personal banter has become part of your opening discussions with prospects, and you don't genuinely take an interest in what you're saying or can never advance beyond the banter to help with serious solutions, well, we feel sorry for your clients.

Step 3: Building Trust

You cannot fake trust any more than you can fake strategic collaboration. Trust is earned by actions, often preceded by commitments that get met. Whatever next steps came out of the first call now have to be meticulously carried out to specification and timetable, because your follow-up actions provide your prospect with the most natural way to consciously or otherwise evaluate your service as a vendor.

The tactical salesperson makes the appointed follow-up calls and sends the product and service information requested, and maybe has gotten to know the buyer's personal interests and has sent off some published tidbits related to that topic. The strategic salesperson focuses instead on sending useful information or ideas from time to time, based on his or her understanding of the prospect's needs or areas of pain. Almost every buyer needs substantive information at some time or other to get approvals, so they welcome information that they can store for such purposes. This information can take the shape of clips or links to published information, with respect for all copyright rules, perhaps appended with a comment related to their business. Trust isn't created in a day; it takes time to build. In some fields, where clients buy millions of dollars of services at a time, it can take two years or more for you to achieve the necessary level of trust.

Many organizations today try to support the trust-building process with marketing, often consisting of a trade magazine or other advertising, trade show participation, newsletters and direct mail. The assumption goes that brand awareness makes buyers feel more comfortable. Today, the difficulty involved with breaking through the clutter to create broad-based customer awareness and the general skepticism of buyers to any marketing claims make traditional approaches less beneficial. The most efficient marketing is aimed specifically at the people in each salesperson's database, so that the very people in the sales process get addressed through marketing efforts.

Beyond targeting the people most likely to buy, today's marketing has to recognize that corporate customers have become increasingly skeptical of sales pitches and react much more positively to a consultative, helpful sales approach. Marketing can recognize this change by providing marketing resources aimed at helping the buyer by providing useful, easy-to-digest information, ideas, resources, etc., rather than just making claims or selling. Most marketing newsletters today consist of little more than promotional hype packaged to look like useful content; true customer-focused marketing goes beyond the hype by providing completely objective, relevant information that could make the buyer a little better or smarter at his or her job. For every four articles in a newsletter, three should focus on objective topics if you want to appear helpful, instead of self-serving, in your marketing. See the section "Business Development Tactics."

Step 4: Closing the Sale

For many marketing services salespeople, the close becomes a long, drawn-out process from the time the buyer gives a solid buying signal until the contract actually gets signed. This, of course, runs counter to the often impatient nature of ambitious salespeople, who want to make the sale as quickly as possible. How a salesperson handles the closing process often distinguishes the true solution seller from the phony and can actually undermine the trust developed by an otherwise solution-oriented approach.

The trial close (the process of feeling out a client as to your chances) still has a place in solution selling. You have every right to determine the level of your potential client's interest in continuing the dialogue, and the potential client has every reason to express a desire to cut it off if no fit seems apparent. In fact, no phone or in-person meeting should end without determining an action step, which in and of itself represents a form of trial close. This is when you can quickly determine if the prospect wants a next step, or what kind of next step. In the early phases of a sale, especially those involving larger-volume, more sophisticated services, the trial close might not yet involve determining whether or not you can get the business, but instead determining whether or not the prospect wants to include you in their strategy or buying process. Asking for an order before you have established your place in the client's thinking—strategic or tactical—risks relegating you immediately to the tactical, where your prospect will know your interests truly lie. The strategic solution seller holds back on any type of trial close until the almost Socratic, question-answer-type analysis process has determined that his or her services indeed fit the bill. In fact, whenever a collaborative planning process, often taking place over the phone, in a meeting or at lunch, involves a strategy with a place for your product or service, you almost don't need to employ a trial close. You'll know you have a shot because you participated in the planning process.

Even when your formal proposal has gotten the nod and you proceed to contract, it's important to remain vigilant about details to make sure that somebody's lawyer or management hasn't added caveats or new expectations you cannot hope to meet. In fact, the biggest quandary faced by solution sellers involves making sure clients have appropriate expectations or have not insisted on a secondary solution you know you can't deliver.

The Art of the Presentation

Organizations probably spend billions every year on making sales presentations and training salespeople to better conduct them. The huge sums spent directly corresponds to the challenge of imparting presentation skills to a vast workforce, when the true art of the presentation probably represents a relatively rare gift. The great presentation not only demands a total command of the subject but a continual ability to read the audience, either over the phone or in person, and nuance the message on the fly based on raised eyebrows, nods, smiles or smirks. Here are the fundamentals. For the rest, you might seek out a presentation coach to help you or your sales team get the maximum benefit from this most critical of steps in the selling process.

1. Know your audience; make sure the content targets their issues and level of authority.


2. Consider starting with a provocative question, especially if you know the answer will support your presentation.


3. Make sure you know how much time you've been allotted and respect it; don't stay longer unless asked.


4. Focus on benefits to your audience.


5. Demonstrate that you did some homework regarding your prospects.


6. Pause from time to time to make sure your audience is with you.


7. If your audience includes a talker who continually interrupts, keep your answers as direct and brief as possible.


8. Include time for you to ask questions.


9. Make sure your PowerPoint is appropriate to the audience.


10. Don't end without finding out if you have follow-up steps or if you can add the individual to your mailing list or follow-up schedule.

See "Business Development Tactics" for more information on PowerPoint presentations (otherwise known as Decks.)

Sales Force Deployment

Obviously, the skills required of a strategic salesperson different greatly from those of the tactical salesperson. The strategic salesperson has to know the industry, the players, the trends, the opportunities and the challenges related to their field and have the confidence to apply those to real-life problem-solving and planning. The tactical salesperson has to have a firm grasp of sales skills, the product and unique benefits, sales tools available and competitors. Strategic skills take time to acquire and come not only from a combination of knowledge and creativity, but real-life experience. Nothing compares to personal involvement in multiple successes and even failures in terms of having some chances of predicting the potential success or failure of some new idea. You can't learn experience in books or in classrooms, but you can learn where to go to find more information and what problems to watch out for.

As a result of the experience and preparation required of top producers, strategic salespeople often command the highest salaries, enjoy the best client followings and avoid cold-calling and prospecting as much as possible. Many marketing services companies do not even have "salespeople" in the sense of representatives out cold-calling. They often rely on top management relationships and industry activities for really big accounts and on smart, hard-working account executives to build relationships at the more tactical level to nurture additional business opportunities or cross-sell within current clients.

Companies that sell products often do not have any strategic salespeople, because they get contacted long after the strategic decisions are made, by people who themselves have no involvement with those decisions. 

Probably the best solution for most marketing services companies includes both a tactical sales force to conduct the hunt for qualified prospects and at least one to a few strategic salespeople whose natures combine the competitive passion that fires successful sales with the extensive knowledge and creativity that customers value in trusted advisers and people they buy from.

Depending on your business, you could divide your tactical sales force into two groups:

1. A telephone sales operation of sufficiently trained and well-spoken people to identify decision makers, obtain permission to begin a sales and/or communications process and potentially get appointments for strategic salespeople


2. A salesperson who works in direct support of strategic salespeople to generate qualified leads for the strategic salesperson and help service current customers. This provides a mentoring opportunity that nurtures potential strategic salespeople.

Quick Quiz: Do You Sell Strategically?

Answer these questions to determine if your organization sells strategically:

You have carefully profiled the type of client that can best benefit from your unique selling benefits?
____Yes    _____No

You have some means of managing all of your sales and communications with your prospects?
____Yes    _____No

You have a system in place for collecting key data about prospects and getting their permi