The Solution Selling Trio

In solution selling, a healthy relationship between sales, pre-sales, and professional services is crucial to provide the outcomes that create happy customers.

In a restaurant the cook is as important as the server and bartender. Without each of these critical roles the restaurant cannot operate. In the complex world of solution selling, sales, pre-sales and professional services (the implementation team) are equally critical to a successful engagement with a customer.

You can build a product that enables time travel while curing cancer, but if you don’t have a good sales team then you won’t move any of them. On the other hand, if you over promise and under deliver, your customer will bad mouth you and not come back at renewal time. And finally, if the implementation team cannot install the solution as promised then the whole project will be dead on arrival.

When selling a solution, pre-sales is there to demonstrate the capabilities of the product and propose creative solutions without over-promising. Some less experienced sales execs will push the pre-sales consultant to oversell the dream; but if you position your solution as an easy fix and then the customer finds out later that the promised outcome requires a monumental effort and added costs, then you are going to find yourself in a tricky situation. There is a fine art to matching your solution’s capabilities to the customer’s needs without over-promising

As a pre-sales consultant I’m incentivized to see the deal close, but what I won’t do is tell the customer that the hammer I am selling them is also a power drill, because it isn’t. A powerful technique I have been trained on is called Value Selling by Visualize. This is where we level-set the engagement and get to the bottom of why the customer is in need of a particular solution.

By getting to the root of the customer’s issue we can better map our capabilities to the business issues they are trying to solve. Rather than rushing to show off all our wares, I take the time to discover what exactly their problem is so that I can match our solutions to their requirements. This saves an enormous amount of time and fosters trust and long-lasting relationships.

I’ve been on calls with prospects trying to explain that while the product is amazing, it can’t automagically configure itself, and that professional services are required to implement the solution. Sometimes the sales exec will text me to plead that I don’t discuss that topic, but I always insist that the customer understands exactly what it is they are purchasing and what is involved in making it work. While this can create tenuous moments in the short term, in the long run the customer appreciates the honesty and more often than not comes back with more realistic expectations and a greater sense of trust. Thankfully, inexperienced short-term oriented sales execs are a rare breed where I work.

I can’t emphasize enough the value of a good sales exec. I’ve worked with many during my career and their importance is often understated. While I’m focused on my technical skills and understanding the newest capabilities of the product, they are tasked with making it rain on a hot summer’s day. They have to uncover and nurture opportunities, build relationships and trust, coordinate meetings and demonstrations, negotiate complex contracts, report to their leaders, compete with other sellers, manage partner relationships, and much more.

You can immediately tell the difference between a good sales exec and one who is less than scrupulous. Some of the best reps I know are great leaders and have incredible social skills. One rep I traveled with could walk into a restaurant and immediately create an atmosphere in the place. People who would have sat alone at dinner are suddenly at our table and new opportunities are forming. It takes a certain talent to bring people together and build trust that grows into a promising business opportunity.

Fostering a good relationship between sales, pre-sales, and pro-services is important if you want a successful solution sales org. As a pre-sales consultant I am the right arm for my sales rep. If she needs me to help with an order form or set up a meeting invite I will. I stay away from pricing discussions but any other non-technical task I can perform to help move the deal along is not beneath me.

As a pre-sales consultant you would think I don’t need to preoccupy myself with the price list for the features and capabilities of the products I am designing. That’s up to the sales rep, right? Well if I am designing a solution that involves multiple products and features, I need to keep the client’s budget in mind. There may be less expensive alternatives that are a more cost effective option in the short run. As the customer gains benefits from the solution and familiarity with the product, the more elaborate and costlier solution might be more appropriate at renewal time. It is important to understand the overall cost impact of your solution as you design it. Even if budget is not a major issue, having alternative solutions in your back pocket can come in handy during spirited rounds of negotiations.

A good sales rep will include me early on in the opportunity and help me discover the client’s needs. He won’t tell me to position a solution that is inappropriate just for the sake of making quota. He will leverage my expertise to uncover the business issues and discover which solutions are appropriate. While it’s always profitable to sell everything on the truck, the last thing you want is your solution to become shelf-ware. If the customer does not implement it or use it then they will feel like they were over sold and will seek to rectify that perceived injustice come renewal time.

An inexperienced sales rep on the other hand will put a client call on my calendar and hope to get me up to speed during the introductions at the meeting, rather than taking the time to brief me beforehand. This often leads to disaster and frustrated customers. If you have an important meeting with a busy client, make sure your entire team is as prepared as possible, well before they join the meeting. A simple agenda is an often underrated tool that will ensure a positive client engagement.

A good pre-sales consultant will periodically be in communication with the delivery team ( pro-services) to make sure they aren’t promising features that are overly complex or too difficult to implement. In the past I was part of deals where the pre-sales and delivery teams never communicated. Sometimes this worked out, but other times it resulted in endless calls back and forth to communicate exactly what vision was sold to the client. It is a good investment of time to prep the delivery team prior to the deal closing so they can be prepared for the project they are about to undertake. It also helps to run your proposed solution by them to get their opinion. Pre-sales live in a hypothetical world while pro-services live in the real world. A periodic sanity check can go a long way toward a successful engagement.

Professional services are under tremendous pressure to actually deliver the dream that I sold to the client. While I could design the client’s ITSM solution to also call out to their smart fridge and place an order for milk via Alexa, this is overly complex and not necessary to meet the specific needs of the client. I strive to keep the solution reasonable so that the implementation team can succeed on time and within budget. This keeps everyone happy ... except the intern who can’t find any milk for her coffee.

One last tip to coexist harmoniously with sales execs; be helpful and kind to them as the end of quarter draws near. They are riding an emotional roller coaster as their clients play last minute Texas Hold’em with the contracts.

“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success." - Henry Ford

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