Self Service vs Solution Selling

As a former Enterprise Software sales guy, I came through the ranks with the Solution Selling and Target Account Selling approach that what we were selling was not a product, but a solution to a problem. The prevailing attitude was “Don’t sell the product – find out the problem and tailor the product in a way that solves the problem”. In other words, if you just told the customer what the product did, you might lose to someone that has an inferior product, but who better articulated how his or her product solved the prospects problem.

Fast forward to today. Now it’s possible to install on-demand applications into an on-demand CRM platform without even speaking to a sales rep or a systems engineer. We have people do it every day. Welcome to the new world of self-service on-demand applications! Does Solution Selling totally go out the window? I don’t think so.

I love when our customers and prospects call us after having educated themselves on the basics of our products. I love it even more when they’ve installed one of our products and used it inside their own Salesforce.com account. At that point we end up having a much higher level conversation about how we can combine the functionality of our products with their unique workflow and business process to create a solution that will uniquely yield value to their organization.

I know that there are those of you that still don’t want to talk to a sales person. Your email address is mickey@mouse.com. But don’t worry. We don’t bite, and in fact we may even be able to impart some value in how you can combine the power of platforms like Force.com with our products in ways that will bring you competitive advantage, or at least save you from a few hours a week inside Excel. Give us a call!