TXM Lean Minute – The Lean Sales Process – Solution Selling

Lean sales is about applying Lean thinking directly to improve the value that customers get from your product or service. This lean minute video explains how a Lean Sales approach can deliver significant benefits to your business and your customers. Click here to learn more about the TXM “ValueMAX” Lean Sales approach

Read the Transcript of this Video

Hi, I’m Ron Spiteri.  Welcome to this TXM Lean Minute where we’ll explore the application of lean to the sales process.  We call this solution selling.

A traditional sales process is a transaction between a seller and a purchaser.  The seller provides a product that the purchaser has determined to meet their needs, and the purchaser compensates the seller by paying the agreed price.

Solution selling focuses on maximising value for the customer, which changes the role of the seller and changes the point of engagement.

In solution selling, the seller focuses on the customer’s pains and addresses these issues with the optimal strategies, services, and products to yield the best possible outcome for the customer.  The seller takes the role of a subject matter expert.

Rather than talking to the customer’s purchasing offer, the seller now engages with the users, the engineers, the quality department, the safety department.  This is where the customer’s pains and issues will be exposed.

In the process of exposing the customer’s pain, a seller has the opportunity to highlight the value of their solution, which is evaluated as the Benefit minus the Cost.  The benefits can quantify the ease of value-adding, consistency, and safety.  The cost may consider price, terms of trade, creation of waste in downstream processes.

By adopting solution selling, we find that our customers have been able to improve sales conversion rates, improve customer penetration, improve customer retention, create barriers to entry, and importantly, improve sales margins by promoting value rather than price.

Call us at TXM to learn how we can help you elevate your sales process to solution selling. I’m Ron Spiteri and this has been a TXM lean minute.