The Story of Solution Selling

–By Mike Bosworth

When I was first asked to be a sales trainer in 1976 for Xerox Computer Services, my paradigm of selling was based primarily on logic and reason. I defined selling as the process of helping people solve problems using our products. At the time, I was the number one salesperson in the company, and how I "solved someone’s problems" was the only way I could explain my approach – that is what I thought differentiated me from the rest. I agreed to move into the role of a trainer because I saw it was a way to help others.

My paradigm of selling was also shaped by my work with behavioral researcher Neil Rackham in 1979. Revenue production at Xerox, as at most companies, was highly disproportionate, so Xerox hired Neil Rackham to study what the top 20 percent of salespeople were doing so we could teach it to the mediocre masses. This study was called the SPIN project.

Rackham conducted the study by recording the behaviors of both buyers and sellers in 1,500 sales calls. His marching orders were to only study the top 20 percent and he focused on what was observable at the time: the styles and types of questions that those top sellers were asking. What he did not observe at the time was how those sellers connected with buyers before they started asking their questions. After poring over the data, all of the people on the SPIN project team, including me, arrived at a linear, logic-oriented, questioning approach. The paradigm was established: for a buyer to cooperate with a salesperson, the salesperson had to learn how to ask a series of questions that would yield the answers they were looking for. At the time, we were not able to understand how the best salespeople connected in such a way that they got their buyers to open up and reveal themselves.

This paradigm became the basis for SPIN and Solution Selling, and many subsequent selling models. The B2B sales training industry was born.

The question-oriented paradigm ignored the existence of emotional connection. At the time, we had no way of articulating how any two individuals connect emotionally. In 1979, we observed that the very best sellers had an innate ability to get their buyers to cooperate with them. We used terms like "woo," "mojo," and "gift of gab". However, we had no scientific evidence that something deliberate and replicable was happening. It was just "magic". In fact, Xerox convinced me that emotional connection (what they called rapport) is the unique chemistry between two people, and no two combinations are the same. I took that as gospel and trusted it for years. I believe the rest of the industry did too. My gut always told me that people make emotional decisions and then come up with the logic to support those decisions after the fact. I just had no model to support my gut feeling, no evidence to prove it, so I just didn’t deal with it.

Solution Selling, a model based on logical problem solving – diagnosing and prescribing, became the prevailing sales model and remained intact and unchanged for nearly three decades. Thousands of salespeople over 30 years were taught to ask diagnostic questions, to give value propositions, to do ROIs, and it's still not working. If it were, we would have seen a shift from the 80/20 Rule. In fact, it's gotten worse. Recent research shows the gap between the best sellers and the rest of the pack has actually widened. This was an extremely difficult pill for me to swallow because when I moved into training and consequently when I developed Solution Selling, I believed in all my heart that I was helping the bottom 80 percent.

So why have the masses struggled with implementing sales methodologies like Solution Selling? Why is the gap widening between the best and everyone else? When I look back now at what led to my success as a salesperson in the late 70's, I now know that it wasn't that I was "solving problems". I was forging human-to-human, emotional connections with my buyers. I got buyers to open up and reveal themselves not because I was asking lots of questions; it was because we emotionally connected with each other. I didn't know that at the time because, back then, we couldn't explain it. We can now. The best salespeople I know, the best sales calls I have ever been on, prove this to be true.

Read more about Mike at www.mikebosworth.com