Customer Focus is Key to Successful Solution Selling

When I speak to printing companies about their business models, I really love talking to them about customer-focused versus product-focused business models.

In a product-focused model, the company focuses on producing a limited set of applications as competitively as possible and selling those applications across a variety of customers. Think of Henry Ford — you can have your car in any color you wish as long as it is black!

On the other hand, in a customer-focused business model, businesses work to provide everything a customer needs, even if they don’t produce everything in-house. It is companies with this latter model I believe that have mastered solution selling. They make themselves invaluable to customers in many ways by digging deep into customer operations to understand where they can most be of service.

Let me provide you with a couple of examples, and these are, believe it or not, real-life stories. One company we worked with, a flexible packaging company, was able to grow organically by 50% per year, year after year, basically from the same customer base because they made themselves invaluable to those customers.

In another example, a company serving a number of large retailers providing, among other things, store kits, also managed data about the retailers’ networks. One of these retailers could not even tell you how many stores they had and where they were located. They had to call their print provider to get the answer. And that’s a great example of making one’s services invaluable!

I’m looking forward to sharing these stories and more during my educational session at PRINTING United, and I hope you will join me on Wednesday, October 23^rd, at 3:00 pm in Room C148. We’ll talk about what solution selling is, how companies are successful at it, where and how they source their sales people, and much, much more. The goal is to provide you with actionable ideas you can take back to your business to help transform it to a customer-focused business that successfully employs solution selling techniques to foster growth. See you then!