The IT and technology industry continues to grow – Canalys estimates that IT sales in 2024 will have reached $4.94 trillion worldwide by the end of the year and that 73% of that total will have been delivered by partners. This signals a substantial market opportunity.
Cybersecurity continues to grow faster than the rest of the market, driven by compliance regulations and increased threats. At the same time, companies are increasingly looking at their cloud bills and IT costs, then looking at where they can cut vendors, consolidate projects, or otherwise reduce their spending. For channel partners looking at how they can support their own growth, this is a challenging market to sell in.
Looking back at the history of sales, selling has normally focused on products. The traditional model is to have a product to sell, identify potential customers, prepare your approach, and then contact them about the features and benefits.
This model was in place for the majority of the 20th Century. Selling based on features and benefits alone has been replaced with solution-led selling, however, Michael Bosworth’s book Solution Selling goes into the challenges that exist where sales cycles are very long and products are expensive, which is common in the technology industry. Since that book launched in 1995, the majority of IT sales activity has been solutions-led.
This approach is having less and less success over time, however. Buyers have embarked on an increasing amount of the research into their problems that might need solving – according to research by 6sense, 78% of prospects have already done the research and determined their solution requirements before they ever contact a sales person.
They are unlikely to change their decision process or reference framework, even if there might be other approaches that are more suitable. The opportunity to be a trusted advisor and provide guidance into what the best solution might be is gone when customers have already looked at the whole market and have their perceived ideal goals in mind. The company that prospects contact first wins the deal 84% of the time, too.
In this environment, old school selling, based on product benefits, is definitely out. But solution selling is also problematic, as you have no chance to reframe products or services to meet the prospect’s goals. Prospects have already done that work, and you are unlikely to change their mind if they are too far along in their selection process.
They may also discount your recommendations as they don’t feel your methodology fits with their thinking. Worse, you may just be making up the numbers in providing quotes for a project without much hope of clinching the deal in a profitable way.
So, what can channel companies do to avoid this doom and gloom scenario?
Adapting solution selling for 2025
The challenge here is not that solution selling is wrong – it still has the right ideas in place around focusing on customer pain points. Instead, we have to go even further in focusing on customer needs. Rather than looking at solutions to general problems, we have to understand the details of the prospect and their existing IT environment and what they are looking to achieve as their future state.
This involves looking at specific outcomes that are delivered to the prospect, rather than what a solution promises. Those outcomes might need to be delivered over a longer period of time which means your proposal could include multiple stages of a solution for example delivered over a 6 – 12 month period. This is often referred to as a ‘crawl, walk & run approach’ - in an outcomes-based model, this has to match exactly what the customer has in place.
Outcome-based selling takes the approach around ‘solution selling’ even further, so as to focus on the customer in more detail. Rather than looking at a business problem or pain point, the sales motion should focus on the customer’s specific IT environment and then build recommendations based on their situation right now.
Rather than looking at solutions that would fit general problems, outcome-based selling aims to fit those products, services and consultancy recommendations into that customer’s environment and demonstrate in advance how those recommendations achieve the right results.
Outcome-focused selling is the future
The challenge here is that it means sellers have to be even more focused on the value that they help customers to achieve. The benefit for the channel is that many companies are already doing this to some extent in working with their customers, particularly where they provide managed services. That market was worth $475 billion according to Canalys and grew 13% year on year.
Protecting enterprise endpoints against the festive cyber surge
To be successful in selling to prospects, channel companies need to move beyond solutions and look at outcomes for the customer. This approach looks directly at the changes and improvements that technology products and services can deliver, and shows those improvements to customers as part of the buying process in their environment.
Rather than dangling a solution in front of the customer without any guarantee that it will work, outcome-based selling takes all those potential challenges into account from the start. It aims to overcome objections and put the partner right at the front of the queue when a prospect is ready to buy.
By being the first company that a prospect turns to, this approach should ensure that selling is more successful and, over time, more profitable too.
