Clare Lynch wrote a post here recently in which she utterly destroyed the rationale for using “solutions” in business copywriting. Her post was so on target, so witty, and so devastating that frankly, I don’t know why I’m trying to append my own thoughts.
Perhaps it’s because her guest post and our subsequent Twittering led to our creating the cartoon featured above and I need to have some excuse for publishing it. Another possibility is that the use of solution speak in corporate copywriting is so pervasive that it is incumbent on us bloggers to fight it at every turn. If every marketing blogger in the world took a day to blog against solution selling, the output would still be dwarfed by the mountain of companies who rally around the banner of We Sell Solutions.
What’s Wrong with Selling Solutions?
Selling solutions is not distinctive. Every company sells solutions whether it says so or not. Saying we sell solutions is about as compelling as saying we sell things.
If a company loses an order to a non-solution seller, it will look down its nose at the competitor and the customer and dismiss the whole thing with the rationalization: They were just buying on price.
News flash. Buying on price is buying a solution to the problem of needing a lower price. When a high minded seller loses an order because of price, it means he didn’t convey enough value to overcome a lower priced option. The solution seller may have had a solution, but saying we offer solutions is not the same thing as offering them.
Customers want the offer, not the promise of an offer.
Sometimes, solution selling is nothing more than a euphemism for we don’t like to sell on price. In these cases, the seller will meet any price, but will do so kicking and screaming all the way. Having spent more than my fair share of time in b2b purchasing, I came to dread interaction with this type of solution seller. I knew I would be in for long, drawn out sales pitches full of rhetoric about the firm’s sales philosophy and ironically, precious little about solving my particular problems.
The nice thing about self-professed price sellers: they get right to the point.
If you tell a price seller she’s high, she’ll fire back with why it’s worth the money. In other words, she’ll justify her price by communicating the overall value of her offer. This is exactly where the solution seller ends up, only with a longer windup and a slower pitch. It doesn’t work too well face to face, and in the much faster world of e-commerce, it’s even worse. If you have 5-7 seconds to capture the attention of an online customer and you chew up 3 of them with We Sell Solutions, well, my friend, you are in trouble.
Some companies don’t mind selling on price, but prefer to sell based on a customer understanding the total overall value of their offering. To accomplish this, they must force the conversation away from purchase price and talk about other direct and indirect benefits of their product or service. These other benefits are the solutions.
Forget the Solutions and Tell Us What You Got
Here are examples of how you can go from saying nothing into saying something.
Procurement solutions
You can place an order in half the time
Search marketing solutions
Our customers average a 20% increase in click-throughs
Custom engineered solutions
Your machine will last twice as long as anything else on the market
If you were going to a website looking for procurement, a web design, or a machine – which statement would make you want to learn more?
The problem, of course, is that many firms offer a multitude of benefits, and solutions makes a convenient bucket to dump them all into. This is exactly the sort of laziness that Clare so eloquently and elegantly blugeoned. If your sales and marketing people can put their heads together, do a little math, and just stretch their creativity a hair, perhaps they could come up with something like -
Offering 25 ways to reduce your procurement cost
Seven battle-tested design strategies proven to increase web traffic
Our 10-step engineering process ensures long lasting, uninterrupted performance
Again, assuming you were in the market, do these statements speak more directly to your needs than a vague promise of solutions? If so, and you have solutions running around your website – why is that?
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If you have questions or need help to solve your solutions problem, learn more about my content strategy services.
I think this is a great addendum to my post. Where my rant focused mostly on the verbal nastiness of the term (as is my wont), you’ve provided a thoughtful discussion of the business reasons to avoid the word.
I think I might do like Lynn Truss and take a big black marker pen to every instance of “solutions” that I see – and change it to “things”. I quite like the sound of “innovative plumbing things”, “Italian meal things”, “dental things”. They sound cuter – and no less stupid – than they do with the tired old “solutions”.
Clare, Brilliant idea. That would actually be a great way to pitch services to a new client – show them their existing copy, de-solutioned and re-thinged.
Benefits benefits benefits! Great ideas shown above…will incorporate them into my own sites as well. Thanks for the reminder!
Barbara, Benefits versus features … don’t get me started!
Never been a fan of “solutions” and many companies were using the term. At first thought, it sounds like the smart thing to do because you’re solving problems. But you explained it well, Brad. You pointed out to explain what problem you solve.
Your pain: 5% clickthroughs.
How we help you: Boost your clickthroughs by 20%. See your clickthroughs climb by 20%.
The yucky way to say it: We offer clickthrough improvement solutions.
I like how you show what companies tend to write and a better way to go about it.
Oh, please can we remove “synergy” from our vocabularies… pretty please?
Hi Meryl, Your formula is perfect for developing persuasive copy – thanks for sharing. And I’m with you on “synergy”, especially when companies offer Synergistic Solutions or Solution Synergies.
I’m completely with you on this one and its something I see quite often copywriting for education and governmental departments. It’s usually because there isn’t anything to sell, so instead you get ’solutions’ and similar words. It’s very frustrating!
I guess it’s a matter of finding your unique selling position and going with that. We all offer solutions, whether we’re bakers or bloggers. In today’s world, solutions are a commodity; we find them at every turn.
We’re taught to sell benefits instead of features, but that’s just another method of selling solutions. When benefits (and solutions) are a dime a dozen, consumers need some other way to sort things out. That is where our USP comes into play.
Interesting post.
Iain, You deliver disturbing news. I’m so immersed in the private sector, public sector solution abuse never occurred to me. I hope you can counteract it!
Terry, One thing customers want more than ever now is a personal connection with the seller. That’s where social media comes into play. Notice on Twitter people actually work together to solve problems without solutions ever coming into play.
Right on target, both of you! If there’s anything I hate in modern copy, it’s words that mean nothing, even when folk’ll swear up and down they actually do mean something.
As a consultant, here’s my favorite: methodology. Maybe you and Clare ought to take a whack at that one, eh?
Robert – Methodology – brilliant. What do you think, Clare?
Funnily enough, I’m just this minute preparing my next list of 30 words and phrases that should be banned. And guess what? “Methodology” is on there. Tell you what, I’ll give you a sneak preview:
22. Methodology
UK readers might recall the famous ’80s TV advert in which Maureen Lipman gets a call from her grandson telling her that he’s failed all his exams apart from pottery and sociology. Her response? “He gets an ology and he says he’s failed. You get an ology, you’re a scientist!” Use the word “methodology” (unless you really do mean “the study of methods”) and you’re that grandson.
Planning to post it next week. Also on the list: value proposition, thought leader, stakeholder, synergy, best practice and many more!
Clare, Thanks for the preview. Robert may have some additional thoughts on methodology; not to put him on the spot but I’ve invited him to guest post at WS on that very topic.
You should sponsor a blog contest to see who can write the best (worst) post using all 30 of those words/phrases! Grand prize could be a book on methodologies.
Brad, that’s a brilliant idea! I plan to do it.
When do you plan to run Robert’s post? I’d be happy to link to it.
Clare, Robert hasn’t agreed to do the post yet, so we may be putting the cart before the synergy. I will definitely let you know if he does, and I’m eager to help you promote the contest. Who can set the benchmark for bad content? What could be more exciting?
Wow, talk about falling into it! OK; lemme have a few days to think on it and see if anything shakes loose from the ol’ attic.
The point you make about how a price seller will rapidly come back with reasons for their price vs the other strategy is an interesting question of power during the negotiation. Once price is announced (whether negotiable or not) it provides footing for further discussion to BOTH participants. Versus, when price is a secret, the buyer is being kept uncomfortable. Possibly not being able to even concentrate on your key selling points.
Sometimes there are reasons why a price has to be developed – but that is a quoting process that should occur as fast and efficiently as possible.
Fred, Very good point about introducing price early on! With so many prices published on the web for any product or service under the sun, the suspense is pretty much gone from pricing anyway. When I started selling industrial supplies, buyers had a hard time ascertaining market pricing – information was scarce and carefully guarded by suppliers. Nowadays, enterprising buyers often know as much or more about market pricing than the sales representatives.
I AGREE 100%… AND I DISAGREE 100%
As Product Manager for Sales Performance International’s (SPI) registered trademarked brand “SOLUTION SELLING®” I couldn’t agree more with how frustrating it is to hear the phrase “solution selling” abused in our marketplace.
To further agree with much of the sentiment from the other comments, we (at SPI) clearly believe that sellers who claim to “sell solutions” must define their sales approach as one that understands the customers problem, quantifies what their capabilities or services will mean to that problem and then measure success after implementation… to determine is a SOLUTION actually was sold.
To use the phrase “solution selling” any other way is simply an exercise in hype-marketing… one that renders the true term much less meaningful to those who use it correctly.
But to those who hold the original term sacred, as we do, we know it has a significant place in the arena of sales and marketing.
James, Thank you for sharing your thoughts – and passion – on the subject of solution selling. In my mind, there is a big difference between a firm such as yours that is deeply invested in the concept of solutions selling, and one that casually repeats the phrase as a means of filling space on a web page. It’s the latter situation that this post dealt with. It’s too bad your ability to convey your message is hampered by the overuse of the term. Unfortunately, and you are proof of this, today’s worst cliches were once meaningful, moving phrases. I guess the good news is that cliches fall out of fashion. The day may come (let’s hope so) when solution selling is “out”, and your brand will be more distinctive than ever.
Let me second the comments of my colleague, James Touchstone, and also offer this article from our blog: “So, you think you sell solutions, do you?” — I think this illustrates the general misunderstanding of what a “solution” really is, and what it takes to actually sell one! http://www.solutionsellingblog.com/home/2009/8/10/so-you-think-you-sell-solutions-do-you.html
Good luck and good selling!
Hi Timothy, Thanks for stopping by and providing the link to your solution selling post. It’s definitely worth studying.
Brad,
Just say for example that I were a medium sized business owner, say, looking to buy a couple of photocopying machines to put in the office. Say also, that ‘Tom’s’ firm manufactured machines which were ten per cent more expensive than competing machines.
If Tom came to me and started talking about ’solutions,’ I would politely show him the door, explaining that I had a less costly solution. But if Tom came to my office and asked me if I wanted to lose less staff time due to paper jams, then I might welcome him in for a discussion. If he could further convince me that his company’s machine was indeed more robustly manufactured, and that that indeed would result in fewer paper jams and more productivity through less staff time spent fixing paper jams, then I just might be persuaded that the benefit of his company’s machine is sufficient to justify the extra costs.
Vague talk about ’solutions’ will not cut it as an excuse for price competitiveness. But specific benefits just might, provided that their value exceeds any cost differential associated with the offering.
Andrew, You have put your finger on it exactly: “solutions” is (sometimes anyway) a vague substitute for real benefits. Using that term telegraphs that the salesperson does not offer real benefits or is too lazy to articulate them.