Ten lessons for managing a solutions council

Let’s face it: Most solutions are complex offerings. To succeed with solutions, you need deep knowledge of your customers, an ability to collaborate and share resources and assets internally, and a dedication and commitment to ensuring your solution actually works in the customer environment. Sometimes I think our clients wish they were selling golf balls or running shoes - products that are easy to explain, easy for customers to understand, and suggest a clear vision of how customers will use them!

While few of our clients have actually abandoned their B2B careers, they have had to work very hard to figure out how to manage a solutions business effectively. One important step that many of them have taken is establishing a solutions council. These councils are designed to ensure coordination and collaboration across business units and other intra-company boundaries so companies can build, market, and sell integrated solutions more effectively.

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You'll always struggle creating solutions, unless...

We’ve seen it time and time again. Sales execs e-mail their colleagues and report what their customers want. They pass on the concerns, interests and desperate requests – “if you had a securitization system that could do this, or a network optimization application that could give us this level of guarantee, or a CRM system that could provide information in this format, we’d buy in a heartbeat.”  The messages are heard loud and clear, there is flurry of interest and activity at HQ, and then….nothing.

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