Steve Hurley interviews Nina Hargus, VP of Global Services at EMC Corporation on some of the difficulties in enabling the channel to sell solutions
Sales Enablement is a huge topic in B2B these days. You can spend all day every day and still barely scratch the surface of all the dialogue, debate, and events exploring the "real" meaning of sales enablement, who is doing it well, what tools are most useful, and how social media will revolutionize the whole process. (Forrester's upcoming forum is a great example.)
I was interviewing a Key Account Manager for a large tech firm the other day, and was struck by her comment that she wanted the firm's marketing people to be much closer to her customer. 
A friend recently had the good fortune not only to take over marketing for a successful B2B firm, but to do so with a mandate to build a new strategy that ensures a much greater impact on the business.
He's a bit like a kid in a candy store. He's got budget to spend, executive support for more ambitious marketing, and a relatively clean slate upon which to draw the new strategy.
About a month ago, the good folks at the Outsourcing Institute asked me to contribute some "lessons" for services marketers based on their web-based reality show, The Transaction. No cash involved, but it sounded like an quick PR hit for me while helping out a great organization.
While the main idea of “provocation-based selling” may not be so new, Geoffrey Moore’s recent article has certainly provoked some useful thinking here at Solutions Insights. Steve Hurley has already presented our general perspective that the differences between Moore’s “new” idea and the longstanding tenets of solutions selling are actually minimal at best. Indeed, we have always believed (and taught) that good solutions selling requires just the type of deep customer insight, strong point of view, and executive-level engagement that Moore, et al, claim are the key ingredients of the new approach.
Did longtime tech marketing guru Geoffrey Moore just publish an obituary for one of the most successful forms of selling in our industry’s history? In a recent Harvard Business Review article, “In a Downturn, Provoke your Customers,” Moore and his TCG Advisors team propose a new method for selling complex offers called Provocation-Based Selling. The TCG team states that in this tough economy, top sales teams need to provoke their customers with interesting and possibly game-changing options for their challenges. The authors contrast provocation-based selling with solutions selling, suggesting that solutions selling may no longer be effective in these tough times.
The need for speed in the market is little doubted, and organizations are constantly trying to accelerate the pace of innovation, bringing new products and services to market, and, of course, the sales cycle itself.
As in journalism, though, getting it right is just as important as getting it first.
Jeff Kaplan posted a great story on his always interesting THINK IT Services blog yesterday about a large software company preparing a new offering in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market -- about which Jeff is one of the leading experts.
Solutions Insights
