The Harvard Business Review recently published an article about the future of B2B sales: data-empowered customers have been researching and defining solutions themselves. This is a bad omen for the orthodox solution sales model, in which sales reps put together a package of products and services to meet a customer’s needs. You could draw a parallel with the relationship between the rise of the internet and the downfall of door-to-door sales. Pretty soon, a solution sales rep won’t even be able to get past Yonkers.

The idea is that the customer will come straight to you if your organization has the best solution for their need (and the data supports it). Who needs a salesman when you can find the best solutions yourself? This is bad news for startups without much of a reputation, or the data to back it up: why would a customer ever abandon a tried-and-true solution? Unless you can convince the customer that their “need” isn’t really necessary, you’re out of luck.

Actually, though, that’s exactly the approach Brent Adamson, Matt Dixon, and Nicholas Toman (the HBR authors) present as a replacement for solution sales. Since the information age obliges your organization’s services to be groundbreaking, sales reps can no longer succeed by simply advocating for one solution among many in a market of competitors, providing a link between a need and an answer.

The new sales rep is a disruptive (but constructive) shaker. “The End of Solution Sales” details a new sales strategy model based off high-performing sales reps who understand this new sales dynamic. In “Insight selling,” sales reps approach agile organizations in flux, rather than those with clearly defined needs. They seek to fundamentally restructure the process surrounding a need, so that a competitor’s solution becomes irrelevant.

The HBR authors offer the following guidelines for transitioning to the new sales model:

• “Target accounts where demand is emerging, not established” because there’s no “consensus”: your salespeople have an opportunity to strike.
• ”Turn a customer with clearly defined requirements into one with emerging needs.”

At Bluewolf, for example, we have moved from making sales pitches to having conversations with executive teams. It starts with listening to their vision for the business, then seeing where their cloud applications do not line up. Similarly, the HBR piece tells an anecdote about a sales rep who “made it clear to the executives that they were asking the wrong questions” and won the contract.

What I’d like to add is that the key is not to be rude by suggesting that the customer doesn’t know what s/he’s doing, but to be creative and present challenging ideas about possible improvements that could help the customer’s bottom line. Not to be overly promotional, but Bluewolf has some fantastic consultants who can coach your company through the process of developing new sales training programs. Expert advice in general can help you avoid the types of blunders I’m envisioning, in which a sales rep gets his company blacklisted after offending a prospect: “Everything you’re doing is wrong!”

And of course, solution selling will always be at least a small part of your grab bag of selling strategies, because customers whose research leads them to your products can’t do all the work. Customer empowerment simply means that solution selling is declining and that insight selling is fast eclipsing it. Maintain your established products and services with solution sales, but agility is the key to avoiding sales stagnation, a fatal condition in an ever-changing market.

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