Do you ever get an uneasy feeling about the “solutions” you bring to the marketplace? That maybe they really aren’t all that special or different anymore?

Everybody claims to offer not just products and services, but solutions! Isn’t it possible – or even likely – that your customers can’t distinguish between your solution and your competitor’s solution?

You don’t have a single competitor clueless enough to not at least claim to offer “solutions” to customer problems. A few might not have the wherewithal to actually deliver, but most probably can to some degree.

The notion of creating solutions has been around for decades. The survivors have figured out how to do it. Adding application know-how and other value-add to core products and services is no longer a differentiator. Since everybody else offers the same sort of product/service packaging, buyers still have you cornered into the lower price game.

So now what?

As always, the answer lies in being both innovative and competent enough to deliver on those new, creative ideas. Easier said than done, especially when you already have spent the last several years wracking your brains to come up with something new and different. Maybe it’s time to get a little more creative about extending an approach that we know works.

Think through your traditional sources of innovation and competence. Obviously, others within your own company are first on the list; closely followed by your suppliers, whose own self-interest is served by helping you perform better. Next come customers. Including them is what enabled you to graduate from providing commodities, to differentiated products and services, to total solutions to begin with!

Now stretch a bit further. Think about including “adjunct partners” in the quest for more differentiation and value. Adjunct partners are other individuals or organizations that have interests in common with your customers. Like, for example, their other suppliers, suppliers of those suppliers, your other customers, your customers’ customers, maybe even your competitors. Of course it’s conceivable that integrating their ideas and capabilities with your ideas and capabilities can result in a whole host of new and more compelling value propositions.

You can even take it a step further and create a “community” of all these entities. Become the center, the focal point, the nexus of all this thinking and discussion about innovation and sources of knowledge and competence. Become the first place to check for where else to go and what else to do.

How? Use the classic tools. Work those industry associations, user groups and contact lists with enthusiasm and innovation. If you haven’t already done so, create user groups and advisory councils of your current customers.

Use the new tools: “Google” everything – every problem, every issue, every idea. Sign up for and read blogs regularly. Write your own blog. Look at what a group called InnoCentive is doing for the scientific community at www.innocentive.com and copy them (or at least set up a forum for idea exchange on your Web site).

Selling solutions doesn’t cut it anymore. Become The Source – that special entity that will always point to or create the new environment needed to solve any problem.
 

Todd Youngblood is managing partner and CEO of The YPS Group Inc., a sales training and consulting firm based in Acworth, Ga.