MANY COMPANIES HAVE INVESTED heavily to create high-value solutions. The goal is often to grow revenue by increasing deal size, capturing a larger share of wallet, and increasing the customer’s switching costs. After making the investment of time and effort to build elegant business solutions, many companies are shocked by the magnitude of the shift from selling discrete products to selling more integrated business solutions.
Why is this shift so challenging? In short, although the underlying technologies and components of the newly configured solutions may be quite similar to the original products, the capabilities to successfully sell integrated solutions are radically different. The following chart outlines some of the differences:
| Selling Discrete Products | Selling Integrated Solutions |
| Customers care about features, performance, and price of the current offering | Customers care about your company’s viability, product roadmap, and your longer term ability to create value for them |
| Easier to switch suppliers, perceived as lower risk by customers | Harder to switch suppliers, perceived as higher risk by customers |
| Purchase requires less change for the customer. | Purchase requires more change for the customer |
| Specific products sold to specific people or departments | Integrated solutions must be sold to multiple departments, functions and stakeholders. |
| Sales people rely on product differentiation | Sales people must create business value via the total solution |
