Your customers don’t care about your so-called “solutions”

Everywhere you look, sales organisations of all descriptions are promoting their so-called “solutions”. It’s become such an overused term that for years the UK’s Private Eye magazine published a fortnightly column satirising the most amusingly egregious misuses of the word.
Hopefully neither you nor any of the companies you have been involved with achieved your two weeks of fame by being featured in this way. Because it is my fervent belief that your potential customers don’t care for – and aren’t looking for – generic solutions.
I contend that a solution cannot exist in isolation from a clearly defined problem that a customer is determined to address. But a cursory review of sales and marketing literature shows that many of these mismarketed “solutions” are no more than another way of labelling a set of products or services, with no reference or relevance to an underlying problem or opportunity.
At the