That is a significant shortcoming, since our analysis has also clearly shown that commercial capabilities are closely correlated with solution-selling performance. One of the companies we analyzed, for example, was a commercial real-estate company with above-average commercial capabilities as well as a compound annual revenue growth rate of more than 15 percent over five years—four times the average for its market. That kind of connection between commercial capabilities and performance came through again and again in our analysis.

Filling the capability gaps

Our analysis of solutions providers delivered a clear message: if you want to grow your business, improve your commercial capabilities. Success hinges on three main factors.

[Here’s the first.]

1. Build the right institutional capabilities

“Good products sell themselves,” says an old adage. While there’s obviously an element of truth to that, we wanted to learn more about what capabilities are most important in solutions selling today. We benchmarked 101 B2B companies across eight capabilities, from strategic marketing to commercial support, plus four enablers, from organization design to information systems (Exhibit 1). 

The following insights particularly leapt out at us:

• An average B2B solutions provider does not outperform its product- or service-focused counterpart in commercial capabilities, as we might have expected, but lags behind. The gap between the top and the average solutions provider is even wider. In other words, solution-selling companies have great potential to unlock value by boosting their commercial capabilities .
• The gap between average and top performers is far greater among solutions providers than transactional sellers in innovation and product management. This confirms that, for solution-selling companies, customer-backed innovation and constant renewal of products to meet customer needs are key differentiators, in which insights from sales provide the competitive edge.
• Solution-selling companies seem to have marketing programs that struggle to support sales effectively. Value propositions that sales reps can take to their customers are often difficult to tailor or quantify, nor are they modular.
• The biggest gap to close between top and average performers lies in managing channel partners. In solutions selling, channel partners may struggle to understand their role in contributing to your value proposition and solutions. If training channel partners to sell your portfolio of products is important, it is even more so for solutions.

Improving commercial capabilities isn’t just relevant to customer-facing sales teams but also to entire end-to-end sales processes. One professional-services firm struggled to manage global sales across its broad portfolio of solutions and decided to address its organizational effectiveness. It discovered that salespeople with queries often had to wait two or three days for a reply from their lean technical-support team, even for high-priority bids and customers. To reduce these delays, the firm set up a cross-functional team of service experts, marketing specialists, and salespeople, led by a newly appointed presales project manager who acted as customers’ main point of contact. This dedicated role meant that when a customer had a question, there was someone responsible for quickly getting them an answer, which cut response times way down. Under the new setup, queries were resolved within a day, helping the firm cement its reputation as easy to do business with and an expert in its field.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Boudewijn Driedonks is an associate partner in McKinsey’s Amsterdam office, Berenika Hengstebeck is a manager of solution delivery in the Frankfurt office, and Michael Viertler is a senior partner in the Munich office.