Is your B2B sales force with you or against you? Make the difference by ensuring your solutions and intent are pulling in one direction.

I have a simple theory about product range: your sales force gets bored with the offering well before your customer base. It's a variation on the old adage that familiarity breeds contempt.

I was reminded of this rule as one of our sales guys entered the 40th minute of a promised five minute conversation. Jack was trying to convince me launching a new software solution would deliver a big spike in company performance. I was unconvinced of the argument but recognised if I didn't soon agree to some action, this Friday evening chat might take me in to Saturday.

"Ok, Jack, I'll take a look at it," I promised. He wanted me to launch a third party software solution that didn't stack up in terms of margin, penetration or support. It was also similar to two or three other solutions in the range. In its favour, though, it was new.

And newness can matter. If you're selling the same offer every day with a similar talk track, it's natural to get a little bored, even when the customer is fully engaged in the solution.

Plus, as you learn more about your customer requirements, you begin uncovering further unmet needs, or at least needs that can't be easily met by your existing portfolio of products.

A typical B2B brand ecosystem has primary, tertiary and complementary solutions, so it's important a marketer clearly understands where and how they fit.

The primary solutions will be your core lines. They generate the most revenue, margin, profit, market share, growth or whatever metrics you use as your KPIs. Tertiary and complementary solutions allow you to expand your reach and fit in to segments or markets.

Success is found in identifying and supporting the primary lines, underpinned by your prevailing business strategy. The 80:20 rule will invariably identify your primary solutions, because 80 per cent of your KPI will be delivered by 20 per cent of your offerings. 

Similarly, when investing resource in to your marketing and sales effort, the 80:20 rule applies as well. Put 80 per cent of your effort in to the most important 20 per cent of your solution set - that is, spend four out of every five days working on maximising the success of those key solutions.

My experience is that a sales and marketing team that focuses its combined efforts on a tight and discrete set of solutions, tends to have greater success than a group selling broad and varied offerings.

It makes sense, right? Give me three solutions to sell, and I'll do them all well. Give me five to sell, and I'll probably be great at two, okay at two and not so great at one. Give me 10 to sell, and I will probably struggle with all of them.

It's why you'll see B2B sales structures with account managers primarily looking after the customer, supported by a range of expert solution specialists. Just as importantly, your after-sales support network is much more effective when it can become expert on a smaller number of market relevant solutions.

However, customer needs are often identified that can't easily be met within the confines of your existing portfolio. The sales force, anxious to ensure no sale is lost, looks for a solution.

But if the effort of launching a new solution outweighs the benefit, then the individual sale isn't worth the effort, despite the protestations from an anxious sales rep. A robust business strategy, supported by a solid solutions development lifecycle process, ensures you can tell the difference.

Which is where my mate Jack came in to the picture. I knew the answer to his client problem already existed in the current suite of offerings, but it required a bit more effort to sell and support. He was looking for a simple offer that could be sold fast and enable him to move on to the next opportunity.

In retrospect, if I had spent more time clarifying his concerns, really understanding the client issues, then building better sales support tools (including pricing bundles or wrapping in pre-sales support), it would have saved me a lot of pain down the track*.

A creative marketer should always be looking at their core solution suite and working to ensure the talk tracks stay fresh and offerings remain current. That way, the sales force never has reason to get bored with the primary suite of product, solutions and services they have to sell.

Jack might not agree with me, but launching a new offer was never what he really needed.

(*PS. I launched the software offering against my better judgement. It bombed. And Jack didn't hit his sales target. On the upside, I've only ever made the same mistake once since then ...)