Designing Industrial Solutions in Value-Based Selling : Managing Uncertainty and Solving Wicked Problems of Customer Need

Abstract

Today a majority of industrial companies claim to provide solutions and produce customer value that surpasses the benefits of the traditional product-service offerings. However, providing and adding real value to the customer has seen to become more difficult for both off-the-shelf products and more complex, customized solutions with different levels of sales support. This change is creating a very different industrial business-to-business (B2B) sales environment, and business leaders need more than just the typical analytical skills to tackle these complex challenges during their sales efforts. Motivated by this challenge, this dissertation brings together two separate theoretical backgrounds – design thinking, and industrial marketing and management – and concentrates especially on the intersection of the research on value-based solution selling with the research on solution design principles. The main research question is how can industrial companies design and sell value-based solution offerings? This research goal is achieved by examining the efforts of two selected industrial companies applying the value-based selling principles. These companies became both as the main data collection site and the arena for applying and testing the knowledge produced from the research. The problem with current sales theories is their lack of approach for addressing real life business problems and their related uncertainty. This study thus goes beyond macro-level customer problems to demonstrate that the common industrial logic used for addressing and tackling customer problems in solution selling and co-creation is currently incomplete. It introduces a third view, abductive epistemology, for handling customer problems of value-based selling. Further, this research suggests that handling and even utilizing uncertainty is a key feature of the value-based sales process. Indeed, it has strong managerial implications for the existing ways of understanding how practitioners should handle uncertainty, wicked problems and the complexities of value-based selling. More specifically, it provides managerial guidelines to use to handle, understand, and solve those challenges that are often preventing investment decisions. This study also developed knowledge that can drive industrial manufacturing business toward viable solutions business and customer value orientation. In practice, this research provides a new value-based selling technique for the sales force. It lets both customers and vendors maximize their returns and minimize costs. These value-based sellers utilize problem-solving methodologies that draw on design thinking and apply them to create greater business value, innovative new products, and more valuable services and solutions. The very reason for adopting a design thinking approach for solution design stems from uncertainty, introduced herein as a central facet of value-based selling. As a theoretical outcome, the research demonstrates how value-based solution selling can be understood as an uncertainty management process. More specifically, this thesis shows that utilizing design thinking during value-based selling offers new ways to reduce the uncertainty of a solution.