Cambridge Business Association
The Prime Solution
Book

The Prime Solution

Close the Value Gap, Increase Margins, and Win the Complex Sale

Jeff Thull
Kaplan Publishing, 2005
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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable

Recommendation

Jeff Thull is a highly regarded consultant whose client list reads like a who’s who of big business. He is also the author of the insightful book, Mastering the Complex Sale. Does this new volume live up to the promise of that one? It depends on what you are seeking. Given that its title, The Prime Solution, sounds like a brand of steak sauce, be prepared to chew your way through terms like "decision acuity" (i.e., help your clients understand what’s really going on), "solution opportunities" (i.e., answers) and "value promise delivery" (i.e., implementation). Such stylistic nuisances aside, the book diagnoses and documents a "value gap," the shortfall between the value that buyers receive versus what they feel they bought. Thull attributes this gap primarily to flaws in how providers of business-to-business products design, sell and execute their complex "solutions" or offerings. He suggests ways to address those flaws, along with many useful cases and good practical advice for consultants, particularly in the last three chapters. getAbstract.com recommends this book to experienced consultants who sell solutions. Our one caveat: just don’t beef about the vocabulary.

Summary

Winning Solutions

Management guru Peter Drucker could hardly have guessed what he was getting into when - in his landmark book, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices - he wrote: "The customer never buys a product. By definition, the customer buys the satisfaction of a want. He buys value." Over the past three decades, Drucker’s notion that customers actually buy solutions has triumphed in the marketplace of ideas. Today, virtually everyone sells solutions: software solutions, wireless solutions, strategic solutions and so forth.

Do these solutions actually solve customers’ problems? The evidence suggests otherwise. A McKinsey & Company study found that more than half of the companies that purchased solutions failed to recoup their investments. Moreover, more than 75% of the companies selling solutions failed to recoup their costs. In other words, both customers and vendors were dissatisfied with the outcomes. This may explain why today’s customers demand solutions that create significant value and help attain return on investment (ROI) objectives. Solutions that meet these criteria are called "Prime Solutions." They offer maximum value to both sellers ...

About the Author

As president and CEO of Prime Resource Group, Jeff Thull is a leading strategist and corporate adviser. He is the author of Mastering the Complex Sale.

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    R. T. 4 years ago
    This gets a relatively bad rating on GetAbstract, but in a world of failed digital transformation, this “solution advice” seeming comes into its own. I personally think it’s better than its press might suggest.