Short answer
Solution selling is a sales methodology where you diagnose the buyer's problem before recommending anything, then build a vision of the solution together, rather than pitching product features. The classic stages are: find a critical business issue a specific person admits to, diagnose its causes and impact, create a vision of the solution, reach the people with power to buy, agree an evaluation plan, and close. Michael Bosworth's 1994 book Solution Selling popularized it.
- Diagnose before you prescribe: no recommendation until the buyer agrees on the problem.
- Pain belongs to a person. A problem nobody owns won't get a budget.
- If a competitor shaped the buyer's vision first, re-engineer it with new criteria instead of fighting on theirs.
- Buyers now research alone, so your diagnosis has to add something they couldn't find.
On this page
- What solution selling is and where it came from
- The stages of a solution sale
- Questions for each stage
- Worked example: from admitted pain to a shared vision
- Selling when you're not first
- Scoring and decision rules
- When it fits and when it doesn't
- Solution selling compared with similar methods
- Common mistakes
- Sources
- Questions people ask
This page is for B2B sellers who sell a combination of products and services, such as IT providers, consultancies, systems integrators and equipment firms, and for managers deciding whether solution selling still fits their team. It covers the method's history from its own books, its stages with the questions for each, an illustrative deal with the numbers worked through, and how to sell when a competitor reached the buyer first.
What solution selling is and where it came from
Solution selling is a problem-led rather than product-led way to sell. Instead of describing what your product does and hoping it matches, you learn what's wrong, why, and what it costs, and only then recommend a combination of products and services that fixes it. IT trade press has long contrasted it with "box pushing", selling on specifications alone.
The term became widely known through Michael T. Bosworth's Solution Selling: Creating Buyers in Difficult Selling Markets, first published in 1994. Keith M. Eades updated the method in The New Solution Selling (McGraw-Hill, 2004 edition) and again in The Collaborative Sale: Solution Selling in a Buyer-Driven World (Wiley, 2014), written for buyers who do much of their research before talking to a seller. Accounts that trace the method to the mid-1970s exist, but we couldn't find a primary source for them.
"Solution selling" is now also a generic phrase for any problem-first approach. On this page we describe the formal method and say where the generic version differs.
The stages of a solution sale
The chapter structure of The New Solution Selling gives the sequence: plan and research, stimulate interest, define the pain or critical business issue, diagnose before you prescribe, create a vision biased to your solution, gain access to people with power, control the buying process, and close. The table turns that into what you need from each stage.
| Stage | What you're doing | You're done when |
|---|---|---|
| Research | Learning the account and forming a hypothesis about its likely problems | You can name a probable issue and the role that owns it |
| Stimulate interest | Opening with a relevant problem, not a product | The person agrees to talk about it |
| Define the pain | Finding a critical business issue a specific person admits to | Someone says, in their words, "this is a problem for me" |
| Diagnose | Learning the causes, who else is affected, and the cost | You both agree on why it happens and what it costs |
| Create a vision | Helping the buyer picture how it could be solved, in a way that favors your strengths | The buyer describes the solution they want, and it fits yours |
| Gain access to power | Reaching the person who can approve the spend | The approver has heard the problem and the vision |
| Control the process | Agreeing the evaluation steps, owners and dates | There's a written plan the buyer accepts |
| Close | Reaching final agreement on scope, price and terms | Signed |
Questions for each stage
What's the biggest obstacle to [the goal they mentioned] this year? When did that last cause a real problem? What happened? Who feels it most: you, your team, or someone else? Is fixing it on your list, or someone else's?
Why do you think it happens? What's behind it? How often does it happen, and what does each time cost? Who else is affected when it does? How do they deal with it? What have you tried already? Why didn't it hold? What happens if it's still like this in a year?
If you could fix this any way you liked, what would it look like? Would it help if [capability you're strong in]? How would you use that? What would need to be true for you to trust it worked? Who else would want to see it before agreeing?
Who besides you would approve a change like this? How did you decide the last time you bought something of this size? What steps would you need before a decision, and who owns each one? If we agree it's worth doing, what date would you want it working by?
Notice how the vision questions work. You suggest a capability as a question and let the buyer decide whether it helps. The vision becomes theirs, and it happens to describe what you do well.
Worked example: from admitted pain to a shared vision
Illustrative example. The companies, people and figures are invented to show the method.
The seller: Bastion IT (bastionit.example), a cybersecurity managed service provider (MSP). The buyer: Halvorsen Engineering (halvorsen.example), a civil engineering firm with 80 staff, 52 of them billable engineers. First contact: the operations director, who replied to an email about a file server outage the firm had mentioned on its client portal.
Define the pain. The operations director said the main file server failed for two working days last quarter, while two bridge projects were due. She owns IT alongside facilities and said the partners asked her to "make sure it can't happen again."
Diagnose. Over two conversations, Bastion learned the causes and the cost:
| Cause | Detail |
|---|---|
| One aging on-site server | Five years old, past warranty, holding all project files |
| Backups never tested | Nightly backups to a local drive; the restore took 31 hours because nobody had practiced it |
| No monitoring | The disk had logged warnings for weeks before it failed |
| Cost of the outage | Arithmetic | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Lost billable time | 52 engineers × 16 hours × 50% of work blocked × $145 billing rate | $60,320 |
| Emergency recovery contractor | Invoice | $8,400 |
| Late-delivery credit to one client | Agreed credit | $12,000 |
| One outage | $80,720 |
The operations director estimated, without prompting, that a similar failure was likely every two to three years on the current setup. Taking the midpoint of 2.5 years, that's about $32,300 a year in expected cost ($80,720 ÷ 2.5), before counting a ransomware event, which she worried about more.
Create the vision. Bastion asked how she would want it to work. She wanted files available within four hours of any failure, proof that backups work, and warnings caught before they become outages. Bastion asked whether quarterly test restores, with a report to the partners, would help her show the problem was fixed. She said that would matter more to the partners than any technical detail. That became part of the vision.
Power and process. The two managing partners approve anything over $25,000. The operations director agreed to present the problem, the cost and the vision at their monthly meeting, with Bastion's one-page summary, and to set a decision date before the next project deadline.
The offer: monitored cloud backup with a tested four-hour restore, server monitoring, and quarterly restore tests, at $2,150 a month ($25,800 a year) plus $4,500 setup. Year one costs $30,300 against an expected outage cost of about $32,300, before any ransomware risk. Because the numbers were close, the case rested on the partners' stated priority: never missing a project deadline because of IT. The quarterly restore report spoke directly to it.
What made this work:
- The pain belonged to a named person with a reason to act (the partners' instruction).
- Diagnosis found three causes, and the solution addressed all three. A replacement server alone would have fixed one.
- The quarterly restore report came from the buyer's answer to a vision question. It cost Bastion little and became the deciding feature.
- The seller was honest that the hard numbers were close, and let the buyer's priority carry the decision.
Selling when you're not first
Often a competitor, an analyst report or an AI search has already shaped the buyer's idea of the solution, and you're invited in to quote against a list of requirements. The New Solution Selling calls this re-engineering the vision. The approach:
- Accept the buyer's vision first. Ask how they arrived at it and what problem each requirement solves.
- Find the gap in the diagnosis. Look for a cause or an affected person the existing vision ignores.
- Add a criterion, don't attack one. "Would it matter if restores were tested every quarter?" is easier to accept than "their backup is weak."
- Get the new criterion into the evaluation. If it isn't in the scoring, it won't decide the deal.
- Know when to walk. If the buyer won't reopen the diagnosis and the requirements were written around a competitor, a polite no-bid saves weeks.
Scoring and decision rules
Rate each item 0 (missing), 1 (partial) or 2 (confirmed by the buyer). These rules are our guidance, not from the books.
| Item | 2 points when |
|---|---|
| Admitted pain | A named person describes the problem as theirs |
| Diagnosis | Causes and cost are agreed, with numbers |
| Vision | The buyer describes a solution that fits your strengths |
| Power | The approver has heard the problem and vision |
| Process | A written evaluation plan with dates exists |
- 9 or 10: propose.
- 6 to 8: work the lowest item next.
- 5 or less: keep it in nurture.
- Admitted pain at 0: there's no opportunity yet, however interested the contact seems.
When it fits and when it doesn't
| Fits well | Fits poorly |
|---|---|
| Offers that combine products and services, configured per customer | Standard products bought from a catalog |
| Buyers who don't yet know how to solve their problem | Expert buyers with a defined specification and a procurement team |
| Mid-size companies without in-house specialists | Price-scored tenders with no access to the users |
The strongest critique came in "The End of Solution Sales" (Harvard Business Review, July to August 2012), by Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon and Nick Toman. Their argument: as procurement and buyers grow more sophisticated, companies "can readily define solutions for themselves," so sellers who wait to be asked about needs arrive too late. Their answer became the Challenger Sale. The practical lesson is that your diagnosis must tell buyers something they couldn't find alone. Before the first call, account research gives you a hypothesis worth testing; at volume, Bebop researches each account in a list and suggests the angle.
Solution selling compared with similar methods
| Method | Starts from | What it adds or changes |
|---|---|---|
| Product selling | The product's features | No diagnosis; works for simple, known needs |
| Solution selling | The buyer's admitted pain | Diagnosis, a shared vision and a controlled process |
| Value selling | The buyer's business issue | Puts the quantified business case at the center |
| Gap selling | The buyer's current state | Deeper on root cause, impact and emotion; sizes the gap |
| Consultative selling | The seller as advisor | A posture rather than staged process |
| Challenger Sale | An insight the buyer lacks | Teaches first, for buyers who think they know the answer |
Common mistakes
- Prescribing in the first meeting. If you name your product before the buyer agrees on the cause, you're product selling with extra questions.
- Pain without an owner. "The company has a problem" isn't pain. Find the person.
- A vision that isn't biased to you. A generic vision invites a price comparison. Steer it toward what you do well, honestly.
- Skipping power. Your contact's enthusiasm won't survive a partner meeting you never prepared them for.
- Over-engineering the solution. Bundling more than the diagnosis justifies makes the price hard to defend.
Next step: turn the diagnosis into a business case the approver will accept with the value selling guide.
Sources
- Solution Selling: Creating Buyers in Difficult Selling Markets (catalog record), Open Library, accessed 26 October 2026
- The New Solution Selling (catalog record and contents), Internet Archive, accessed 26 October 2026
- The Collaborative Sale: Solution Selling in a Buyer-Driven World (catalog record and contents), Internet Archive, accessed 26 October 2026
- The End of Solution Sales, Harvard Business Review, July to August 2012
- What is solution selling?, TechTarget, 24 September 2021
Written by the Bebop team at Blackpearl Group. Last updated .
Questions people ask
What is solution selling?
Solution selling is a sales methodology in which the seller diagnoses the buyer's problem before recommending anything, then builds a vision of the solution with the buyer instead of pitching product features. It usually combines products and services tailored to the customer. Michael Bosworth's 1994 book Solution Selling popularized the formal method, and Keith Eades later updated it in The New Solution Selling.
What are the steps of solution selling?
The classic sequence is: research the account, stimulate interest with a relevant problem, define a critical business issue that a specific person admits to, diagnose its causes and cost, create a vision of the solution that fits your strengths, gain access to the people with power to buy, agree an evaluation plan, and close. Many teams compress these into discovery, solution design, proposal and close.
What is the difference between solution selling and consultative selling?
Consultative selling is a posture: the seller acts as an advisor who understands the buyer's business and puts their interests first. Solution selling is a structured process with defined stages, from admitted pain through diagnosis and vision to power, evaluation and close. A consultative seller may use solution selling's stages, and good solution sellers behave consultatively, so the two often overlap.
Is solution selling still relevant?
Yes, with an adjustment. A 2012 Harvard Business Review article, The End of Solution Sales, argued that sophisticated buyers can now define solutions themselves, so sellers who wait to be asked arrive late. Diagnosis still matters, but it has to add insight the buyer couldn't find alone, and sellers often need to reshape a vision someone else started rather than create one from scratch.
Who created solution selling?
The formal methodology is most associated with Michael T. Bosworth, whose book Solution Selling: Creating Buyers in Difficult Selling Markets was first published in 1994. Keith M. Eades extended it in The New Solution Selling and The Collaborative Sale (2014). Some accounts trace the approach to sales teams in the computer industry in the 1970s, but those claims are poorly sourced.