Victor Saeijs, Vice-President Sales Eurasia for Nokia, explains what is the main difference between product and solution sales and also shares the experience how the process of internal education is realized within Nokia structure.
1. What should you be able to do to behave like people from solutions?
It's very different from a pure product sale and if you think about selling a solution. In Nokia terms we have a music solution, so you have a twelve months unlimited free downloads of all music you like, including all the new songs which are coming out in next twelve months which you can download into your mobile or into your laptop and it's basically packaged into device price. The way Nokia brings such solutions to the market is very different than a pure naked product. We have a number of training sessions now within Asia with a big part of the team. It first starts with understanding what the consumer and his segments are, but you also need to have a deep understanding if the solution is being brought through with a trade customer to the consumer, you need to have a very deep understanding of the trade customers' basis model, their needs, the persons' agendas and what works.
2. What is the difference between the product and a solution sale?
You package it together, bring the value proposition in the segmented way to the consumer and to the trade customer, and it's much more about defining the future than the current. It's very much about convincing the trade customers that this is a direction which is good for them as well because they can actually earn new money and your revenue streams for the future, if it's a retailer, it helps them to get more people into the store, to sell at a higher value proposition; if it's an operator it helps them to generate a higher RPU levels and have a higher profitability. And it's a much more strategic sale than: here's my product, there's the price, there's the promotional campaign, and we can deliver you so many devices a month and that's it. That is a product sale. A solution sale needs to look at much more different components, if you're an account manager, you need to bring all these components together. The business model is different, and many of our solutions are related to internet businesses, so the types of revenue generating models which will come into solutions space are very different fro what we traditionally have been doing.
3. What competency should people be different at?
It's very much about building the whole value proposition from a pure device price offering which includes service, a device connected to it, clear consumer targets, quite often working with external partners, in Russia with such companies like Odnoklassniki or some other to bring their offering to the Nokia consumer working with certain partner. It's much more a strategic sale - it needs to go beyond the purchasing counterpart, that's really working with marketing team, you would work with the segments team, you would work with a technology team and bring them this whole value proposition together. It's much more working across different functions and also working across different levels of the organization because this quite often goes to the CEO level, it is very much about the discussion we have with the CEO and his leadership team. It's about bringing the vision to them, selling the vision by getting buying the vision and working with the rest of the team to make it happen. It needs more future orientation, it needs a lot of innovation, and it's also about doing it. We challenged all account managers to bring a concrete solutions case for one of our customers to the market in the second half of this year. And now we already have seen some good examples - some of them have already getting it, some of them are struggling a bit more and we work with them. This transformation towards solutions is a must for Nokia, there's no way back. It's the only way to go.
4. It's very difficult to make this switch, isn't it?
Absolutely. If you look at IBM, which is one of our examples, they went through it and it took then more than ten years to go from where they were and become a product focused company, and the majority of their profitability is coming out of that. We don't have ten years. We're though in B2B business also, but mainly we're in B2C, so we have a few years to make this transition, we need to accelerate this much quicker than IBM did. But also we need to bring in the fresh blood, fresh talents from other industries who will help us to make this transformation. Only by trainings and creating competencies with the existing teams we won't be able to make this shift quick and deep enough. In different parts of the organization we're recruiting very good new team members who understand how it works and they will teach us and the rest of the organization how this can work.
5. How do you coach younger generation in your company?
What we are doing is that my colleague in India shared a month ago that they had a kind of reverse mentoring. That means that they had a number of very experienced managers, but some of them were between 40 and 50 years old, and they had a lot of young talents coming from internet industries, IT and services companies who actually have great expertise with the internet business models and with solution sales. They are the ones who are mentoring the more senior members of the Nokia team. That is reverse mentoring and I think that this is great: the expertise that we're trying to achieve is much more with the younger generation, even younger than I am, than it is with me.
6. What do you personally do?
In our office I love to talk and discuss with the young team members who come from the music industry or from the gaming industry. Very soon we will be recruiting very senior team members from a large internet company who will bring a lot of knowledge to the team and to me, and that's a great way to learn. It always works up-down, down-up, sideways, and that's what a learning organization is about, you learn from everybody around you, and you're never too old to learn.
