Hannah Grove, Kevin Sellers, Richard Ettenson and Jonathan Knowles
Selling Solutions Isn't Enough
B2B companies need to focus on helping each customer achieve better outcomes.
MIT Sloan Management Review, 2018
What's inside?
Instead of offering solutions, business-to-business leaders are becoming collaborative partners with their customers.
Recommendation
Technology and management trends are driving a transformation in business-to-business (B2B) markets toward collaborative supplier–customer relationships and outcome-based approaches. Leading B2B enterprises no longer offer so-called solutions; instead, they’re retooling their organizations and mind-sets to become contributing partners in their customers’ success. Management professor Richard Ettenson and consultant Jonathan Knowles collaborated with chief executives from leading B2B companies to produce this authoritative report for the MIT Sloan Management Review. The authors draw on 10 years of research to outline the ways leading B2B suppliers are transforming to support their customers’ success.
Summary
About the Authors
Hannah Grove is State Street’s CMO. Kevin Sellers is CMO of Avnet. Richard Ettenson is the Keickhefer Fellow of Global Marketing and Brand Strategy at the Thunderbird School of Global Management. Jonathan Knowles is CEO of Type 2 Consulting.
Comment on this summary