The real reason robot analysts don´t roam the earth yet

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Horses for sources had an amusing Fools Day Story about Robot Analysts replacing human analysts. The idea is not so crazy after all and has been tried in more primitive forms and certainly with less fancier names than Phil Fersht has coined. At least some advisory firms have tried to automate and make their sourcing templates so standardized that even a robot can read, understand, and respond to them! Some have gone further and tried, once the vendor responses are in, to use a machine to easily count the Ys and Ns to the series of interrogatory questions, to calculate the $ value of all the Ns, to add it to the vendor´s quoted prices and then to rank the vendors by price! Integrate all that into a database driven online tool fitted with a reverse auction engine and voila, you have made the software soul for your robot advisor! If daily life became that simple and orderly, many of us in the outsourcing business would immediately turn jobless!   

I have watched the sourcing advisory industry evolve over a decade now and have seen how some advisors have tried hard to standardize the sourcing process through detailed and precise templates and so on. Invariably on such advisor led deals, vendors have complained mostly to themselves how such straight jacketing kills their otherwise abundant creativity. The buyers have generally complained how little these advisor mandated processes and templates reflect the unique nuanced rich realities of their business operations. The advisors have generally complained about how little the clients listen to them and how little the vendors comply with them and how they then need to stay on with the client post contract to clean up the mess and ensure the vendor delivers the promised value. In the end, everyone finds a way to do their dharma and move on – the client convinces the advisor to customize their templates, the vendors find ways to make robotic evaluation of their offer difficult, and the advisors give up once again on their vision of an automated, mature, robotic sourcing market!

So, now that we know why we don´t have robot analysts among us, do we really miss them? In 2014, the sourcing world does seem more livable without them, but hey, we are game for a challenge! Bring them on and we will find a way to humanize and clutter them up and frustrate them too! 

Is Insight selling only Solution Selling in a new bottle?

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While researching the solution selling topic, I came across a couple of interesting articles announcing the death of solution selling and one of them even announcing the birth of the new kid on the jargon block called ´Insight Selling´. You can check them out for yourself (the HBR one will require a subscription) here and here.

Here is a gist of the HBR article since you probably won´t have access: The authors argue that the now outdated ´solution selling´ depends on the client having a problem which they don´t know how to solve, which is then the opportunity for the vendor to come in and solve. Apparently, most of the big companies today are far ahead in the maturity curve when it comes to what and how they want to buy which makes life difficult if not impossible for solution sellers. In the audio interview with one of the authors at HBR, there is even a ridiculous comparison between solution selling and a visit to a car dealer which is very different today compared to what it was a couple of decades ago, armed as the customer is with the information from the internet and so on.

The two minor issues I have with this point of view are

a) Many big companies (especially those in Europe) are hardly mature in sourcing or even in clearly defining their problems and they are nowhere close to asking vendors to take ownership for outcomes. This means solution selling is on very fertile ground on many many such client situations even today and

b) Comparing a complex B2B sale to buying a car from a dealer is pure nonsense. I don´t want to waste time dismantling the author´s argument here but you can do that yourself easily. This means that solution selling adds or should add much more value than any car dealer ever added to a car sale.

The major issue I have is that the new concept introduced by the HBR authors (Insight Selling) has also been around for ever and it is no different from solution selling. A solution addresses whatever problem or goal the client has and invariably incorporates innovative insights about the client´s business. Putting it another way, Solution Selling already includes Insight Selling and any good solution must incorporate insights about the client´s business.

We really don´t need to throw the Solution Selling baby away with the bathwater - especially since most people in sales are seeing it for the first time even as you read this today in 2014!