eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

This study aims to provide concrete actionable advice for Metso Automation Services on how to define and quantify customer value in solutions and how to use it in solution sales.

Academic literature aimed to reveal the main concerns in the different phases of solution sales, namely definition, quantification and selling. The empirical findings were drawn using unstructured theme interviews, reference case data and a collection of Metso Automation Services sales material.

Three principal issues in solution sales process of the customer organization were found during the empirical research; lack of value-selling skills, complexity of the existing value selling tools and the lack of documented reference cases. To overcome the first issue, in addition to training, recruitment of people with financial background was suggested to diversify the engineer–intensive sales team. Also centralizing the solution sales into one unit was proposed. To simplify the value-selling tools, using KPI based simple arithmetic formulas was recommended. In addition, the need for a comprehensive reference case database, searchable by KPI’s, industries and processes was noted.

In general, the research revealed that in solution sales trust is crucial and transparency is the key to acquire it. The importance of the understanding of the customers’ business logic was also noted and is considered to be the key behind a successful solution sales presentation.