The word solution needs to be retired from the business vocabulary. What was once a meaningful, buyer-defined term that meant “the answer to my specific problem” is now generic jargon that sellers have co-opted to mean “the bundle of products and services I want to sell you.”
Management guru Peter Drucker made this observation nearly a half-century ago, when he said that customers are always more interested in their outcome than in your solution. “What the customer buys and considers value is never a product,” Drucker wrote. “It is always utility, that is, what a product or service does for him.” In the business-to-business (B2B) environment, many companies have moved away from this truth. They develop products and services (often described as solutions) from an internal view, and they attempt to sell them to the widest possible customer base.