Full Solution Sales Worth $13 Billion

I was talking with Courtney Manlove and Deena Ghazarian, both of Monster and usually two of the smartest people in the room, at the PRO Group Spring Meeting when the topic turned to the lack of full CE solutions being sold through retail.

Obviously, the issue is important to companies like Monster, which sell many products that fit together in a full ecosystem. The issue is also important to Dealerscope. We see the sale of a full solution - core hardware, accessories, software and integration services - as the profit driver and differentiator our core audience (the independent CE, 12-volt and appliance retailers) needs to sell to successfully compete in this cutthroat market.

What's not obvious, as Manlove and Ghazarian pointed out, is how difficult it is to convince some retailers - from top management down to the sales floor - of how important that full-solution sale really is. We chatted about how the mission statement, the mantra, the lifeblood, of any CE retailer should be to maximize revenue, profit and customer satisfaction by optimizing the performance of every product sold. In most cases, selling a full solution helps achieve that goal.

During our conversation, I mentioned a report I based a column on during 2006 CES when I was running a different magazine focused on consumer technologies. I was hoping that more than five years later the report would be obsolete. Manlove assured me it wasn't and asked for a reprint. I couldn't locate the whole report, but I did find an excerpt.

Written by Ted Schadler, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, it's titled "Sell Digital Experiences, Not Products: Solution Boutiques Will Help Consumers Buy Digital Experiences." I remember writing at the time that it was one of the best things to come out of the show.