Most of us have known for a long time that transactional selling means a commodity sale. Over the past several years, organizations have worked to transform the business model into "solution selling." This involves working to discover a customer's needs and selling that customer a solution that combines printed products and some combination of "services."

In the July/August Edition of the Harvard Business Review, Matthew Dixon, Executive Director of Sales & Service Practice at Corporate Executive Board, published an article entitled The End of Solution Sales. Dixon's article states, "This type of solution selling is now dead in today's market. The Internet changed the way that customers buy. Most products and services are commodities that are sold for the lowest price. This is a result of the amount of information that customers can find on their own. Customers no longer need suppliers. They need professional sales consultants who can show real value in solving business problems. The salespeople take control of the conversation and bring 'insights' that the customer can't find (on the Internet) because they don't exist." His philosophy is that there is a new business model called "Insight Selling."

Dixon has a clearly-defined model about the differences between the "solution sale" and the "insight sale." It is depicted in the Figure below.

Figure 1: Solution Selling versus Insight Selling