Moving Enterprise Deals Forward with Solution Selling and Joint Customer Workshops
An eight-part tutorial series by Amrita Mukherjee, ex-Oracle, ex-KPMG, ex-Wipro | CCSP
For account executives, solution architects, alliance leaders, and consulting partners who need to turn a customer problem into an agreed solution, a credible business case, and an executable buying decision.
Tutorial contents
- Qualify the problem before you qualify the deal
- Build the buying team before the workshop
- Design a JCW around a customer decision
- Compare architectures the customer can actually buy and operate
- Build a business case that survives finance review
- Turn the workshop into a bounded proof of value
- Turn technical confidence into a buying decision
- Measure JCW success through customer progress
Part 1 of 8 · Discovery and qualification
Qualify the problem before you qualify the deal
A customer asks about cloud migration. Another wants to explore AI. A third needs to reduce database costs. These are useful starting points. They still leave the most important question unanswered: what business decision does the customer need to make?
In my Oracle alliance and presales work, I used Joint Customer Workshops, or JCWs, to connect business priorities with architecture, economics, and delivery planning. The workshop motion helped structure opportunity development: establish the current state, compare options, examine value, define a roadmap, and identify the next commitment.
This series explains that approach. Customer identities are anonymized, and historical pursuit examples are labeled according to what they establish. The practical templates are my recommended ways to apply the lessons.
Start with a problem the customer recognizes
Solution selling begins with the customer’s needs and problems, then develops a recommendation around them. Salesforce’s overview provides a useful introduction. In an enterprise pursuit, I translate that principle into five discovery questions:
- Which business process needs to improve?
- What happens today, and who experiences the consequences?
- What evidence would let us establish the size of the problem?
- Why would the organization act now?
- Who owns the decision and the resources needed to act?
A request for an AI demonstration might lead to a claims-processing discussion. That discussion might reveal investigation delays, fragmented information, or excessive manual review. Each possibility implies a different solution and a different measure of value. Treat them as hypotheses until the customer confirms them.
From our pursuit work: an insurance organization
For Insurer A, our JCW design connected claims-fraud opportunities, claims-platform modernization, and potential budget levers. The useful lesson is the framing: a fraud discussion could also expose platform and funding questions that needed to be addressed together.
This was a pursuit and workshop-design example. It does not establish that a model reduced fraud or that a resulting deal closed. The questions I would carry into discovery are concrete: which claims are in scope, what constitutes a confirmed fraud outcome, how much review capacity exists, and which platform limitations prevent improvement?
Write the problem in a form that can be challenged
For [business owner], [current condition] creates [business impact]. We will validate the impact using [evidence]. The next decision is [decision], owned by [person or role].
Leave unknown fields visibly unknown. A missing baseline is a discovery task. A missing decision owner is a qualification gap. Neither becomes more reliable because a seller assigns a probability in the CRM.
Try this on one opportunity
Rewrite its description without mentioning a product. Ask the customer to correct the problem statement and identify the evidence owner.
Advance when: the customer recognizes the problem, assigns an owner, and agrees to a discovery step. Hold the stage if interest is the only evidence.
Next, we will identify the people whose participation turns that discovery into a decision the organization can support.