I’m going to dredge up a buzzword that has launched a thousand eye rolls: “Solution.”

Many B2B marketers still use the word in their marketing materials, but my sense is that it is used as a swap-out word for a product or service-the idea being that a solution sounds more valuable than a plain old product or service.

If you’ve hung around with ITSMA for a few years, you know that we take the word way more seriously than that. We think of a solution as a combination of products and/or services with some extra IP stirred in there that helps customize the whole package to a particular business need of a customer. That means standalone products and services don’t cut it; nor do bundles of products and/or services, because they lack the custom fit that customers are looking for.

Indeed, customers have an even tougher threshold for the word than ITSMA. They define it as an end-to-end relationship that begins with requirements definition and ends with post-implementation support and retirement.

No wonder CIOs shake their heads when marketers use the s-word for everything from servers to razor blades.

But I haven’t given up on the word yet. Mostly because I work with a group of 23 different companies that we call the ITSMA Solutions Council—and they haven’t given up on it. I’m going to one of the Council’s semi-annual in-person meetings next week in London. We’re going to present a report that I think advances thinking about solutions quite a bit. It’s based on research from companies that are actually fulfilling the promise of solutions from the customer perspective.

ITSMA research shows that a critical competence in solutions is integration—the ability to integrate products, services, people, and external providers together into a solution that meets the specific needs of customers. But the interesting thing we’re learning is that the level of integration varies quite a bit. Not all solutions require a mind meld with customers and two-year consulting engagements. Some may only need a tiny bit of customization to fulfill the need.

For this reason, the level of organizational integration necessary to back up a solution can vary quite a bit—even for solutions offered inside the same company or even at the business unit level. For example, within a telecom group of one of our members organizations, solutions drive a close integration of multiple, independent P&Ls. The strategy is driven by the buying behavior of telecom customers, who increasingly come from the business side rather than IT. They demand an integrated solution—a billing system, for example—rather than buying individual pieces of software or hardware. Thus, the general manager for the telecom group has a large number of people dedicated to solution integration, and can draw on resources from other business units to deliver components optimized for that industry.

Meanwhile, in other areas of the organization, solutions are at the opposite end of the spectrum. The primary component of the solution is marketing—a small group of marketers backs the solution with a campaign. There is very little customization or integration necessary, so fewer employees are devoted to supporting the solution. Indeed, the organization has the market-leading software in the category and a team of consultants that can optimize the processes that the software controls. The solution consists of marketing those capabilities together so that the consultants can then customize them for each customer.

So you can see there is a big range of possibilities. However, there is one major constant across all solutions: the need to switch the organizational DNA from transactional selling to relationship-based selling. You can’t sell a solution if you can’t figure out what customers need.

We’re working on a maturity model that defines the different levels of organizational integration needed to support solutions. Clearly, a solution is more than an empty marketing term at these companies.

Have you made real organizational changes to support customer solutions like these companies have?