The Problem Statement Framework that Unlocks 35% More ACV

In 1956, IKEA hit a breaking point.

The company had grown from Ingvar Kamprad's mail-order business to a showroom in Sweden, but was struggling with a critical problem: furniture delivery costs were eating into their margins, and pricing products beyond most customers’ reach.

A big problem.

So one cold morning, IKEA designer Gillis Lundgren arrived at their workshop to photograph a LÖVET table for their upcoming catalog. He had attempted to load the elegant, leaf-shaped table into his Volvo… but it wouldn't fit.

"I remember standing there, looking at this beautiful piece that was essentially blocking our progress," Gillis later said. "We were already running behind schedule, and I had the photographer waiting at the workshop."

So he figured, "Well what if I just take off the legs, and reassemble it later?"

Which is what he did. Placing everything flat in his car, then reassembling it at the photography studio.

When Ingvar saw his improvised solution, "He called me into his office," Lundgren shared years later.

I thought he might be upset about modifying the product. Instead, he was energized, asking detailed questions about how much space we saved and how quickly I could reassemble it.

That evening, Ingvar gathered his small leadership team. On a simple notepad, he wrote out the question that became their north star:

Why do we have to assemble furniture before shipping it?

Which was an altogether different way of framing the problem:

• Instead of a margin issue that asks, “How do we cut our shipping rates?”—which is a matter of negotiating better fees and pricing with carriers—he challenged a fundamental assumption about furniture production.
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• Fundamentally transforming IKEA by using flatpacked furniture, to take up 80% less warehouse space, cut shipping costs, and afford lower prices for customers while maintaining their margins.

Just the same, the problems your prospects bring you aren’t objective. They’re subjective.

Which means changing the way you talk about the problem will change the way they go about solving it.

That’s why top reps spend the majority of their time finding and (re)framing the problem (to align with the approach they uniquely enable).

How to Find, Frame & Sell

Here’s an example.

Let’s say we’re selling an AR/VR solution to IKEA, and based on our research, we notice they’re shifting toward a new, smaller footprint store design.

As part of their push into into digital orders, not just in-store sales.

In this case, through some research and discovery conversations, we might come to frame up the problem this way:

In short, the job is about:

• Finding and framing a high-cost, high-priority problem.
• Including multiple levels of cost (with the buying team’s own data), and the impact against a company-wide priority.
• Plus, why it’s getting worse over time, demanding a response now.

Ready-to-Assemble Frameworks

If you’d like to go deeper on this idea (and the full IKEA case study), check out the Account-Based Sales crash course here:

There’s a full set of DIY frameworks to get started with.

Or, try Fluint for the Done-With-AI approach.

You’ll get a set of sharp, tailored problem statements written for each deal in your pipeline.

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