Does your sales team use a consultative selling approach? It can be a significant differentiator in a competitive market.
Buyers have endless options and information available at their fingertips. Having a good product or service is no longer enough to stand out.
To stay relevant and get ahead of the competition, salespeople need to position themselves as strategic advisors capable of solving their customers’ business problems.
Your sellers must build long-term relationships beyond the transaction and maintain their standing as trusted business partners.
They can do that with a consultative sales approach.
What Is a Consultative Sales Approach?
Consultative selling is a needs-based selling approach that focuses on building a relationship with a customer, understanding their issues and priorities, and developing solutions to their challenges.
Consultative selling puts the buyer’s needs ahead of the needs of the sales professional. The primary skill is asking open-ended questions and active listening.
Instead of leading with a sales pitch, sellers conduct conversations and provide insights, advice, and guidance that help potential customers achieve their goals.
Get your free copy: The Value-Driven Seller: Essential Skills for Consultative Sales.
7 Consultative Selling Techniques
Here are the top seven consultative selling strategies you need to teach your sales team so they can win more business, improve customer lifetime value, and increase share of wallet.
1. Research Prospects Thoroughly
Sales is fast-paced, and sellers may jump from one call to the next without having time to research the next prospect. This is a mistake. First impressions matter, and you want the customer’s first impression to be one of competence, caring, and connection.
Sellers need buyers to view them as resources rather than product vendors. Thorough research ensures your sales professionals can add value to the conversation by asking probing questions rather than yes-no questions or inquiring about topics on the prospect’s website.
Train sellers to conduct a thorough investigation of the contact, their industry or business, and their organization. Have them use social media, company websites, and third-party news and research sites to gather as much information as they can, including the history of the individual and their company as well as any current events affecting them.
The more the salesperson knows in advance, the more thoroughly they can engage the client at a high level. This helps them win the respect and trust of the prospect.
2. Pre-Call Plan
Coach your team to invest time in the pre-call planning process. This includes identifying where the buyer is in their buying journey and specific issues that may affect their buying readiness (such as a company or industry event).
The plan should include a list of discovery questions the sales professional can use to uncover prospects’ needs and wants. Probing questions build trust, help the prospect identify pain points, and help the seller understand how they can support the customer.
Download What Works in Prospecting: Research-Backed Strategies for Filling the Sales Funnel for successful tactics.
3. Build Trust with Customers
Trust is a critical ingredient in consultative selling. A prospect who does not trust the sales professional will be less likely to answer questions, reveal problems, or cooperate with discovery and problem-solving.
The fastest way to lose trust is to treat the prospect like a wallet and focus only on what you can sell them. It’s critical that sales professionals address the prospect as a person, not just a decision-maker. They should focus on uncovering what makes the buyer tick, and why, so they can provide effective consultation.
Invest in teaching sales professionals how to build rapport early in the relationship. Coach your sales team to express genuine interest, compassion, and commitment to the prospect’s success.
Trust also requires sales professionals to follow through on promises. This starts with small things (such as sending material when they say they will) and continues on to big things such as delivering the right solution.
When a buyer can rely on a seller to follow through on small promises, it teaches them they can depend on the seller for the big things too.
4. Ask Great Follow-Up Questions
While it’s important to develop a list of questions during pre-call planning, it’s also important that your salespeople not simply rattle them off like a script. This can feel like an interrogation to the prospect and it does not develop trust or engage them in a consultative sales approach.
Instead, equip your salespeople with the consultative selling skills to ask good questions, listen thoroughly to the answers, and follow up with questions that dig deeper.
A consultative approach uses this more fluid conversational style to begin identifying where and how the seller can help. A responsive line of questioning will uncover the challenges the customer is facing, which may be different from what they initially stated or from what the seller assumes.
Prospects open up with effective consultative selling because the conversation is authentic and unscripted. They begin to feel that the conversation has value apart from learning about your solution.
5. Listen Actively to Prospects
Some sales professionals ask questions as though they’re “supposed to.” While the prospect is answering, the seller focuses on what they’ll ask next rather than on what the prospect is saying.
This is human nature, and it’s common in daily conversation. But world-class sales professionals do better. They shift their focus and make it their main objective to solve the prospect’s problem. That requires them to really listen and understand.
Coach your sales team to slow down, talk less, and home in on the prospect. Active listening means asking follow-up questions that show you’re paying attention. We recommend a three-part approach that helps sales professionals get to the root of an issue rather than viewing it at the surface level.
Using this strategy, the conversation with a prospect might go something like this:
Seller: So, you’re having delivery issues with your current supplier. How does that translate to your business?
Prospect: It’s delaying our delivery to hospitals and ambulance drivers who need and expect the products to be on time.
Seller: What impact does that have on your efficiency and bottom line?
Prospect: We spend a lot of time, energy, and money negotiating the returns and tracking down deliveries. It’s cutting into our profit margin substantially, not to mention it creates a ripple that ultimately affects patients.
Seller: What would it mean to you to have guaranteed quality products delivered on time?
Prospect: We really want to partner with a high-quality company that can deliver on time, every time. We spent over $5,000 last year alone on issues relating to returns.
6. Problem-Solve Proactively
During a consultative selling conversation, your sales professionals will either learn that your offering can solve a customer’s problems or that the prospect isn’t a qualified match.
Once trust is established and the conversation is going strong, teach your sellers to focus on those solvable issues. But they shouldn’t go straight for the close. Instead, they should use those problems to further their questioning and advising.
Teach sellers to collaborate with customers to brainstorm solutions and discover deeper needs. Help them uncover just how much those problems cost them and their organization. Lead them to understand how your offering can help and what a successful solution will look like for them.
Sellers should be confident offering business advice. This means you should coach your team to improve business acumen so they can provide solid, trustworthy consultation while simultaneously working toward a solution.
7. Adapt to Customer Styles
The most effective sales professionals constantly evaluate their consultative selling approach and adapt to feedback in real time.
This requires sales professionals to be sensitive to the verbal and non-verbal cues of each prospect and to change their approach in real time based on those cues.
You can help them learn to do this effectively by introducing them to the concept of conversational styles, as understood through DISC personality profiles.
The DISC sales assessment provides a framework for understanding how people prefer to communicate and interact. Sales professionals trained in DISC can quickly identify which style each prospect prefers and adapt their own interactions to accommodate those preferences.
This works at a deep level to build and maintain trust and it helps prospects be more open to your salesperson’s consultation.
Why Choose a Consultative Sales Training Program?
The key to successful consultative selling is keeping a strong customer focus throughout the entire sales process. That focus creates a win-win situation where the buyer feels supported in having their challenge solved and where the seller gains a loyal, long-term customer.
The Brooks Group IMPACT Selling® is a buyer-focused, consultative sales process used by teams in multiple industries.
Learn more about how our sales training helps sellers connect with buyers, communicate value, and solve challenges for customers.
