What is Consultative Selling?

Consultative selling is different from traditional sales in that it takes a less aggressive stance in pitching products and solutions to potential buyers. It focuses less on you and your organization and more on the buyer's needs, problems, and interests. Consultative selling demonstrates the value of a brand or solution, by empowering the sales process with a service-oriented approach to sales.

Photo credit: Kevin Dooley - Some rights reserved

Consultative selling not about you at all – it’s all about the customer’s wants, needs, and challenges. As a salesperson, your role is to focus on the customer and act as their trusted advisor. In this way, you’ll build a strong relationship and increase the likelihood of closing the sale.

With that said, here are the five key steps of consultative selling:

Step One: Research your lead. In order to make the sales process about the customer, you first need to know who they are. To begin, gather data about your lead’s company size, content interests, email preferences, and past behaviors on social media. We also recommend researching their latest company news to gain some perspective on where they might be coming from.

Step Two: Ask questions about your lead. Once you’re on the phone or having a conversation with the lead, avoid launching into a generic sales pitch or offering a bunch of information about your product or company. Instead, open with questions about your potential customer. Even though you’ve done your research, you want to get them talking about themselves. To get started, ask them about their goals, future plans, challenges, and pain points. As they share information about themselves, listen not only to what they say, but how they say it. Do they sound excited, frustrated, or inspired? All of this information will provide you with insight into what your next move should be.

Step Three: Offer guidance. As your lead shares information with you about their challenges and goals, look for opportunities to offer guidance. Throughout this process, take on the role of a trusted advisor, and offer the lead advice as to how they can overcome their challenges and achieve their goals. In some cases this advice will be directly related to how your product and service can help, but other times it will look like sharing relevant industry knowledge. Both of these circumstances have immense value, because they allow you to earn your client’s trust while building a strong relationship.

Step Four: Weed out unqualified leads. When practicing consultative selling, you want to spend the majority of your time on leads who are a good fit for your company. Trying to close an unqualified lead is a massive waste of resources and isn’t in anyone’s best interest. To weed out these individuals, ask your leads questions about their budget and authority within the company. If their budget isn’t in alignment with your pricing, or if they don’t have the authority to make a purchasing decision, part ways in a friendly manner and move on to interacting with qualified leads.

Related topic: Tips For Increasing Lead Quality From Online Sources

Step Five: Close your qualified leads. If you’ve moved through the first four steps of this process properly, closing your qualified leads should be relatively easy. As long as your lead has the appropriate budget and authority, and your product or service genuinely solves one of their challenges, they should be just about ready to make a purchasing decision. And, because you’ve created a relationship built on transparency and trust, and you’re only trying to close leads who are qualified, this portion of the conversation should feel effortless, as though it’s a natural progression through the interaction.

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Photo credit: Kevin Dooley, Some rights reserved, Image source - https://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/