Consultative Selling
Have you got the right type of sales people selling the right value offerings to the right level of buyers in the right way? Not sure? Well let’s take a look.
What is consultative selling?
Consultative selling is where the customer doesn’t know precisely what they want to buy but knows what they want to achieve. The sales person’s role is to work with that customer collaboratively (or ‘consultatively’) to create a solution to their problem. Inevitably, this type of selling requires building relationships, sometimes over a long timespan and so that ability to build and nurture customer relationships is a critical skill for the consultative sales person.
Customers who are looking for a solution to their problem are likely to be less price-sensitive than customers who know what they want to buy.
The flip side of consultative selling is transactional selling, where the customer knows precisely what they want to buy and therefore the sales person’s role is to communicate the value of the product or service. This is often a shorter sales cycle as it will be made up of a series of transactions and there is less need to build relationships.
Consultative sales people are quite different people from transactional sales people ie. they demonstrate different behaviours. If you want to know whether you have consultative or transactional sales people in your organisation, then take a look at our Consultative Transactional Quotient (CTQ)
Here’s an example of how we made a huge impact for one of our clients:
Saving >£250,000 in recruitment and getting better teamwork in selling
A management consultancy was struggling to achieve the kind of sales they needed and therefore were planning to hire a very expensive principal to focus on sales – to ‘plug the gap. We were able to work with the senior team and showed them how to work better together to focus on consultative selling without the need to hire an expensive ’specialist’.
This was a short project including: a) individual behaviours and team behaviours, b) sales and pipeline planning, c) consultative selling
The great news is that they are now 140% above their original sales target and are actively enjoying selling!
To learn more about how to sell consultatively – please watch the recording of our Consultative Selling Webinar.