Common Sense in Selling B2B™

When consultative selling, a sales professional should act more like a consultant than a conventional salesperson.  Rather than pitching the features, advantages and benefits, of a product or service, a consultative sales person should make recommendations based on the buyer’s most pressing pains and desires.

By acting like a consultant rather than your stereotypical salesperson, consultative selling enables sales professionals to create long-term relationships with customers which are based on trust.  This adds significant value to each and every sale, making customers all the more likely to buy from you instead of a competitor.

Here are 4 quick sales tips which will get you on the right path to mastering consultative selling:

Tip 1: Be a Problem-Solver:

Consultative selling requires salespeople to approach selling in the same way that they would to solving a problem.  They need to treat any customer pain, need or desire as a problem that is there to be solved.

Here a commanding knowledge of your own company’s capabilities is necessary to align the customer’s problems with the right product or service.  However, it is important for salespeople to open discussions around the customer’s pressures, pains and desires before aligning them with the product/service’s features, advantages and benefits.  To become a problem-solver, salespeople need to qualify with their customers that the problem exists and can be solved before pitching their solutions.

Tip 2: Become a Trusted Advisor:

When consultative selling, moving the discussion from the customer’s problems to their desires will transform the salesperson’s relationship with customers.  By applying a consultative selling technique, the salesperson will be perceived as a trusted advisor by the customer.  By acting like a problem-solving consultant, consultative selling can transform the buyer/seller relationship into a novice/trusted advisor relationship.

Tip 3: Probe with Open Questions:

To truly master consultative selling, salespeople need to be great at asking the right questions about their customer’s pressures, problems and desires for improvement.  By asking open-ended questions (i.e. who, what, where, why, when…), salespeople can probe their customer’s deepest motives, feelings and attitudes towards the solution.  By probing the customer’s pressures, the implications of failing to respond to these pressures (the potential pain), and the customer’s desire for improvement, the customer’s needs can be shaped and urgency can be created.

Consultative selling through asking open-ended questions enhances the salesperson’s understanding of the buyer’s situation. This makes them better equipped to qualify sales opportunities and align the buyer’s pains and desires with the solutions they sell, thus giving the customer confidence in the salesperson’s recommendations.

Tip 4: Give the Customer Added Value:

As part of the final step to mastering consultative selling, salespeople must learn to create added value for their customers.  Here salespeople need to enhance the value that their solution will give the customer in order to differentiate their offer from that of the competition.  Added value comprises the tangible advantages and benefits that your company offers over and above the product or service that it is proposing.  This may be a ‘right-first-time’ delivery guarantee that you know is better than that of the competition, or a managed implementation service that you can deliver across the region.

Each ‘value-added offer’ must be specific to the selling organization’s capabilities and will increase the value of the overall solution to the client so long as it has been aligned directly to their most pressing need.  When aligned directly to this need, added value will not only enable you to differentiate your offer from competitors, but will actually allow you to charge a premium.  You will be able to not only increase your chances of winning deals but you will also find it much easier to up-sell or cross-sell during the meeting.

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Consultative selling enables salespeople to gain a clearer understanding of the customer’s world.  By achieving a clearer understanding of the customer’s most pressing needs and desires, salespeople are able to play the role of a consultant who aligns their solutions with their customer’s problems.  By implementing an effective consultative selling methodology, you will be able to determine you customer’s most pressing pains and desires and respond accordingly.

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This article was originally posted in the Sales & Business Development Blog by Steve Eungbut on November 11, 2011

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