If you look back over the last hundred years or so, there have been three or four major shifts in how major organizations sell.  Each period was dominated by a specific sales model and best practices for implementing that model.

Clearly the “king of the hill” for the last thirty to forty years has been Consultative Selling.  Consultative Selling emphasizes the importance of moving from a product-centric to a customer-centric sale.  A focus is placed on doing a superior job in building relationships and uncovering and developing customer needs. The art and science of asking questions is a pivotal skill set.

Now for sure, each business organization and each training company has their own particular twist on Consultative Selling – for example: different questioning frameworks. But the underlying assumptions and fundamental skills are the same.

It is important to highlight, as compared to the product-centric approach, Consultative Selling has proven to be a dramatic improvement – it has worked and worked well.

With that said, if one looks very carefully, it’s possible to discern the emergence of a new model for selling in B2B markets. Like most paradigm shifts the change is not happening everywhere, all at once – over night. Instead, the change is emerging in phases with some markets and companies spearheading the way.

The important point is to be aware a change is happening and to start exploring the importance of the shift for your organization. With this in mind, let’s take an initial look at the new sales model and explore why the change is occurring.

This new sales model maintains a customer-centric approach, but the assumptions about the expectations of the customer are different.  Let’s examine that difference.

Some customers are changing from wanting consultative sales people to wanting expert sales people. These customers are becoming increasingly impatient with sales people who consistently start calls with a “discover your pain” discussion. They expect the sales person to have a good handle on their needs and interests before the call.  So time in the call can be spent on diagnosing and integrating the problems and on generating alternative innovative solutions which will have a positive impact on the customer’s business.

In order to conduct this type of call, the sales person must know beforehand the economic, political, market, and regulatory trends driving the customer’s business. With this knowledge in hand, they can bring a point of view to the discussion, ask second and third-level questions and work with the customer to formulate a business solution, as opposed to, starting with a basic discovery conversation. Today’s problems are complex and time matters. So customers cannot afford to start at square one to help every sales person understand their business issues.

Anytime there is a paradigm shift, it’s interesting to ask the question: Why now? Usually there are a number of voices speaking out but seldom is there total consensus. But what is common is some trend which defines the change and a match that ignites the change.

In this case it could be speculated the underlying driver is the fact customers in a wide variety of markets are facing the necessity to up their game. Market economics are demanding, competition is tough and getter tougher and a lot of the old answers have been played out.

So business-as-usual is not going to carry the day and changes which are simply incremental may help you to survive but not to prosper. Customers need new ideas they can use to innovate their business and they are expecting their suppliers to help. This business dynamic has been occurring for some time and some companies have gone through transformational changes in order to adjust.

But, what was the match that lit the fire for change in the sales function? Again consensus is unlikely to be found … but here’s something to consider.

The match which started the movement toward Consultative Selling – the key event which brought Consultative Selling to emerge – was the research done by Neil Rackham’s Huthwaite Research Group.  This was subsequently turned into the all-time best seller – SPIN Selling. The research provided the credibility and the book provided the how-to.

As was the case forty years ago, a new piece of research has been conducted and a new book has been published to provide the foundation for change. In this case, the research was done by the Sales Executive Council and the book was authored by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson. The book is entitled The Challenger Sale.

It’s always hard to tell whether a new set of ideas are a vanguard for an important change or simply a creative fad for promoting discussions. In this case, you may not want to bet against the former.

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 This article was originally posted by Richard Ruff on June 20, 2012 to the Sales Training Blog

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