What is consultative selling?

Consultative selling is a way of selling that focuses on getting to know your customers and meeting their needs through open communication and relationships. Part of this process is spending a lot of time with the customer to understand their problems and then giving them solutions that are precisely what they need. In contrast to traditional sales methods, a consultative sales technique focuses on building long-term relationships with customers rather than making quick sales.

Synonyms

• Solution selling
• Value-based selling
• Customer-centric selling

How to Do Consultative Selling

These sales ideas are fundamental to this method:

Getting to Know the Customer

The first rule of strategic selling is understanding what the customer does for a living. This means discovering their business, its place in the market, its rivals, and its unique problems. For salespeople to offer the best answers, they need to know the customer’s short- and long-term goals. This understanding isn’t something that can be done just once; it needs to be worked on all the time as the customer’s business and the market change.

Giving Customized Answers

As soon as you fully comprehend the customer’s company, the principle of strategic selling comes into play: providing customized answers. This means making a solution that meets the customer’s specific wants and goals, not just selling a product or service. To earn a customer’s trust and put their success first, a salesperson should show them how their product or service can help them solve problems, run their business better, or reach their goals. This customized, value-based sales method shows the customer how valuable the product or service is.

Putting together relationships that last

Making a quick sale isn’t the point of consultative selling. Instead, the goal is building and keeping strong, long-term customer ties. This concept says to keep in touch with customers regularly, help them, and always look for ways to add value. It’s about being a reliable advisor to the customer for help and information. Customers will be loyal, buy from you again, and tell their friends about you if you build long-term relationships with them.

Putting customer satisfaction first

The last concept of consultative selling is putting the customer’s needs before making a quick sale. This means putting the customer’s wants first and ensuring they are happy with the solution. It means checking in with them after the sale to ensure the answer meets their needs and takes care of any problems. When you put customer happiness first, you get happy customers, good word-of-mouth, and a good name for your business.

Advantages of Using a Consultative Selling Method

A consultative selling method can be suitable for businesses in several ways. Some of these are:

Better relationships with customers

One of the best things about consultative selling is that it helps you build better customer ties. Companies that take the time to learn about their customers’ specific needs and offer custom solutions show that they care about their success. Trust and respect are essential for building solid and meaningful relationships, and this method helps build them. These connections can become partnerships over time, with the business becoming the customer’s trusted guide.

Better customer loyalty

Consultative selling can help you keep customers longer and make them more loyal. People are more likely to stay loyal to a business if they feel like they are being heard and valued. Loyal customers often come back and tell their friends about the business, which is good for its growth and success. Also, loyal customers are less likely to switch to a competitor, which gives the business a more stable customer base.

Extra Sales

Last but not least, a consultative method may bring in more sales. Businesses can make each sale more valuable by focusing on customers’ wants and giving them answers that meet those needs. Customers are more likely to buy a solution to fit their needs than a product or service made for everyone. This method can also lead to chances for upselling and cross-selling, which can bring in more money from sales.

How to Sell Through Consultation

The consultative sales process is a set of steps that help salespeople understand what the customer wants and give them answers that fit those needs. Several essential steps make up this process:

Look into it

Research is the first thing a consultative seller needs to do. To do this, you need to know much about the customer’s business, like their industry, market, competitors, and any problems they face. For example, a salesperson at a cybersecurity company might look into the industry of a possible client to learn about common cybersecurity threats in that field and to find out if the client’s business has had any recent security breaches. With this information, they can better understand the customer’s wants and give them solutions that meet those goals.

Find Out

During the discovery process, you will talk to the customer directly. Salespeople meet with the customer now to discuss their needs, goals, and problems in more depth. For example, a salesperson from a software company might meet with a possible customer to find out what software they need, how much they can spend, and what results they want. This could mean asking deep questions to determine what the customer is having trouble with and what they want. A personalized solution is built on the information gathered during these sales talks.

Solution Development: The sales rep can move on to the solution development part once they know what the customer wants. In this case, you have to make a custom solution that meets the wants and goals of the customer. For instance, one at a digital marketing firm might look for a unique marketing plan for a client that targets their ideal customer, stays within their budget, and helps them reach their specific marketing goals.

Showing off

During the presentation step, the proposed solution is shown to a possible customer. There is a salesperson who talks to the customer about the product and how it can help them reach their goals. For example, a sales rep from a SaaS company might show a client a custom software solution and discuss how it meets the client’s needs. The rep might also show comments from other clients who have used similar solutions and liked them.

Last Call

Closing the deal is the last step in the conversational sales method. This means completing the deal’s specifics, like the price, terms, and conditions, and ensuring the customer is pleased with the outcome. For instance, a salesperson from a consulting company might close a deal with a client by ensuring that the work terms, timeline, and payment are all clear and agreed upon. Before leaving the store, the salesperson should follow up with the customer to make sure the answer they were given meets their needs. Also, any problems that might arise should be fixed immediately to keep customers happy.

Best Practices for Consultative Selling

The following sales training best practices should be thought about by companies that want to use a consultative selling approach:

Invest in Training: To be a great consultative seller, you must get training. Salespeople need to know how to understand what customers want, ask the right questions, listen well, and come up with custom answers. Sales training can be beneficial for sales reps who work from home. One example is a tech company that could give its sales reps training to help them learn more about the problems that businesses in different fields face and how its goods can help them. They might also hold classes on how to listen actively. Role-playing games, workshops, and ongoing teaching could be part of these programs to help people remember the skills they’ve learned.

Utilize tech tools

Consultative selling can be made a lot more successful with the help of sales technology. Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) software and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software are essential tools that can help with this method. A manufacturing business, for example, might use CRM software to keep track of its interactions with customers, keep an eye on their wants and needs, and plan its follow-up actions. The same company can use CPQ software to make quotes for customized products quickly and correctly, which improves the customer experience and makes the business more efficient.

Think about the long term.

The goal of consultative selling is to build long-term customer ties instead of just making quick sales. This means focusing on customer happiness and trust instead of just short-term profits. A software-as-a-service (SaaS) company might ensure their customers are happy by giving them ongoing help and checking in with them regularly after the sale. Focusing on the long term can help the business get return business, word-of-mouth, and a good name.

Technology to Make Consultative Selling Work Better

Sales tools are essential when making a consultative sales approach more efficient and successful. Here are some essential tools that can help with this method:

Software for CRM

You need Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software for consultative selling to work. In this way, salespeople can better control their relationships with customers. A real estate agency, for example, might use CRM software to keep track of its interactions with possible buyers, plan follow-ups, and keep an eye on how each deal is going. All customer information is kept in one place so the sales team can easily access it. This lets them give better customer service and build stronger ties.

You also need Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) software to do strategic selling. It makes it easier to make custom quotes, especially for services or goods that are hard to understand. For instance, a company that sells machines that can be customized might use CPQ software to quickly make accurate quotes based on the exact settings that the customer asks for. This makes things run more smoothly and gives customers a better experience by giving them quick, accurate answers to their questions.

The DealRoom

A digital salesroom, or DealRoom, can improve the consultative sales process by giving salespeople a dynamic and interactive platform to connect with prospects and customers more effectively and personally. There is a central location in a digital sales room for all the essential sales materials, like product brochures, case studies, movies, presentations, and more. This ensures that sales reps can quickly get the newest and most correct information, which lets them customize their conversations based on the wants and problems of each customer.

With a digital salesroom, sales reps can make customized presentations on the spot, picking out only the most relevant information for each client. This level of customization lets the salesperson be more targeted and shows that they understand the prospect’s specific problems and can offer custom answers.

A digital sales room lets the sales team work with others, like product professionals or technical experts, in real time. This means that sales workers can quickly find the right expert to answer specific questions or deal with customer objections during the sales conversation. This makes the conversations more productive.