Sales Tips & Techniques Blog

Consultative Sales – Understanding the customer’s business

For consultative sales customers, value is not inherent in the product; rather, it lies chiefly in how the product is used. In this case, a sales force can create a great deal of new value. Putting a premium on advice and help, these customers expect it to enlarge their understanding of their needs and options. This kind of consultative selling, which calls for a sales force that gets close to customers and has an intimate grasp of their business needs, involves an investment of time and effort by seller and customer alike.

In consultative sales, the ability to listen and build up an understanding of the customer’s business is a more important selling skill than persuasion; empathy takes precedence over product knowledge. A sales force of this kind creates value in three primary ways: it can help customers understand their problems and opportunities in a new or different way; it can provide better solutions than customers would have discovered themselves; and it can act as their advocate inside its own company to ensure that resources are allocated to them in a timely way and that solutions meet their particular needs.

Because these are demanding tasks, good consultative sales people are hard to find. Organisations seeking to improve their consultative selling abilities can easily fall hostage to highly paid star performers. For this reason, effective consultative sales efforts increasingly use diagnostic tools, sales processes and information systems that allow ordinary mortals to perform the increasingly sophisticated consultative selling role.

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