Consultative Selling Training

Consultative selling, also called relationship selling, takes place when there is a long-term or ongoing relationship between the customer and the seller, and the salesperson takes on the task of truly understanding the customers’ needs and providing solutions to meet those needs. In this type of selling situation, a salesperson changes selling behaviour during a customer call to improve the exchange or outcome.

When you are engaged in consultative selling, you build a relationship and tailor solutions according to your customers’ needs. When you are engaged in transactional selling, you are focused on a single sale or transaction.
Consultative selling doesn’t start and stop at specific times during the relationship. In fact, it defines the relationship before the sale, during the sale, and after the sale. “Consultative selling is less about technique and more about trust.” Trust is what gives a relationship value. It is the cornerstone of selling. Trust creates value.
In consultative selling, the sale itself is no longer a transfer of a product or service in exchange for a price. It becomes a value exchange. In exchange for having their profits improved, customers trade off some of the improvement as payment (pain) to the supplier. 

A consultative seller’s price is a function of the contribution made to improve the customer’s performance or profits. The only way the seller can maximise price is to maximise the value of the customers’ goals that are improved. That requires the seller to stop selling products because there is no longer any way to make “sales” by selling the value of the seller’s own products or services. A sale can only be made by helping customers make their own business more valuable, efficient or productive. Consultative selling is selling a dollar advantage, not a product or process advantage. 

Consultative selling occurs when you develop a one-to-one relationship with your customer and truly understand his needs, wants, and resources; it means putting the customer first. Consultative selling helps you develop short-term and long-term solutions for your customer. Transactional selling focuses on a single transaction with no input from or relationship with the customer. 

The benefit of consultative selling lies in how the strategy is executed. Instead of an aimless, ‘how are you?’ relationship-focused strategy, it sets out to learn about the client, understand and find solutions from the get-go. In some instances, it can close a sale in a single meeting, but it’s on complex sales (typically of the big B2B kind) that consultative selling really comes into its own in terms of return on time.

Consultative selling doesn’t push old high-pressure sales strategies onto the buyer. Instead, this strategy makes the buyers feel like they are in control of the process. Since consultative selling works to enhance client profits, sales reps need to fully understand a business and the challenges it faces. To do that, a salesperson establishes themself as a trusted advisor and proceeds to collaborate and consult with the client. The client feels like they’re being informed and that they’re making a buying decision as opposed to being sold to.