Consultative Selling

Consultative selling

A big part of training salespeople these days is helping them to differentiate themselves from everyone else. This is accomplished by effectively applying a consultative sales process: the salesperson has a conversation with a decision maker that is unlike any conversation the competition has had. It uncovers the convincing reasons for spending money, changing vendors, buying a product or service and, as important, buying it from you. That creates urgency, an encouragement for a prospect to self-qualify, so that you don’t have to pull teeth getting a prospect qualified. The end result should be a prospect that is willing to spend more to do business with you, and a sales cycle that is not based on winning on price.

Example:

A salesman met a customer that had moved their business to a competitor because of price issues. It sounded like they were getting what they were paying for:

- Paying more for freight,

- Finding variations in the product,

- Stocking more inventory than necessary because of availability problems

So far so good. The salesman had done enough to at least uncover some issues and, while these aren’t persuasive reasons, additional questions would lead us to these. What he should have done:

He should have asked, “How important is it to have continued availability of quality, local inventory?” The customer would have said, “Extremely important”, the salesman would have said, “Tell me how that would affect your business”, and we would have gotten closer to the persuasive reasons.

What the salesman did instead:

He asked, “If you had access to local delivery, through a distributor, and the price was competitive, would you consider looking into this?”

The horror of the question was that the salesman introduced an unnecessary criterion: competitive pricing for doing business with him. What’s wrong with that? Two things:

- Even if you wanted to be the low priced seller, and they don’t, if you don’t have a competitive price, you don’t get the business!

- He didn’t need to offer competitive pricing, because he sold value! He identified the problem and offered a solution to a problem. That is the value someone will pay for and he undermined it by bringing the customer’s attention back to price!

The lesson:

The reality is that there are only four reasons why price becomes an issue:

- The salesman made it an issue (experience)

- The salesman accepted that it was an issue (non supportive beliefs)

- The salesman didn’t know how to prevent it from being an issue (tactics)

- The salesman was foolishly calling on purchasing instead of an actual decision maker who owned a problem or an opportunity (strategy).