Consultative selling is an ideology that focuses on creating an authentic relationship with your prospects, and it involves various techniques like asking relevant questions, paying attention to their needs, expectations & pain points, and lastly, personalizing the products or services that you offer to them!
If you are a salesperson, practising conservative selling will help you in developing a global and subtle understanding of the requirements a buyer has at that point in time and try hard to meet those requirements with a tailor-made solution.
We know you must be thinking that why consultative selling is important over any other type of selling? Well, we do have an answer for that! The reason is that good relationships drive better sales. Developing enduring and real relationships with your customers and prospects is considered the greatest strategy for any company to outlive in this competitive world!
So, here we are with an in-depth blog post to help you master consultative selling and see you excel in your sales career! Let's start…
What Is Consultative Selling?
Consultative selling is a kind of sales approach which includes building authentic relationships with your customers and enabling them to convey their needs and expectations without any hesitation. Salespersons who actively engage themselves in consultation selling with their customers get to know more about their choices, needs, backgrounds, etc., to provide better solutions which in turn helps in building brand authority.
Salespeople who prefer to ask questions and give valuable advice to their clients based on their unique needs utilize the strategy of consultative selling. A consultative salesperson becomes an advisor to the customer, assisting them to understand the various ways that can solve their unique difficulties and offering customised solutions to them to make a sale.
Advantages Of Consultative Selling
Here are a few benefits of consultative selling that you must know:
- Deep Understanding Of Your Prospect's Needs — Consultative selling is a sales process where customers determine their needs, pain points & expectations, and the unique problems that drive them to find a suitable solution.
- Strong Relationships — Knowing about the preferences, needs and backgrounds of your prospects helps you build trust between your prospect and your company.
- High Authenticity — Consultative selling allows you to focus on curating a solution for your customer instead of just focusing on making a sale by selling a product. And this can help you to seem like a more authentic and trustworthy person to your prospect.
- Higher Customer Satisfaction — When consumers feel that their necessities are genuinely understood and fulfilled, their satisfaction levels increase! This can lead to repeat business, referrals, and positive word-of-mouth, enriching the overall reputation of the salesperson and the company too.
- Increased Sales Success — The approach of consultative selling is geared towards delivering solutions that genuinely solve the problems of the customer. This alignment usually leads to higher success rates in closing deals.
What Is The Difference Between Consultative Solution And Solution Selling?
Both the concepts, consultative selling and solution selling are quite equivalent and they are the sales approaches that tend to concentrate on the needs and pain points of the prospect. These two approaches also encompass strolling prospects via personalised solutions that can fulfil their requirements. But you know what? There is a significant dissimilarity that makes these two approaches different from each other!
Consultative selling solely focuses on providing personalised solutions to the prospects they need to solve their problem. Salespersons who utilize the consultative selling approach are usually considered to be more trustworthy. However, it might not lead you to make direct sales, this is a sales technique that involves a relationship-building strategy which can result in future sales.
On the other hand, the solution-selling approach tends to find solutions for their potential client, but they will focus more on providing offerings from their own firm to meet the requirements of their prospects. This way, the solution-selling approach is considered to be more debatable in nature.
Principles Of Consultative Selling
Here's a step-by-step process that has to be followed when you are using the consultative selling strategy:
a) Determine Your Ideal Prospects
In the initial stage of the consultative selling procedure, you need to find out the ideal prospects and based on that you can curate a targeting method to reach out to them. For this, you can utilize emailers, social media platforms, cold calling or any professional networking events.
b) Build A Trustworthy Connection
Building a good relationship with prospects plays an important role in the consultative selling process. Construct an effective connection with your potential customer by associating with their industry values, showing respect and illustrating a fair interest in their requirements.
c) Active Listening
You need to have super listening skills because you cannot build a strong relationship or cannot consult your prospects if you are not aware of the subject matter! So, when you deal with a prospect, pay attention to listening to them carefully. This will help you to have a better understanding of the needs of your prospect and also display that you care which creates trust.
d) Qualify Prospects
Now it's time to qualify a prospect as this can help you save your precious time for further development of your consultative selling method. You just need to be quick in determining that you are dealing with a person that has the power of decision-making and then, hop on to discuss the budget to find if it is appropriate for the solution you will be providing! This way it will help to examine the quality of your prospect.
e) Ask Questions
Next, knowing that the prospect is of high quality and pretty serious about the solution, start popping up your questions in order to identify the needs, expectations and pain points of the customer. Also, let the client know that if their answer is negative, it's completely okay because this will help you in filtering your approach according to their difficulty and create a personalised solution.
f) Educate The Customer About The Solution
Lastly, educate about the solution that you have to offer to your customer, and try to frame it as the best solution to their problem. Give them more information about why it is suitable for their requirements and make them understand the value it holds.
Best Practices To Win Leads Using Consultative Selling Strategy
1. Have Clear Knowledge About Your Products Or Services
You must have good knowledge about the products or services you are offering. This enables sales reps to build faith and reliability with clients, determine the ideal solution for their needs, give the right answers with confidence and specify the value. In order to get equipped with product/service knowledge, you should focus on conducting your own research, have fruitful conversations with individuals working in other departments, study the company brochures & marketing materials, talk with clients, etc.
2. Ask Sufficient Questions
Ask questions or investigate to know about the problems your prospect is dealing with! Prospects might not organically tell you about all their problems. That's why you have to dig deep to understand what is the difficulty they are confronting. And customers tend to make a purchase to solve their problem, so it is necessary to identify the pain points and move ahead.
3. Never Underestimate Your Prospect's Knowledge
One mistake that sales reps often make is to underestimate the knowledge of their customers and try to push them further to make a deal. But always remember that a customer is always prepared with their own research and it's quite easier to fetch information in the world of the internet. This one mistake can damage your capability to build trust, omit essential information and prevent you from offering personalised solutions. Therefore, as a sales rep, you should show some respect to your prospects and appreciate their knowledge.
4. Don’t Make Assumptions
Assumptions can be made easily, but as a sales rep, you should avoid doing this task! It's not important for consultative selling because assumptions can result in incorrect data about the needs, objectives and pain points of your customer. Assemble precise information about the situation of the prospect and then, create a customised solution that fulfills their needs.
5. Ascertain Value
When employing the consultative selling method, you would want to determine value by concentrating on the advantages. Remember that you are not here to see a product/service, you are here to give a suitable solution to their problem! But today, every other sales rep is selling good solutions, so how come yours is better compared to others?
So, offer value-based solutions! Demonstrate value to your prospects. You need to tell them that you are offering something that is more than just a solution! Never perceive your customers as transactional consumers, but take them as partners who are going to be there in the long-term selling process.
Enhance Consultative Selling With Edge CRM Today!
A strong CRM system is beneficial for maximizing efficiency as well as the effectiveness of conservative selling. Basically, for consultative selling to be effective, it needs a good understanding of the client's industry and their needs. Therefore, sales training programs must point up the consultative selling approach, providing sales reps with essential skills to be able to succeed. By incorporating CRM training into sales training, your team will be able to learn how to pull off CRM features and information when it comes to decision-making at the time of the sales process.
A robust CRM system will assist you in offering constructive feedback & guidance to your sales representatives. Utilizing the CRM data & analytics, you will be able to recognize new opportunities, track performance and provide targeted training sessions to improve the consultative selling abilities of your team.
A CRM (customer relationship management) system can streamline as well as automate different sales procedures, helping you to save time and enhance productivity. There are excellent automated features such as email templates, task scheduling, lead scoring, follow-up reminders and many more that allow sales representatives to concentrate on cultivating strong customer relationships and providing better solutions.
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In Conclusion
To master the art of consultative selling, you must focus on working hard to gain a deeper understanding of the unique requirements and objectives of your customers. This is achieved by conducting in-depth research, having good listening skills instead of just concentrating on hard selling and striving to build a genuine, personalised connection with the buyers. There are some effective tools that can be utilised to perform thorough research and employ automation wherever it is possible, this way it can be extremely useful for you in consultative selling.
But, remember that the biggest challenge that will come your way is trying to keep the seller-buyer relationship genuine in all terms. You need to continue reminding yourself that the major goal is to make your customer happy & satisfied, and not just increase the number of sales. Give a tailor-made solution to your prospect and guide them through the process. Focus on the pain points and emotions of your lead and you will see the decision will be in your favor soon.
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