How To Master the Art Of Consultative Selling Process and Find Spectacular Results

If there was ever a soft side to selling – it is consultative selling.
And so all sales reps need to have this weapon in their arsenal. 
This is because in modern times salespeople will want to do more than just understand their customer’s challenges and needs in order to offer personalized solutions. 
Hence consultative selling process today is all about getting the prospective customers to see their needs in a different light, and thereafter showing them new ideas and finally driving changes that can improve the work or lives of the customers. 
In other words, expert consultative sellers are less of a sales rep and more allies in bringing realization and foster improvement, which constitutes on developing a customer-focused solution that needs more than asking questions to unveil the prospective customer’s goals or challenges. 
Hence, the approach to consultative selling goes beyond just questioning to gather information, and rather it is about asking questions as a means of sharing and exploiting information. 

Benefits Of Consultative Selling

• Salespeople close more deals by better qualifying prospects to find purchasers who are in the true requirement of their solution(s).
• Buyers do not have to waste their precious time attending to endless sales pitches for unnecessary solutions that are not a good fit – and thereby end up more satisfied with their decisions to buy. 

However, it must be remembered over here salespersons do not need to completely change their selling approaches overnight. Rather consultative selling is more a matter of evolving from traditional selling to a more radical one. 
Now while processes are good. Best practices are even better. 
Hence here are five best practices as to how you can master consultative selling, which we as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM tools have found from experts, practitioners, and researchers in this stream. 

1. Be a consultant

Yes, while selling you are always a salesperson, but while doing consultative selling you must try to act more like a consultant.
Hence provide advice to the prospective buyers of your offerings after you have understood the customer’s goals and challenges. 
Do not offer a sales pitch. Rather now that you are in a position to offer valuable advice, share insights on where the industry is heading or how upcoming technological advancements might impact your prospect’s marketplace.
Once this is over, then provide ideas to your prospective customers on how they can get ahead of that or how your buyers can take advantage of different hitherto unknown opportunities. 
For this dig deeper into the prospect’s circumstances, study and interact with your prospective customers, understand their needs, goals, and challenges, and thereafter collaborate on some faction before giving advice that can drive them to do greater things. 

2. Raise a red flag

Veterans in consultative selling are reps who are not afraid to question their prospect’s objectives. They are the ones who complement buyers on what is going on and act as a critique on the buyer’s current thinking and processes which are outdated or ripe for necessary improvements. 
Now if you want to be a great consultative seller, you can always do this by simply doing a background check on your prospect or perform a cursory search on their operations. 
This is because, in sales, you always need to do a rigorous analysis of the organization that you want to sell in order to introduce critical analysis and thereafter measure the organization’s possible performance and outcomes.  

3. Build toward decision

The art of consultative selling is like building a structure brick-by-brick right from its foundation. 
Hence as a vendor of easy to use CRM tools, we would suggest for building relationships ask questions to create rapport with your prospective leads and thereafter step back to get feedbacks and store all those information and interactions inside your CRM database.  That implies, start with a volley of questions to comprehend the goals of your prospects, then take a step back to find feedbacks on what you think before you continue to lay the next successive brick over your last one.
The key over here is to ask smart questions- ask about things that can make your prospective leads think differently about their current situation so that they can become increasingly open to new ideas and perspectives. 
Ask questions that can float in the prospect’s minds, rather than making flat-out introductions to new ideas, which can be rejected in absence of proper and up-to-date knowledge of the buyers. 
For example, instead of saying “We have a solution that I think you might like…” as a sales rep, you will find prospects nowadays are more open to ideas unveiled in question like:
“Have you ever considered…?”
“What do you think about…?”
“How do you feel about…?”
This is because when sales reps ask questions, which can provide them with feedback and clarity on the prospect’s needs and goals, rather than plowing ahead with a sales pitch, it helps the buyer and the salesperson align their thinking process, which can result in building decisive momentums and make the prospects decide faster and close their deals.

4. Think like a physician

As you might have understood by now- questions are actually the lifeblood of the consultative selling process. 
This is because questions are what keeps the heart of the sale pumping, and alive.
Now for this, generic questions will not do like they used to in the traditional sales processes, rather salespeople nowadays need to rely on their experience and constant learning. 
Hence much like it is in a doctor-patient relationship, whereby it needs both expertise and experience to analyze the situation and thereafter identify the real issue for treating a patient, in consultative selling the salesperson also requires to find out what is contributing to the prospect’s challenges and goals.
Therefore the salesperson must utilize the wealth of their product knowledge to formulate and ask questions that can successfully bring the prospective customer’s attention to important issues and thereafter the sales reps need to relate their questions to the quintessential aspects of their offering(s) that would be able to provide a satisfactory and mutually accepted beneficial outcome. 

5. Take the purchasers to the ‘aha’ zone

Finally while doing consultative selling, sales reps need to move their prospective leads into a special “aha” zone, whereby the buyers can see things in a new light, find answers to questions they have always been thinking and thereby become open to new and unique ideas.
Now it must be remembered at all times that this “aha” zone is a very small place, and so buyers can very quickly move beyond it and land into a paralysis zone, whereby they can also get themselves overwhelmed with a plethora of new and unknown information and thereafter shut down from accepting different perspectives. 
Hence when buyers show interest in your expertise, show them scenarios that challenge their status quo, and advocate for alternatives by introducing new ideas to slightly disrupt their perspective. 
This is because reframing discussions around new ideas can always provide the prospects a new lens on how they see their pain points and issue, where after as a consultative seller you can easily direct the prospective buyers to a better solution and possibility.