You Should Read This
Anyone in sales today owes much of what they do to what’s known as consultative selling. Done well, consultative selling wins business by “out-understanding the competition,” so the chief currency in consultative selling is great questioning.
The reality, though, is most salespeople and organizations are only quasi-consultative, their interest in buyers circumscribed by whatever will serve the decision to buy. Consultative selling, while improving salespeople’s professionalism, limits their effectiveness to questioning, to identifying, and expanding on needs, and then to positioning their solutions against meeting these needs.
Consultative sales training led by the traditional sales training companies now appears dated. Notions of finding an internal coach, asking questions, and then positioning your solution based on the client’s answers, still look, well, so 1990s—which is when this approach became fashionable.
