Consultative Selling Requires Sales Professionals to Focus Every Ounce of Attention on the Needs and Wants Their Customers

Today, in order to advise a prospect appropriately about the implementation or use of your products or services, you must provide objective information about how to make a buying decision for the product or service. And it must appropriately meet the prospect's needs and wants.

Only after identifying the prospect's needs and wants can a consultative salesperson discuss the product or service and its application to the client.

How to Implement Change

Training a traditionally-minded sales team how to be consultative is no easy task. Part of the problem rests squarely on the shoulders of the sales management team. According to a survey released in Sales and Marketing Management Magazine and conducted by Equation Research, sixty-five percent of sales managers say they focus on building volume rather than finding more profitable customers. Sixty-three percent say they neglected personal skills development. Both of those statistics reveal startling tendencies toward traditional sales techniques rather than consultative sales strategies.

In order to see maximum return on your bottom line, adequate sales training, evaluation and compensation must also accompany structural changes to your sales force. In other words, a unilateral decision to transition from traditional to consultative selling will fail.

Remember, training is only one component of a successful transition. The most positive effect will come when training is coupled with follow-up and reinforcement components that extend beyond the classroom and into the field. Too often, sales-driven organizations believe that an annual sales conference and (supposedly) weekly sales meetings will be sufficient to upgrade the knowledge and skills of salespeople. While those are important pieces they do not, by themselves, complete the puzzle.

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