Consultative selling is one of the most effective sales strategies in recent times. It focuses on creating value for your potential customers, gaining their trust, and exploring their needs before selling any product or service. Companies that adopt this sales approach prioritize customer satisfaction over selling their products or services. In this article, you will learn some of the ways to get more deals with consultative selling.
It’s crucial to develop your consultative selling skills as a salesperson. It helps you to understand your customers’ needs and position more compelling solutions.
If you want to get more deals with consultative selling, here are 7 techniques to help you achieve it;
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#1. Balance Questions With Insights
Balancing questions with insights is one of the ways to get more deals with consultative selling. Ordinarily, the easiest way to close a deal is to understand your customers’ needs by asking them questions.
But most times, sellers often position solutions that aren’t fit for customers. And that is because they are unwilling to ask questions.
Of course, you need to ask questions to have a perfect understanding of your customers’ needs. Again, the process takes time, and your prospect could feel interrogated when you ask too many questions.
However, the smart way to go about this is to give your prospects instances when your product helped businesses similar to theirs.
Giving your prospects insights about your product or services makes them more interested in whatever you are offering. It allows you to ask more questions regarding your customer needs and offer them a differentiated and compelling solution.
#2. Carry Out a Thorough Research On Your Prospects Before Engaging Them
It can be very tempting to engage a prospect without researching them. But it’s a terrible mistake you must avoid. In fact, researching your prospects before engaging them is one of the ways to get more deals with consultative selling.
When you do your research before engaging a new prospect, you will leave an excellent first impression about your team. It shows that you are competent, caring, and more concerned about establishing a long-term relationship than a quick sale.
Knowing a few things about your prospects before a sales meeting helps you have a valuable conversation with the prospects.
Of course, you will ask relevant questions and make every moment you spend with the potential customer worth it.
It can be very disappointing when you ask your prospects very basic questions during a sales call. It could give the customer a terrible impression of you and your team.
So, never engage any prospect without researching them. Know more about their companies, their performance, what they are doing wrong, and how it’s affecting their growth.
#3. Engage in Pre-call Planning
Engaging in pre-call planning is one of the most effective ways to get more deals with consultative selling.
At this stage, you use the information from your prospect research to plan your meeting with them. Pre-call planning is a crucial step in closing any deal. So, pay serious attention to it.
When planning your sales meeting, the first thing you should do is to determine the prospect’s stage in their buying journey. You also have to identify any issues that could discourage them from making the final buying decision.
During your pre-call planning, you need to establish the objective of the sales meeting and the strategies to help you achieve them.
Of course, you should draw out a list of consultative sales questions to help you uncover the prospects’ needs and wants.
Ensure that every question you ask your prospect is open-ended. This will help build trust between you and them and make the prospects uncover their needs without feeling interrogated.
#4. Ask Intriguing Follow Up Questions
Generally, it’s essential to have a list of questions during the pre-call planning. But you have to be strategic about how you ask them. Otherwise, your prospects will feel that you are interrogating them.
When a prospect feels interrogated, you won’t be able to build trust and establish a relationship.
So, when you ask a question, listen keenly to the prospects’ response, and ask a follow-up question based on the potential client’s response. It will help you to dig deeper and uncover their peculiar needs.
In consultative selling, you need to adopt a fluid-like conversational style to uncover your prospects’ pain points. But it starts with knowing how and where you can help them.
Asking intriguing follow-up questions is essential to identify the challenges your audience is really facing. And that is why it’s one of the ways to get more deals with consultative selling.
The authentic and unscripted nature of consultative selling makes it easier for prospects to tell you their needs. And that is because you appear to be more interested in offering solutions to their problems than selling your products or services.
#5. Listen to Your Prospects Actively
One of the best ways to get more deals with consultative selling is to listen to your prospects actively.
Don’t be in a hurry to talk whenever your prospect is still talking. There’s no way you can feel whatever your potential customer is going through if you don’t listen.
In consultative selling, your focus is to solve your prospect’s problem. Of course, you want the prospect to buy whatever you are selling.
But the priority is to solve the customers’ problem, and it starts with listening carefully whenever the prospects talk. It will help you to understand whatever they are going through better.
To be a good listener during a consultative selling process, you have to slow down, talk less, and allow your prospects to express themselves.
These are some of the ways to get more deals with consultative selling. With these strategies, you tend to close more sales and attract more loyal customers to your brand.
