MyNextClient

Very few of us in the sales profession have the luxury of creating a new product for every customer need, as in the case of the French fries in the first article.  But broken into its elements, might we gain insight into consultative selling from this simplistic illustration?  The answer may surprise you as counter-intuitive. It requires detachment, dispassion, and self-removal.

In the first element, detachment, we resist the notion that our product is necessarily best suited for the customer requirement.  Otherwise we are making presuppositions about customer needs and will not be open to listening for clues that would help uncover those needs. Instead, we ought to regard our product or service as only one in a universe of solutions available to the customer; then our task becomes discovering if and how our product might satisfy a customer problem not presume it will by virtue of our justifiable belief in its merits. This subtle distinction underscores needs-discovery as the primary enabler of consultative selling.

In order to explore how our product may solve a customer problem, we admit to the second element, dispassion or objectivity.  We should be more concerned about the problem and its ramifications on the customer’s business than about our product.  In other words, we have to assume the role of the customer-advisor or customer-advocate.  We deny our self-image as a sales rep and assume one of a problem solver.  This is tough to do when quotas are challenging, our livelihood depends on increasing commissions, and we are naturally enthusiastic about our product.  Therefore, we must convince ourselves against our instincts that earning a trusted advisor role will, over time, enhance customer loyalty, reduce competitor influence, improve the propensity of the customer to buy, and improve the margins of our proposals.

The third element, self-removal, is viewing the process from the perspective of a third person.  William Ury calls this “going to the balcony”.  A thorough discovery and co-developed definition of the customer problem allows us to propose potential applications of our product within a set of potential solutions.  This requires letting go of the feature-benefit mode of selling and focusing instead on problem-resolution, which forces us to think like the customer and like a shareholder in the customer’s organization.  We then accept the possibility that our product may resolve the problem, may be a component of the solution, or may not be a good fit.  In all three cases, a candid exposure of solution sets with the customer from their vantage point, earns us trust and contributes to the relationship.

Now we can venture a definition of consultative selling: a process by which the sales rep and the customer 1) agree that their relationship is paramount and must survive any single transaction, 2) focus first on discovering and defining a need or problem independent of the product or service, and 3) create a set of solutions to resolve the problem which may incorporate the product or service.

In summary, in the consultative sales process we start with detachment, dispassion, and self-removal, and work toward attaining a trusting relationship, candid discussions of needs, and co-development of a solution set. It is not with every customer that such a process will succeed as many will force us into the transactional or tactical sale.  I propose, however, that those customers with whom we can achieve such a relationship constitute our most loyal and most profitable accounts.