Consultative Selling – Analysing the Past and Building the Future

What is Consultative Selling?

‘Consultative selling’, a term coined back in 1970s by Mack Hanan, has become synonymous to 'Selling' in the age we are living in. It is the way of selling that focuses on creating value for the customer by exploring their needs before offering a solution. The salesperson does not go on reciting the hard-pressing, aggressive sales pitch, but rather acts as a consultant who tries to understand customer's pain points and needs. He or she then use that information to research the best possible product (or service) to meet the customer’s need.

While this consultative approach of selling, which includes research and preparation, does sound time consuming process, technology has worked as a savior. It has brought in a plethora of enablers which have carved in this new version of consultative selling, a model which is constantly evolving, even as we speak!

The constants and the variables

There are few elements in any sales process which remain unchanged and as important since the very beginning: the human touch or capability required to do rational analysis of certain things, human’s ability to build relationships, the research orientation of human mind (which is needed even to act upon system given insights), domain expertise (without that, even the smartest of the systems can misguide you), etc. However, there are still a lot of elements in Consultative selling that have been affected by technology for good.

A retrospective view to understand the degree of change

In order to understand which elements have been affected by technology and to what extent, we have to understand the phases within selling. Selling can be divided in two phases: the discovery phase and the sales process.

The discovery or initiation phase of selling included tasks such as cold calling, account mapping, account profiling, research, analysis of purchase patterns in terms of both, probability and propensity of purchase. Even though the discovery phase housed some of the most decisive action points, it used to be time consuming and tedious, taking up to 60% of the total selling time. Manual expertise, research bent, relationship-building quotient, mobilization capability, etc were some of the extremely important requirements for fulfilling the activities of this stage.

The sales process or closure phase activities included zeroing down on the contact person, establishing and nurturing a relationship of trust and value, understanding the prospective customer’s precise needs and preparing a proof of concept based on that. After that, the next step used to be pitching, and price negotiation followed by closure. All the steps in the sales process phase required one-on-one interaction. The entire process which was just explained, had extreme dependency on a lot of people.

The discovery process prepared the customer for buying only up to 20% while the rest of 80% prepping used to be done in the sales process or closure phase.

Now, let’s take a look at how advancements in technology have affected these phases and activities within them.

With the aid of technology, the activities in the discovery phase now take a lot less time than they used to. While earlier models of selling included information collection via manual interaction, today almost 70% information is collected without talking to anyone. Thanks to technology, organizations today are not just consuming data but are also leveraging it. Businesses are also using digital marketing via different channels such as Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and more as an effective tool to add value to their sales process. Account-based marketing has further spear-focused the outreach and cut down on the time significantly.

With a tech savvy sales professional managing the process, the discovery phase which used to take 60% of the entire selling time, now takes only 20% of the effort and preps customer up to almost 40%-50% (as compared to 20% of earlier times). Moreover, the time and resource consuming one-on-ones are getting replaced with collective outreach such as targeted webinars, for example, CEO or CIO webinars.

Artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented reality, etc. are some of the emerging technologies that have helped in optimizing the sales process. Additionally, because of the right time, right moment and right need capture, the pitching has become so micro-targeted that the price negotiation now consumes minimal time, resulting into quick closures.

In a nutshell

While the phases in selling remain the same, the effort division between them as well as, the sales profile and capability of the people have changed over the course of time. People are not data coordinators any more, but they have become empowered sales consultant. With tech platforms’ help, they can now focus more on their USP, i.e. human relationship bonding and nurturing, instead of spending time in firsthand relationship curation without any researched backdrop

This era of revamped consultative selling has made the sales process shorter, effective and much more yielding. Looking at the rate of revamp, the consultative selling may undergo further change – making the processes more seamless, transparent and effective.

Snehashish Bhattacharjee
Global CEO & Co-Founder, Denave