The selling salesperson is dead. Long live the consulting salesperson! Episode 2

A recent study published by the American firm Forrester predicts the imminent demise of field sales representatives in the face of e-commerce. However, a different outcome is possible for B2B field sales representatives, provided they revise their positioning to adopt a consulting stance, particularly through the quality of their questioning and a more "customer-centric" approach.

What are the other components of the consultative salesperson's approach, and how can you adopt them? That's what we'll see in this second part.

Position yourself as an expert

While listening is key to creating the conditions for a trusting relationship, it is also important to demonstrate your added value.

In companies, formalizing a project is very often delicate and complex. Even if they are increasingly informed and autonomous, customers therefore expect their sales representatives to have in-depth expertise that will enable them to refine the outlines of their project.

Buyers want salespeople who can challenge them: analyze a situation, conduct a diagnosis, and model the data collected. This will allow them to formalize and synthesize the guiding ideas of their project, and thus help them to "sell" it internally.

 

The sales consultant should be seen as an expert whose opinion the client values. However, be careful not to confuse "opinion" with "solution proposal"… That would again be trying to sell something!

The expert salesperson must express and stand by their convictions on a given subject, and encourage their counterpart to react in turn. They must be able to deliver a point of view and develop it, not to convince but to provide factual insight into their client's concerns.

The value provided by the salesperson is also measured by an approach oriented towards "profitability."

 

All companies operate with a focus on return on investment. The consulting salesperson is there to help their client realize their idea, so they must provide indicators to measure the effectiveness and profitability of their solution, the famous ROI.

Consequently, the client is no longer focused on the cost of the solution but on the financial gain or savings it will enable them to achieve.

Leverage the restatement of the client's challenges.

Finally, the consulting salesperson demonstrates their value by their ability to integrate and restate the issues and concerns of their interlocutor.

Reformulation helps avoid misunderstandings: if something important has escaped the salesperson, their interlocutor will have the opportunity to clarify it without feeling attacked. On the other hand, a well-mastered reformulation demonstrates professionalism and leads the interlocutor in the desired direction. Finally, reformulating the stakes will give rise to new questions that will allow the introduction of new ideas, suggestions, or proposals.

By bringing together all the mentioned components (quality of questioning, provision of expertise, demonstration of the value of the solution, rephrasing of the client's challenges, etc.), the sales consultant creates the conditions for a collaborative and partnership mindset.

Register as a partner

The advisory approach requires acting like a consultant, and adopting a caring attitude towards your client to help them define their need, advance their project, and make it a reality.

Within a company, the project leader has every interest in being supported by an external consultant to help them "sell" their idea internally and convince the forces involved and concerned.

Therefore, you need to associate yourself with their project's success, and offer to act as a conductor with the various teams, making them understand – tactfully – that the sales team and the client share the same interest: the progress of the project.

Identify decision-makers.

During this pre-sales / sales phase, the challenge for the sales representative is also to identify the decision-makers and then gather their vision on the ongoing discussion. This step will allow them to remove any potential obstacles, give meaning to the approach, generate buy-in, and begin to engage all individuals towards a decision. Of course, they will keep their primary contact informed of the progress of their interactions to strengthen the relationship of trust.

The sales consultant may suggest "working sessions," "co-creation workshops," or a "summary meeting to understand the issues."

These meeting formats demonstrate much more effectiveness and impact than the classic "presentation meetings", "discovery meetings" and other "proposal submissions", which remain the panacea of all-terrain sales representatives.

However, clients sometimes reject this approach. It's important to analyze the real reasons for such a refusal. Often, this type of resistance indicates a lack of desire to collaborate. This raises the question of whether or not to continue discussions with the client. In other words: Go / No Go?

A 'No Go' will avoid wasting time and commercial energy on a deal that has little chance of succeeding, allowing you to focus on more promising projects.

In summary…!

The advisory approach is based above all on the salesperson's ability to disregard their need to sell in order to focus solely on listening and advising.

Thus approached, the act of selling becomes an act of non-selling.

 

And this paradigm shift is not insignificant! Positioning oneself as an expert cannot be improvised or decreed. Salespeople wishing to adopt a consulting approach must cultivate and develop additional relational skills, which have now become essential to gain a client's trust, including mastering their discourse, behavior, rhetoric, and the art of questioning and responding.

With that said, we wish you Very good sales Apologies, excellent advice… ; )

Knowing how to reposition your company's activity can be vital in a difficult situation. Discover the different stages of this process in this webinar: