Adopting consultative selling requires a particular personality type. When building your consultative sales team, you should assess existing and new hires on whether they can become great consultative salespeople. Assess individuals motivated by problem-solving and enjoy helping buyers overcome complex challenges by providing bespoke solutions. 

Additionally, look for talent comfortable with the relationship-building side of sales, the talent you trust can put in front of and confidently sell to director-level people and, importantly, professionals with the ever-essential ability to listen to the client and tailor a solution to meet their specific needs. 

Consultative selling is an effective sales tactic that delivers significant results. However, your top talent must understand that wins come less frequently than other selling methods, and this approach requires a degree of discipline and patience. Consultative salespeople must take time to understand the buyer's needs, pitch them a valuable solution and show resiliency to get the deal over the line. 

You must ensure you place people into your consultative sales team who have emotional intelligence and self-awareness and are motivated to put the hard hours in to drive results for your business.   

When building your consultative sales team, you should train and upskill your talent to unlock their true potential. Train them in self-development, from what books to read and playbooks to follow to podcasts to listen to, to grow within the role and understand consultative selling tactics. Give them exposure to more significant deals and how to approach, present, and negotiate with director-level clients. 

Additionally, you could look to develop other core skills within your sales team, including their ability to be resilient and multi-task to hit high sales volumes for your business. 

You could also encourage your salespeople to develop their listening and emotional intelligence skills so they can actively listen to your clients and gain the ability to read through the lines and recognise if the conversation with the client has the potential to open up further opportunities. Training your salespeople to adapt emotionally to different personality types will allow them to pre-empt their questions or objectives to sell and provide more value to your clients.

Ultimately, you need to acquire passionate people who are coachable and who you believe have the potential to become consultative sales experts.