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At Pareto, we go above and beyond to find the right fit for both you and a prospective employer. Taking people of high potential and placing them in positions where they can excel.
At Pareto, we go above and beyond to find the right fit for both you and a prospective employer. Taking people of high potential and placing them in positions where they can excel.
You have now taken the first step toward realising the potential of your sales team by telling us about the strengths and weaknesses of your salespeople. We’ve compiled your answers to determine the next steps you should take to enhance the performance of your sales team.
Scroll to discover what consultative selling is, how to build a consultative sales team, and valuable resources to boost your business.
Consultative sales is a selling model focused on leading with discovery to understand everything about the buyer, from their background, pain points and requirements. From here, the consultative sales team will add value by providing a customised solution best suited to the buyer's specific needs.
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.
Are you predominantly leading, managing or selling, and what is the impact of this? When optimising your consultative sales approach, it’s crucial to reflect on your leadership and management style and how it impacts your business and your team's results.
Being self-aware will enable you to optimise your style and improve performance. For example, if you have a consultative sales team and want to enhance their performance, evaluating how much time you spend managing, leading, or selling is crucial. At the same time, if you dedicate more time to leadership, it's important to consider its impact.
Ultimately, if you tend to step in at the last minute to help meet the goals of your salespeople, your team may view you as a safety net and never realise their potential.
If you can answer all of these questions, you’ll be feeling confident you have a top performing consultative sales approach. If you’re not feeling confident, reach out to our expert below for an exploratory conversation.
Global Sales Director - Performance Consultancy & Training
Samantha Tuohy is a Commercial Consultancy & Training expert with over 12 years of experience at Pareto. As part of the Training Division at Pareto, she specialises in building bespoke training programs and consulting with global sales businesses. Through comprehensive audits, Athene and her team identify areas for improvement and provide strategic recommendations to enable businesses to achieve remarkable growth and realise their potential.
Now that you're aware of your team's progress, let's dive deeper into the consultative selling method to maximise your sales potential.
Consultative sales is a selling model focused on leading with discovery to understand everything about the buyer, from their background, pain points and requirements. From here, the consultative sales team will add value by providing a customised solution best suited to the buyer's specific needs. The consultative sales process is relationship-driven, whereby the salesperson will build a long-lasting partnership with the client to support them with future challenges they may face.
Salespeople who adopt the consultative selling process will unlock what the client needs by asking open-ended questions and layering aspects of sales such as stakeholder mapping, whereby the salesperson may have to prospect several people to get them to buy into the product or service and close the deal. The buyer may have a conscious need but may not fully know what products or services are available to them.
Consultative sales reps lend their expertise and challenge the buyer on their perspective to provide a bespoke experience and ensure the buyer receives the best solution. The consultative approach is much more conversational, where your salespeople will focus more time on questioning and an understanding of the client's organisation and their challenges.
From a client's perspective, whilst you engage in much more meaningful conversation, a consultative sales environment can, at times, feel pretty frustrating. Your salespeople could avoid frustrating the client by finding the answers to top-level questions by researching the client before the call. This essential research and fact-finding can be conducted on the client’s website, social channels or anywhere online where information about the client is accessible.
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