What you’ll learn:
Consultative sales vs. Solution sales
5 principles of consultative sales
consultative sales process
level up your game with ai conversation insights
sell smarter using einstein conversation insights — with customer signals and next-step guidance to help you close.
what is consultative sales?
Consultative selling is a sales approach that focuses on understanding your customer’s challenges and recommending products or services to resolve them. Your role as a consultative sales professional is to empathize, advise, and advocate, not push a product. Customers should feel like you’re genuinely in their corner, treating their problems like your own.
Consultative sales vs. Solution sales
both of these concepts are similar – they focus on the customer’s needs first, instead of on the product. However, there are key differences to keep in mind.
Consultative selling is about building
trust and creating a plan to solve customer problems. Sales reps who use this approach try to understand the root cause of customer problems and find a solution. Even though it might not result in an immediate sale, this relationship-building technique helps reps earn the trust of prospects.
In contrast, reps who use solution selling are looking to resolve customer issues with their company’s product(s). They focus their conversations and questions on uncovering problems that can be alleviated by what they are selling.
Put another way: the mindset of a rep taking the solution-selling approach is, “i need to sell a solution.” but a consultative seller puts the customer’s goals first. Ahead of a sales call, they think about how they can help the customer achieve their goals.