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This method of selling is particularly popular in the financial services, professional services and software/technology environments. However if you apply the concept broadly, you might see that physicians and many, many other specialties, often engage in consultative selling.

It’s an approach that’s especially useful when:

• You hate to sell, but must sell (if you want to eat, or if you want your children to eat).
• There are long sales cycles in your industry (6 to 24 months from initial contact to sale).
• You sell big-ticket, high-dollar products or services (which might result in long sales cycles or not).
• You sell to corporate buyers (who may have to defend their purchase decision to the top-tier).

Here are a few tips on applying the power of consultative selling to your business:

1. Research the top “core” and “perceived” problems of your target customer

Your customer’s main problems must be at the foundation of your marketing communications with them. Nothing else is as important as getting this philosophical approach right. The core problems are the “deeper than obvious” issues that may be affecting your customer’s industry or marketplace as a whole. They may be issues that your customer is to busy with “day-to-day” to solve.

The perceived problems on the other hand, are the problems that the customer sees clearly and is worried about or annoyed by.

2. Create a Free or Low-cost “diagnostic tool” for your prospects
This could be a “Treasure” or “Trash” Audit, a discovery questionnaire, a discovery interview, a troubleshooter tool, decision matrix.
These tools are designed to sensitize the client to the issues that you will make more explicit further down the line. Are they wasting money? Are they stumbling around prime opportunities? Your audit or discovery tool will transition them from a pre-cognitive PWP (“problem? what problem?”) state, into greater awareness of the “perceived” challenges, and into potentially transforming awareness of the “core” problem.

3. Give before you receive
One of the best ideas to come out of marketing in the last 150 years is the idea of “sampling”. Giving a client a taste of what they will get. The consultative selling approach is embodies this idea in the service industry. However, even in product-centric industries, a sales professional who communicates superior knowledge of the customer’s circumstances and challenges will confer some of that superiority to the product he or she represents. A free consulting session is one of the most common applications of “Give before you receive”.

4. Become a Patron of The Prospects and Clients In Your Marketplace
We get our English word “patron” from the Latin word, “Patronus” meaning “patron saint”.
The Merriam-webster online dictionary defines “patron” as,

“a person chosen, named, or honored, as a special guardian, protector, or supporter…”

Your prospects and customers will see through any attempts to apply “consultative selling” techniques without adopting the mindset and approach of a consultant – a patron. This means digging into their conditions, their industry, their decision matrix.

Far too many professionals and entrepreneurs pay lip service to consultative selling by reducing it to its less comprehensive cousin “question-based selling”. They are not synonymous.

Question-based selling is transactional; focused on “a step” in the process of selling. I see true “consultative selling” as philosophical, and based on the “patron” concept.