What is consultative selling?
Consultative selling means selling the way your customer wants to buy, not how you want to sell. In practice it is about creating compelling reasons to change.
In a transaction sale the customer knows the answer or solution without help from a salesperson, or is prepared to stay with what they have. Customer decision criteria are price and convenience, customers resent time spent with (new) salespeople, mainly because the salesperson adds little or nothing to what they have and steals time.
In a consultative sale the customer doesn’t know the answer or solution (or cannot see the advantage of your solution) without help from a salesperson. The salesperson must take the role of an advisor, not just a ‘product promoter’. Customers demand expertise, advice and customisation during the sales process. Often customers insist on multiple meetings with salespeople and others to develop advantages that you can bring and reduce the perceived risk of changing. In this way the salesperson often adds more value than the product or service.