Responses to: "What Happened To Consultative Selling?" From LinkedIn Groups

We asked "What Happened to Consultative Selling?" on a number of  LinkedIn Groups.  Here's a summary of the replies. What are your reactions?

The opinions fell into two broad camps: 1) those who felt consultative selling was alive and well, and 2) those who acknowledged consultative selling was under pressure and facing hard times.  Let’s look at each category.

How Consultative Selling Continues to Work

Where people have the skills and attitude, consultative selling is alive and well.  The necessary skills mentioned most frequently included face-to-face relationship skills, sophisticated product and technical knowledge, understanding current trends and challenges in the customer’s business as well as in the customer’s industry.  But more than skill mastery was mentioned.  Many LinkedIn respondents said consultative selling required confidence.  Salespeople who were successful at consultative selling felt they wanted to and could make a contribution, that their role was to find a “true” fit of product or service to the customer’s need, making recommendations with integrity.  The result was to become a trusted advisor—a person who the customer could rely on for the long view, the advice of a confidante, and the knowledge of an expert.

To earn trusted advisor status, these respondents summed up the journey.  Salespeople had to step up to a being a sales professional.  They had to study the profession, practice the fundamentals, learn the details of the customer’s world to earn the respect of the customer, and have a point of view about the different ways his/her products or services could help.  He/she had to build a network of resources, any of whom could offer support to potential problems the customer’s business might encounter.  These professionals exuded value and could articulate their role as providing that value well beyond the delivery of a product or service.

But It’s Tough To Be Consultative In A “Wal-Mart World”

On the other hand, some respondents paint a different portrait of why customers might not see consultative selling in action, despite sales managers’ entreaties and four decades or more of sales training. 

For one thing, many respondents point to a “remote-access” environment.  Purchasing processes designed and managed for the benefit of buyers seem to be the most frequently mentioned inhibitor.  These systems deny access to decision-makers and are staffed by buyers who are rewarded for lowest price, period. The long-term view and relationships can’t even get a beach head in this kind of environment, report our respondents.  Add the notion that some buyers often have short tenure—a year or two and they’re gone—, making for shallow relationships at best.

Then there’s what one respondent called the “Wal-Mart phenomenon” where low price not only prevails but is a philosophical and practical way of being.  Even if you could get through to the decision-makers, the decision is bound to be price-only, they say.  Our whole society has been driven to buy at the cheapest price possible at every opportunity.  This shows up in the purchasing process where your product or service is “commoditized”, where differentiation is minimized or ignored, and purchasing agents get a “commission“ for buying low.

Another reason is that salespeople are inexperienced, often untrained, focused on orders, not relationships and are impatient with a relationship-oriented sales process.  This crop of salespeople has a window for success that is 30-, 60- and 90-days long and where commissions are based on short-term results.  This sounds like an environment where control of the game is ceded to the buyer, and the seller is willing to do what it takes to get a score.  That means a lot of dialing for dollars, cherry-picking predictable orders from regular customers, without too much focus on segmentation, targeting, prequalification or penetrating existing accounts.

In addition, respondents point out that many companies don’t invest in or use more up-to-date sales training beyond a brief initial on-boarding.  The training investment is “past due”; people are “thrown on the phones” with a quota and numbers to call.  Whatever training that is done isn’t followed up or supported in the field. 

Finally, there is an interesting notion that consultative selling doesn’t fit every buying process.  While some relationships do lend themselves to exchanges of information, establishment of relationships among a number of different customer within an organization, and all the other consultative sales attributes, there are those who say that kind of approach might not be for every customer.  Some customers just want product information: a salesperson who can write up the order and make sure it is fulfilled without errors or delay.  That makes it easy for the salesperson since he or she is turned into a human catalog and order pad.  If you are selling in that kind of environment, you go with the flow and settle into the expectations your buyer has created for you.

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