Consultative selling as a way to win against your competition. Many companies today are still trying to push features and benefits of their products on their customers without understanding the deeper needs of those prospects and how they fit with their own company's products or services. Companies that are still pushing feature and benefits, as opposed to pulling information from their clients and consulting with their clients in developing a solution, are those that are typically not able to accelerate their sales and are struggling against competition that uses a more sophisticated sales approach.

Consultative selling has been well developed and documented over the years, whether it be strategic selling, need satisfaction selling, as originally pioneered by Xerox, solution selling or more recently, spin selling, all of these essential approaches deal with the basic premise that you start by doing a needs analysis of your customer to understand what their needs, their pains, their issues are, and then adapt your sales approach based upon the information that you're able to gather from your prospect. Many companies have still not trained their people on spin selling or solution or consultative selling and need to do this in order to improve their sales effectiveness. We work with a variety of clients that are still following the "old push" features benefits selling model when they can easily adapt a more consultative approach.

The companies that are following the best practices, in most industries today, as it relates to selling, have adopted a consultative approach and have greatly boosted their sales performance and effectiveness as a result of that. We work with different companies that teach consultative selling techniques. We also highly suggest spin selling by Neal Rackham, which is an outstanding book, and it can help any individual to quickly grasp the basic concepts of the complex sale and master them, if they put them to work. Consultative selling is a requirement in most sophisticated product and competitive environments today. Consultative selling is something that can be easily adopted by your organization. What are you doing to transform your business and your sales team towards a more consultative selling model?

We've taught dozens of companies how to use spin selling or consultative selling to their advantage. The approach typically can take 2 to 6 months to adopt and really entrench in your sales team's behavior until it becomes habit, but the rewards are great. Your company will be able to move up market in terms of its professionalism, be more adept at competing against its most fierce competition, and also simplify and develop a deeper understanding of what your customers true needs are, what they pain is, and how your products, service, and solutions can fit uniquely with their requirements.