The potential client’s quality during their interactions with you is the major emphasis of the consulting sales process. It is all about how you can add value to your leads and make it all about them. It is not about your product, your company, or your metrics; it’s about how you deal with prospects and what’s your winning business idea.
How do you make a sale? You almost definitely have a sales process, whether you know it or not. It makes no difference whether you are a sole business owner, a little entrepreneur with only one salesman, a well-developed team of 20 or more, or a global sales force. Every company has its unique sales strategy.
What is your selling strategy? The purpose of inbound sales is to sell what you have created. Within itself, sales are not a goal. This is commonly referred to as the consulting sales process, and it may make a huge impact on you, your company, and your clients.
What is consultative selling?
This is sometimes known as “solution based selling”. A sales technique is solution selling. Instead of simply marketing an existing product, the salesman focuses on the customer’s problems and offer solutions to the problem.
The consulting sales process is based on six principles:
Research
Enquire
Pay attention
Teach
Qualify
Close
These six concepts should serve as the foundation of consulting sales process you develop for your company. The approach you develop should include the product you are selling, your company’s regular sales cycle, your industry, and your customer profiles.
Research – Consulting Sales Process
The consultancy sales research step includes putting the lead insights your firm gathered throughout the lead acquisition procedure to good use. If you are doing your inbound marketing well, you have acquired information on your leads such as company size, website pages visited, email preferences, and social media habits. Even more significantly, you have received a bundle of information on the types of content your lead is most interested in, revealing the most pressing questions on their thoughts.
All of this lead knowledge is stored in HubSpot’s contacts tool. Your “starred” characteristics will be the ones you have chosen as the most essential for qualifying a lead, and your contact timeline will offer you a quick and complete picture of your lead’s experience with your company so far. Sales representatives should really Google their names to see what else comes up, particularly current corporate news, social media accounts, personal blogs, and, of course, recent company news. Before making any subsequent moves, you should always conduct a comprehensive investigation on the lead.
Enquire
Make sure to ask open-ended questions when speaking with the lead. You could be tempted to guess you know everything there is to know about them now that you’ve collected so much knowledge based on your study. This is an error. The goal is for the lead to offer the information on their own, as a result of, and in addition to the trust you are creating between the sales agent and the lead.
Use the phrases which, how, what, why, when to start your questions. Avoid using terms like do, are, you and can to begin a question. These questions tend to elicit yes or no responses, which is precisely the type of response you want to avoid.
The purpose of asking questions is to gradually learn the lead’s goals, what plan they may have to achieve those goals, what challenges they may have in carrying out that plan, and what deadline they have set for achieving them.
You should also learn about their budget and the level of authority of the individual you speak with. Is the person in charge of the budget of an end-user, an influencer, or a decision-maker? If you ask the appropriate questions, you can find out.
During the consulting sales process, always ask questions. One of your most powerful sales techniques is the question.
Pay attention
It is the most vital thing that a successful salesman can accomplish. And, we are discussing active listening here, not passive listening. You are listening carefully to what the speaker says and are prepared to respond and repeat it. The aim is for both parties to be on a similar level. You’ll need to pay attention to whatever the lead mentions as you perform this exercise.
All of the data you collect will aid you in qualifying and closing the lead. You must pay close attention to the tone, pitch, and level of enthusiasm with which they speak. Those factors will assist you in determining your next course of action. It is said that practice makes perfect. Always pay attention.
Teach
You should be replying while actively listening, and you should be seeking opportunities to teach while responding. It’s crucial to remember that this isn’t about telling the lead about your good or service. It is about assisting the leader in overcoming obstacles and developing a strategy for achieving their objectives.
Using your product or service may be included or excluded. Whatever you do, your main goal should be to assist the leader. You must be cautious not to provide too much information. You must strike a balance between the knowledge you impart and the questions you pose, and the responses you receive. Always be ready to teach!
Qualify
You will be qualifying the lead all the time. A competent lead has objectives, a strategy (which may or may not be in place), difficulties to overcome, a timeframe, and a budget. However, during the consulting sales process, bear in mind that an unqualified lead is just as good as a qualified one. Unqualified leads allow you to assist, be friendly, and then go on. Obviously, qualified leads provide you with the opportunity to assist, be friendly, and sell. It’s preferable to detect a lead who isn’t a suitable fit for your product quickly.
Continue to close unqualified leads; you will only harm yourself and them in the long run. You want to focus your time and energy on the highest-quality prospects.
Close
Closing qualified leads should be rather simple. They have a budget and the power to approve the acquisition. If you get pushback during the closing sequence or at any other time, you can always go deeper into the potential ramifications for the lead if they don’t buy from you.
Both you and the lead should feel comfortable with the closing sequence. If you are constantly working to close just those leads that are a good fit for your company, your new customer retention rate will be pretty high.
Now it is your turn
Create your own consulting sales process using these six ideas and try to be your own sales coach. Salespeople operate at their finest when they have a system that they can understand and reproduce and when they believe they have a strategy that will enable them to complete deals. And your prospects will never experience like they’re being marketed to, even if they weren’t ready to purchase from your company in the first place.