Executive seller is someone who sells for an organization and fulfils terms of the contract set with the customer. Whereas, consultative seller provides additional/incremental value to his customers helping them mitigate their challenges. This, however, is just a simple definition of consultative selling…

In this article, I will focus on consultative selling as a mean of boosting revenue and generating a reliable chain of benefits. Having been defined, consultative selling does two of the important things for a business.

Why this strategy?

      1- It eradicates competition as a consultative
seller provides a unique and attractive service to his clients.

2- Being a consultative seller, you will be the
first one to be consulted by your clients for their business issues which can generate
new business opportunities!

The concept of Consultative selling can be
linked with Blue Ocean Strategy. In this strategy sales executives identify
opportunities in areas where there is no competition, ie an unknown market
space and demand is created rather than fought over. Competition is irrelevant.

Blue Ocean is an analogy used to describe the wider & deeper potential of market
space that is not yet explored.

Selling has been in place since availability of consumer products and is a transaction which adds value to the buyer by meeting his or her needs and results in mutual benefits for buyers and sellers.

An organization who receives the service is called Service Receiver Organization whereas those who provide the service are termed as Service Providers.

How does consultative selling work?

Sales Executive quotes a price for service providers based on the reputation,
competency, capability, competition, cost and other factors. Service receivers
then analyze the price, compare it to that of other providers in the market and
decides whether to proceed with an offer. If an offer is made by the receivers,
a contract will take place and acknowledged by both parties to the contract.

The concept of consultative selling is not
too old and says that you have to only sell those services to customers which
brings them unique value rather than selling what is beneficial for your
organization only!

It takes into consideration the needs and challenges faced by the customers and
selling them something which helps them gain a fair share of market and/or
selling them at a low cost which therefore gives them edge in competition.

In adopting such an approach, competition is eliminated by offering unique and
trustworthy services and the consultative seller therefore, becomes the preferred seller for all the products & services your customer needs.

The Approach used by a consultative seller
is way different than that adopted by an executive seller. A consultative
seller’s first priority is his customer, benefits and value for money
transferred and the customer generating profits. Consequently, making some profit
himself.

The thought process of consultative sellers
are different from conventional sellers in that they focus on making their
customers successful whereas, traditional sellers primarily focus on achieving
their monetary goals and are not concerned about the prospect of their
customers.

Conclusive points of being a Consultative Seller

1-
They sell an opportunity of profit to their
customers and not just a product/service.

2-
Consultative sellers work as agents and look out
for opportunities, they then offer those opportunities to their customers.

3-
They identify the challenges faced by their
customers and make plans for them accordingly. (customer is a revenue
generating unit and for a consultative seller to get benefitted, the customer
needs to have a stable and growing business)

4-
A consultative seller always starts selling once
the needs and likely position of a customer has been assessed. They will only
sell if the market forces allow the customer to sell and get benefitted.

5-
Consultative sellers work on ideas, innovation
and bring value to customers they connect to. They believe in maintaining good
working relationship with every customer which leads to growing market share
and creates a monopolistic environment for the business.

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