How to Train Your B2B Sales Team to Adopt a Consultative Mindset

Why B2B Sales Teams Need a Consultative Mindset

It is difficult to say what B2B customers expect from salespeople in most cases. Most people are unlikely to buy from someone who does not understand their business or its challenges. People need someone who understands their needs, sees the problem and advises whether the solution makes any sense at all. This is why a consulting approach becomes crucial for sales representatives today.

Consultative salespeople start their conversations not with the pitch, but with the questions. They learn more about their clients and their problems and suggest a way out. As a result, sales managers need to train not only new skills, but also change the mindset of the team.

Effective consultative sales training should include working on such skills as account research, deep questioning, active listening, connecting solutions to business results, and overcoming objections through understanding.

In this case, the sales team will act like an advisory team.

Define What a Consultative Mindset Means

It will be impossible to shift sales behavior until sales leaders provide their teams with a thorough definition of what a consultative mindset means. Otherwise, sales representatives will see consultative selling as simply asking more questions.

The consultative approach begins with learning about the customer. It's one thing to ask how a representative can sell something to someone and quite another to think about what the customer is trying to accomplish, why it's difficult for them, and what kind of information they need to make the right decision.

It implies curiosity, active listening, business knowledge, analysis of a problem, and suggestions that are relevant. Patience is also needed since the sales representative has to understand the situation first.

Leaders have to showcase the difference between two approaches: product-first and customer-first. The former tells about all the features, advantages, and prices of the product at once, while the latter understands the current state of things and determines if the product has any relevance in that particular case.

A definition will help implement sales training easily. Sales representatives have to understand what and why.

Teach Reps to Lead With Customer Problems

Now, let us consider how one could teach representatives to start selling with clients' problems rather than with their products. It will require additional pre-sale preparation.

Prospects should be researched in terms of their company, industry, market position, business model, and other things that may reveal their problems. However, the main point is not that such preparation will make it clear what the problem is. Preparation will give a context that will allow representatives to ask more relevant questions.

In conversations, salespeople should be trained to understand the problem behind the request. The client asks about something, thinking he knows what problem he has. A consultative seller should be able to understand why it is required before proposing solutions.

For instance, a client says that he needs better sales reporting. A product-oriented sales representative starts to show off the dashboard features. A consultative sales representative tries to find out what is lacking in the current process of reporting, what kind of people use these reports and for what purposes, etc.

Build Strong Discovery and Questioning Skills

Questioning is one of the most significant topics of consultative sales training since good questions yield valuable insights that can't be found through a product presentation.

The first thing to train reps is how to use open-ended questions to get buyers talking about their situation. Process, problems, priorities, and objectives can give valuable insight.

Secondly, there is the technique of follow-up questioning. It's important for salespeople not just to go from one question to another but to listen to the answers and understand which areas are worth exploring further.

For instance, when a prospect says, “Our sales cycle takes too long,” a weak discovery approach might simply move on to another surface-level question. In good discovery, you will explore when this happens, how often, what stages of the process are affected by this, etc.

It's essential to teach reps active listening in parallel with questioning since the goal is to really hear what the prospect says, not just come up with the next pitch.

This is a perfect job for role-play practice. Managers can develop realistic B2B situations, and reps will learn questioning techniques, follow-up questioning, summarizing, and clarifying.

Train Reps to Connect Solutions With Business Outcomes

After the rep identifies the customer's problem, the next step is for him to link the solution capabilities to the desired outcome. This is the place where most sales teams commit an error by reverting to a lengthy presentation of features.

A consultative seller needs to be more effective in connecting capabilities to outcomes. Sales reps should highlight to the buyer why particular capabilities are important for their situation.

When a company needs to decrease manual labor, the conversation should dwell on how this is possible with the use of the product. When the customer wants to ensure that there is revenue growth, then the rep should tie this solution capability to the appropriate growth target and not some other feature.

Educate your sales reps about translating product capabilities to outcomes that customers can relate to. Capability refers to what a product does, while value refers to why it is important.

Also, reps need to be careful when talking about linking capabilities and outcomes. They should refrain from making any promises that lack credibility in order to make the solution look good.

Develop Consultative Objection-Handling Skills

Objection handling also provides another chance to cultivate a consultative approach in representatives. Instead of training them on how to counter every single objection with some ready-made answer, teach them how to understand it first.

In case a prospect tells you "Your price is too high" or something like that, the representative must not immediately jump to offering a discount or enumerating all the benefits. What he should do first is to try to understand what the other party means by saying that.

The same goes for objections regarding implementation, time, getting approval from someone, risk, or competing priorities.

One good framework for objection handling might be listening, understanding, acknowledging, answering, and confirming. In this way, the process becomes more conversational and less confrontational.

Again, role-playing will come in handy here. Provide sales reps with realistic objections and ask them to ask at least one or two questions to get some clarification.

Make Consultative Selling Part of the Sales Process

There will be little effect from training if the process of selling encourages reps to do a product pitch. Consultative selling must be embedded in the sales process.

Go through every step in your sales process and determine where you want to see consultative behavior demonstrated. Discovery must focus on the business problem. Qualification should assess the severity and relevance of the need. Solution presentation must link to the customer's priorities. Negotiation must take value and business situation into consideration. Closing must validate that the solution meets the customer's objectives.

Your playbooks must be adjusted to incorporate this philosophy. Your playbooks should not contain scripts full of product-related statements. Rather, they should contain conversation structures, discovery questions, qualification techniques and solution-to-outcome mapping.

Expectations from managers are also important in this regard. It is crucial for reps to know that consultative selling is not an option when it comes to communication style.

When training and process align, the results are obvious.

Coach Reps Through Real Sales Conversations

Sales training alone does not bring about change in sales behavior in the long run. Sales reps require regular coaching using live opportunities and customer interactions.

Sales managers can analyze discovery calls, meetings with customers, proposals sent out, and live deals in order to see where their team is strong and where there is room for improvement. It is more effective to give concrete feedback like "you asked the right question, but did not develop the answer," or "you discovered a key business challenge but went back to talking about your features", or "you showed great discovery skills, but did not tie your recommendations to the client's goal."

This kind of feedback allows the coach to be more effective.

Reviews of deals in the pipeline are another tool for developing consultative thinking. You need to ask your salespeople what they know about the customer's problem, what the evidence is for this opportunity, who all will be impacted, and what result the buyer wants to achieve.

It helps salespeople develop a consultative mindset.

Measure and Reinforce Consultative Selling Behaviors

Behavior that is measured and reinforced becomes behavior of the team. As such, sales leaders require a simple way to measure whether consultative selling is really taking place.

Revenue and closed deals are not enough; these are important but not always an indicator of consultative selling practices.

Managers may analyze discovery quality, opportunity advancement, client engagement, qualification quality, conversion ratios, deal quality, and customer objectives' documentation. Call analysis will help measure the level of questioning, listening, and value communication.

Consultative behaviors should be recognized as well. Salespeople who make significant customer discoveries, enhance their discovery quality, construct better business cases, or handle objections effectively should be rewarded.

It is not necessary to develop another complicated way to measure; all that is needed is to measure consultative behavior, coach it, and recognize it, not only discuss it during training.

Conclusion: Build a Team That Sells by Solving, Not Pitching

If you want your B2B sales teams to adopt a consultative approach to selling, then changing the sales script alone won't help. You have to change the way your salespeople think about their jobs.

Selling isn't just about presenting your product and closing a deal. Your sales representatives should be able to find out what problem customers have, pose good questions, listen actively, analyze business needs and relate the solutions to the results.

All that starts from an understanding of what consultative selling is and goes through discovery training, objection handling training, positioning of the solution, coaching and performance reinforcement.

In order for the training to work, managers should ensure that the consultative attitude becomes part of the sales process itself. The most powerful transformation will occur if managers themselves practice consulting and teach their teams how to do it right.

Consultative B2B sales teams win trust with their understanding. The more relevant conversations your salespeople have and the better they solve the problems of your customers, the higher sales results they will achieve.

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