Sales Manager’s Training Guide

Below are 12 practical steps to improve your team’s ability to sell using a consultative approach. This sales meeting should take about an hour.Decide whether your company and sales team have the potential to use the true consultative approach to selling. If your company sells commodity products or your average sales team member lacks business acumen, taking the consultative approach may not be a viable strategy.If you decide to proceed, prior to the meeting create a handout based on this article showing the eight stages of the customer’s decision process. Also create a slide based on Acclivus’s concept of the client/customer decision process.Open the meeting with energy and enthusiasm. Explain that you’re going to be discussing some important issues that will influence the way the entire team approaches the sales process. Ask your team to participate fully, because the potential benefits will be enormous.Using the handout, walk the team through the customer decision-making process. In all probability, your team members will already understand much of this, but emphasize that there is supposed to be an alignment, and such alignment often proves elusive.Explain the basic concept of the consultative approach and how it differs from other so-called consultative-selling and solution-selling models. Emphasize that the purpose of the consultative approach is to create alignment, even as you are selling your offering.Display the Acclivus slide and ask the team members to state the level at which they are currently selling — as a vendor, a supplier/provider, or a value-creating partner. Explain that value-creating partners are included in strategic discussions and always have the inside track on the sale of any relevant offering. Open the floor for discussion. Get buy-in from the team that it is possible to take a more consultative approach to selling and that taking such an approach would be of benefit, to each team member and the firm as a whole. At the completion of this step, you should be 20 minutes into the meeting.Explain that it takes significant business acumen to successfully take a consultative approach to selling. Give the team members three minutes to build a personal development plan that strengthens their understanding of their customers’ strategic issues.Ask for volunteers to share their plans. After a third of the room has done so, ask the team members to hone their plans using the best ideas that they heard from the other team members. Give them three minutes for this. When they are done, make a commitment to review each plan personally with each team member.Open the floor for discussion of the kind of support that the team will need from management and the firm in order to successfully sell in this manner. Working with the team, prioritize these requests so that the easiest and most important can be addressed soon.Make a commitment to the team to work on these issues in order to ensure success at this. Share your plans to create a measurement system that will allow the team — and you — to track progress.Thank the team members for their participation and end the meeting with enthusiasm.