Discover how shifting from traditional sales tactics to a consultative approach can help you win large, enterprise-level clients.
To win large, enterprise-level deals, you want to be more of a consultant than a salesperson. Let us start to work on being more consultative by observing a rule that you may not have heard: The larger the client, the more they will judge you on how much knowledge you have that they don’t.
For as long as we have been helping large sales organizations, sales leaders, sales managers, and their sales teams, most have wanted help becoming more consultative instead of looking and sounding like their competitors with an outdated sales approach. In an attempt to sell their solutions, their sales conversation is designed to answer the question “Why us?” This approach is self-oriented and feels more like a pitch than a consultation.
You can improve your sales approach and your win rate for large, enterprise-level pursuits by being the most consultative your client has ever experienced. Let us start building a more consultative sales approach.
Leveraging the One-Up Position in Consultative Selling
In Elite Sales Strategies: A Guide to Being One-Up, Creating Value, and Becoming Truly Consultative I introduced the concept of being One-Up, which means that you should know more than your clients about their problems, opportunities, and the critical decisions they must make to improve their results. Being One-Up comes from having many conversations about these changes. In comparison, your client only engages in this sales conversation every five to seven years. As the years slip by, there are new innovations and changes in the environment, but your clients don’t keep up with the changes.
Why Leading Your Client Is Crucial in Consultative Sales
You might believe that your client should lead their buyer’s journey because they are pursuing their goals and initiatives. This belief will cause you to fail to be a consultative salesperson with the high sales status to lead the client. To be more consultative, you must lead the client through their buyer’s journey. By leading them, you prove you can help them succeed in improving their results.
Crafting Effective Recommendations to Win Enterprise Clients
As you approach your client in the sales conversation, your ability to make recommendations is key. You might provide a set of recommendations that will ensure the client can address their problem. This requires you to lead a sales conversation that will end with a decision that will ensure their better results. This includes sales skills like accessing other stakeholders and understanding the best order of important conversations. To be more consultative and win large enterprise clients, use your experience to provide your recommendations.
Exploiting Information Asymmetry in B2B Sales
As you increase your experience and your knowledge of what works and what doesn’t, you acquire information that your clients are missing. You know more than they do about how to improve their results. You learn from every sales conversation and stack up a set of insights over time.
The result is information asymmetry, meaning you know things your client doesn’t. Information asymmetry is how you create value for your client in the sales conversation, which is why it is one of the most important strategies in B2B sales. As you meet with many clients, document the things your clients will need to succeed in making significant improvements to their business.
To practice, pick a client on your list and ask yourself, “What does this client need to know to succeed in pursuing better results?” To answer the question, you may have to access your notes from your recent sales conversations to identify the topics that will help them make a good decision.
The Power of Providing Advice in Consultative Selling
Over a long number of years, I have watched B2B salespeople fail to offer their clients advice in a consultative way. Some sales reps are even afraid of advising their contacts and their task force, fearing that their client may disagree. Others worry that they are talking out of turn.
Without telling your client what they need to do, you cannot present yourself as a consultative salesperson. Avoiding this type of advisor role will lower your sales status, and your contact will eventually reach out to another salesperson who is able to provide them with the education and the advice they need to make the right decision with confidence and certainty.
Gaining a Competitive Advantage through Consultative Sales
When you are consultative and many of your competitors are not, you have a sustainable strategic advantage in a contest. You create more value by leading your client, offering recommendations, and educating them by filling in the gaps in their experience and knowledge.
Conclusion
To win large, enterprise-level deals, you must shift from traditional sales to a consultative approach. The larger the client, the more they judge your sales approach on your unique knowledge. The best place to start is to move beyond "Why us" pitches and instead offer advice and recommendations like a business consultant.
Key Strategies for Consultative Selling
- Adopt a "One-Up" position by knowing more about client problems and critical decisions.
- Lead the client through their buyer's journey to demonstrate expertise.
- Provide effective recommendations based on experience to ensure client success.
- Leverage information asymmetry to create value in sales conversations.
- Offer advice confidently to maintain consultative status and client confidence.
Use these strategies to gain a sustainable strategic advantage by being more consultative than competitors.
