Evolution of consultative selling

Increasingly the ability of the company to match performance with customer expectations depends on the ability of the sales force to orchestrate the company's response to customer needs. In such circumstances sales people must demonstrate trustworthiness and an ability to solve problems even if the solution does not include the company's products or services.

The most important characteristics that customers seek in sales people are business and product knowledge, communications skills, a customer

Figure [11.7] Characteristics of a sales person sought by customers

orientation and concern for the longevity of the account (Figure 11.7). All four characteristics rely on the sales person's consultative ability to understand the customer's business, to be a problem solver and an efficient provider of services aimed at satisfying customer needs.

The consultative ability requires sales people to be willing to share their knowledge and understanding of the business and product environment so that organizations can better serve their customers. Usually it is necessary to share state-of-the-art information without pressing for a sale. The purpose is to keep the customer informed of business developments. The service thus provided becomes the key to future sales. Consultative sales people must be able to combine selling skills with consultative skills but they must, however, continue to prospect, enquire, support and close deals. Successful sales people are able to strike an acceptable balance between achieving short-run sales targets and cultivating and maintaining long-term relationships with customers. The ultimate goal of sales people is to master the basic skills of selling to be used within a consultative framework.

Companies attempting to shift from product-driven to customer-driven selling based on customer consultation are faced with a dilemma: how to manage the trade-off between short-run sales revenues and long-term customer relationships. By allowing the sales force to negotiate price, credit terms and other conditions to improve customer satisfaction, there is a danger of jeopardizing the predictability of revenues and production schedules.

Developing a sales team

Successful consultative selling means being part of a team with the resources to satisfy customer enquiries and needs. Customers expect consistent, dependable performance from products and services and the sales person is the one cast in the role as provider. The sales person orchestrates the company's resources, people and information, to address the customer's needs. Rather than a simple dyad of sales person-customer relationship, it becomes an integrated marketing programme where concern centres on the longevity of the account and the underlying relationship.

Selling technical products

In industrial markets companies use personal selling as the traditional means of communication between themselves and buyers. Personal selling is dominant in industrial markets because the number of potential customers is relatively small compared with consumer markets. Purchases in value terms are usually considerably larger. The task of the industrial sales force differs from that of the consumer sales force in two important ways:

■ They make fewer sales calls than the consumer sales force.

■ They spend much more time with each customer in liaising and problem solving.

For consumer products, a 'pull strategy' based on advertising and other non-personal techniques is normally used. In consumer mass marketing, where the selling process relies heavily on demand stimulation by brand and heavy merchandising, the pure selling function has dwindled to a pale shadow of what it was before the advent of self-service. Personal selling is also most effective in any market where the product or service is technical in nature and requires a considerable amount of knowledge on the part of the sales person. When demonstration on the use of the product is important, the role of personal selling becomes essential.

Selling technical products such as an enterprise-level software package or a wholesale computer component or a high technology business-to-business service product that only engineers or computer programmers fully understand may require team selling where the team consists of sales people and technology experts. Sales managers in high technology industry often must choose between establishing permanent sales and technology teams that always go on sales calls together or placing the technology people in a pool of professionals who are on-call for different visits. A combination is often the result of experimentation with these diverse approaches. How the teams are formed is often a matter of trial and error. Some organizations use consulting firms initially as a pool of technical experts but once the organization has identified a good combination of sales professionals and high technology expertise, a more permanent team is formed.

While moving technically trained people into the marketing function may work well, reluctant technical experts should not be pushed into the sales role. Conversely, as a general rule marketing people are best served by learning the technical language and concepts they need to know on the job, rather than by trying to match their technical colleagues by obtaining a formal scientific training.

For such interdisciplinary marketing teams to function many companies agree that the sales or marketing person should be in charge of the sales effort. Doing so helps keep the lines of authority clear and communications with customers and prospects uncomplicated. Furthermore, even a well-briefed interdisciplinary team is unlikely to be successful if the technical experts are not enthusiastic about selling. Technically trained people sometimes have personalities which are not so resilient whereas the ability to deal with rejection sets successful sales people apart.

The key to successful technical selling is through consultation, communication and interaction - the ability to listen to customers and the ability to communicate technical information in a way that non-technical people understand. While technical people may discover that joining the marketing team means acquiring an entirely new set of skills, marketing people should acknowledge that they cannot easily develop a technical competence.

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