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The
Consultative Sales Process The Great Consultative Cover-Up And as you increase the time involved, and the amount of information you provide, you increase the risk involved in losing a now informed prospect to your competition. There are a lot of good salespeople who avoid using technology or implementing a true consultative planning approach as a result. Instead, they come in with a couple of suggestions they understand, can support, and can close. What you end up with is a consultative selling ‘veneer’, on a product/service selling core—consultative in image but not in fact. Companies struggle to reconcile the importance of a consultative sales approach, while realizing and hiding the fact that most of their best salespeople don’t really do it. In turn, this makes it harder to get other people to do it and build a true consultative selling approach into the culture. According to noted sales-author and researcher George Dudley: “When examined closely, much of the consultative sales training today is actually a cover, not a cure, for the underlying ambivalence, conflictedness, and sometimes unbridled contempt, many salespeople and their organizations actually hold for the sales profession itself (Chonko, Tanner & Dudley, 2003). In other words, it’s meta-selling: a set of convoluted attempts and diversionary tactics to elevate selling by disguising or minimizing the role of the sales effort. So far, research has not been kind to subtext underlying many diversionary selling programs. Something else may be needed.” This is why we suggest that consultative selling is just a kinder, gentler version of transactional selling, and merely a transitional step in the evolution of professional selling. It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s incomplete. But advances in sales technology and processes are taking place that will help salespeople take the next step in the evolution of selling and establish it as the new paradigm for selling in the Digital Age. |
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