New Research Reveals Power of Consultative Selling Skills

It’s a busy, competitive world. Many companies offer similar products. B2B buyers are barraged with promotional emails, cold calls, and webinar invitations.

How can sales enablement professionals prepare sales teams for this environment? Research shows that using a consultative approach is the most effective way to engage today’s buyers. It’s time to train your teams in these essential skills.

Developing Strategic Advisors

One of the biggest challenges facing sales teams is differentiating offerings. Sales professionals can’t afford to be perceived as just another vendor or service provider.

How do we overcome this difficulty? By making sure sales professionals are viewed as strategic advisors. Strategic advisors use a customer-focused approach to gain trust, build long-term relationships, and create loyal customers. They sell solutions, not transactions.

Identifying Key Consultative Skills

Becoming a strategic advisor starts with strong consultative selling skills. Companies that enable their sales teams to use a consistent, value-based sales process see remarkable performance improvements, including higher win rates, stronger customer relationships, and increased revenue.

To help sales enablement leaders equip their sellers, The Brooks Group’s Sales Performance Research Center measured sales professionals’ abilities for hundreds before and after sales training.

We compared pre- and post-training scores on the IMPACT Selling Skills Index® taken by sales professionals from B2B organizations in multiple industries.

Our new report, The Value-Driven Seller: Essential Skills for Consultative Sales, reveals areas weakest before training, improvements after training, and specific skill gaps.

The report also demonstrates that consultative selling skills are essential for driving sales performance. These skills include researching and qualifying prospects, building customer relationships, planning sales calls, questioning, objection handling, closing, and others.

Many sales organizations are adopting a consultative approach and providing sales enablement that targets these fundamental skills.

How to Improve Consultative Sales Skills

The IMPACT Selling Skills Index is a hard skills assessment that measures a sales professional’s knowledge of selling competencies within the IMPACT sales process context.

The IMPACT process has six steps: Investigate, Meet, Probe, Apply, Convince, and Tie-It-Up. This sequence guides sales professionals through strategic milestones while providing techniques to navigate each buyer interaction with confidence.

Here are three of our key findings:

1. Before Training, Sellers Lean Into Product Instead of Selling Value. Before training, sellers’ skills are strongest when presenting their products or services and validating sales claims by conducting demos, providing samples, testimonials, etc.

2. Before Training, Sellers Score Lowest on Discovery and Closing Skills. Before training, sellers score lowest on effective deal closing and discovery skills. Sellers are more focused on presenting a solution and conducting product demos than on understanding customer wants and needs.

3. After Training, Sellers Improve Both Discovery and Closing Skills. After training, sellers show gains in the initial portion of the sales process, indicating stronger skills in understanding the customer, which are foundational to a consultative sales approach. Sellers showed the most growth in closing skills, indicating improvements in broaching the sale and attaining agreement to move forward.

As these results indicate, when sellers improve in the early stages, they’re able to establish themselves as strategic advisors, present their solutions in ways that build value, and close business more effectively.

How to Apply Research Findings

Focus on Building Relationships. Make sure sales professionals can build long-term relationships beyond the initial sale to maintain their standing as trusted business partners.

Focus on Consultative Skills. Train sellers on core skills of a consultative sales approach: ask open-ended questions and practice active listening.

Focus on Skills Gaps. Use skills assessments to assess whether sellers have the skills to attain results so you can train appropriately.

Focus on Early-Stage Skills. Help redefine seller meetings. Teach them how to move from simply presenting products or services to understanding customer needs, asking for business, and overcoming late-stage stalls and objections.

Download your copy of The Value-Driven Seller: Essential Skills for Consultative Sales to learn how to transform sellers into strategic advisors and set them up to achieve long-term revenue gains.