Empower Your Sales Team with the Consultative Selling Model for Sales

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on today's episode of marketing with moxie we'll be going over consultative selling and marketing through the first three of six phases research ask and listen are you ready to listen hi there I'm Amanda Rosen and I'm Alex Rosen and this is marketing youth moxie a podcast about the intersection of sales and digital marketing and business twice a week we'll share tips tactics and strategies designed to keep you relevant visible and profitable let's get to this week's episode [Music] hello and welcome to marketing with moxie today's episode is going to be the first in a series of two on consultative selling and marketing we're going to try to give equal time to how this applies to the sale side and the marketing side as well as b2b and b2c I've been in sales for over a decade so I'm super pumped to talk about this shift things have certainly changed since the old way cold calls sales demos and qualifying leads and maybe getting a close in there it was kind of sales 1.0 Amanda when was the last time you were given one of those poor telemarketing sales feels oh I would say anytime someone's come to our house to try to sell us something like I'm specifically thinking of the people that come and they just try to cold sell you on why you need their lawn care and they've never taken any time to figure out like what exactly it is that you need they just knock on your door and they always come at dinnertime when everything's chaos inconvenient they don't really care they're just there to sell their lawn care stuff and it's really irritating well things have changed so let's start with a refresher of the concept here in this sales 2.0 era so what is consultative selling so this is a method in which the salesperson spins the time with the customer to understand their needs and underlying problems that they're trying to solve then they recommend a solution and/or aspects of their service or product that will specifically address that problem so indeed this is solution based selling this isn't selling by pushing right to the product or service now the solution is hopefully found in the product or service ultimately but it's important that the focus is more collaboratively finding out how the solution addresses what the customer actually needs not what we presume they need yeah so it's interesting because it's like even if your product ends up not being the best solution for them you're still going through this process with them I would say that we do apply consultative selling as a marketer I guess you could call a consultative marketing it's content marketing 101 it's inbound marketing it's about using content that's on point that's created with the consumer in mind whoever your ideal client or consumer or customer is and then combining that information with actual consumer research so you're using their words and phrases and your marketing yeah so in my work experience this has been an industry shift so much so that sales reps are no longer called sales reps but learning consultants and if you break that down to the two words in the title the stress is on facilitating learning about solutions and consulting or collaborating on how those solutions could meet needs we in fact have industry trainers in place to specialized in teaching new employees about this sales methodology and I know that there's actually you know like several notable sales training companies out there that people outsource to get you know employees up to speed but probably the most notable pioneer and advocate for this methodology and the founder of one of those sales training companies is Linda Richardson it's a New York Times best selling author I think she's now a faculty member at the Wharton School of Business at U of Philadelphia and you know in fact many call consultative selling the Richardson method of selling and I recommend one of her mini books she put out it's called changing the sales conversation now they aren't a sponsor but I'll put a link in the show notes to anybody that's interested in checking out that book for sure but in most iterations of this method there our certain principles and steps one works through as part of the sales process we'll look at an outline that has six steps in particular research ask listen teach qualify and then you come in for the close today's episode we're going to be covering the first three research ask and listen so let's start with research Amanda you love research right I remember reading all of your papers in college yes I love research and in fact I loved it so much that one of my most memorable memories that I have is getting in Carta on cd-rom in the 90s and sitting at our family computer desk and reading all the entries out loud to the delight of my parents like I was a news broadcaster don't you feel so lucky Alex that this person right here is your wife well in full disclosure I had the Encyclopedia Britannica set growing up this it's like leather-bound you know really impressive books let me tell you I think we're dating ourselves by all these amazing 90s references here the 90s was a magic time so presuming you have prospected out your potential clients you'll want to gather intelligence on your actionable lead so you're in spy mode at this point cue the Mission Impossible theme music Alex no no no dinner how was that that's great you should know that Alex wrote that entire thing out phonetically on our script so he wouldn't mess it up and I really hope I didn't break copyright with that so please don't sue us Paramount Pictures I was a little pitchy so hopefully that changed the tune enough I think it I think you're good though so at this type of research it depends on whether you're targeting b2b or b2c which if you are not familiar with these acronyms its business-to-business so you're a business serving another business or b2c as business-to-consumer yerba serving consumers yeah so in my work I'm definitely more I feel like more b2b since I work with higher education faculty and whole academic institutions there and you know often research you know someone in particular on a school website or directory you know to look at their education background and their research emphases where their passion is basically and there will be people that hold the decision-making power for sure so in my case this would be department chairs and Dean's but that could just as easily be applied to other industries where you have people in the corporate ladder that hold the keys to purchasing an adoption power and it depends on the size of the company right Amanda right yes so if you're a company that's you know around one to 50 employees it's probably the owner or the founder who's doing these types of decisions if it's a company a little bit larger like the 100 to 500 employee range it could be a VP of a specific department or someone in charge of IT like if you're selling software or if you are like you know upwards of 500 employees to the much higher level then you will have entire departments that have their own budgets that have their own hierarchy and those are the people that you'll be targeting I just want to take a moment here and say that it's really important to call out that many times b2b sales and marketing teams think of the business they're targeting as just this vague entity instead of as the people that actually run the business because businesses are run by people and what alex has said about researching an individual faculty member or someone with the decision-making power that's how you can characterize that business that you're targeting and that's how you can tailor your messaging to appeal to a person also just consider the fact that even businesses have cultures which you can learn about by reading their mission statement on their site or reading what's on their about page or just you know looking around at their website and seeing how they've structured it you can also learn their brand voice by visiting their social media pages these are all clues about their business culture so by familiarizing yourself with the culture you'll also know how to better research and then position yourself for this phase and other phases of sales and marketing so the main thing to keep in mind is to make sure you know who holds the ultimate buying power which side topic LinkedIn is a really powerful resource for that so you can always go on to LinkedIn and check the company page see who the employees are and you can probably find out from their need to learn that better yeah link we should do a whole episode about link yeah otherwise you might be wasting your time if you aren't familiar izing yourself with the business at least with their culture like an overarching level unless whoever you're talking to can be made into some kind of advocate for your product and help you get your foot in the door yeah so I've done this plenty of times like getting a rapport and buy-in from someone who can serve as my voice to the key decision-maker it's better to hear it from one of their own than an outsider I mean that's at least what I always think so Amanda what's been your experience though with effective research gathering for like b2c yeah so when you're in the b2c space it's a little trickier but you can focus your search on social media behaviors of your ideal client the pages that people are visiting on your website you can kind of go back to the research that you've done when you are coming up with who your ideal client is and think about their typical hobbies and their interests and that will sort of give you a baseline of things that you can talk about you can also focus on their age range because there are different generational qualities like people in a certain generation are going to look at psychology pricing for example in a totally different way some other ways that you can think about this is by checking your sales funnel and kind of troubleshooting it so where their drop-offs and your funnel there's always going to be a drop-off so checking to what see what's happening there you can also use heat maps to research where visitors are clicking on your website that'll give you a really good idea of how they're using your website and then you can kind of pivot from there surveys are also a really powerful tool you can do this in several ways you can obviously send a survey via email to your current customers and use the research that you get from there to help you target new customers but you can also use something called an exit intent pop-up which we've all seen this when you start when you're on a desktop most often and your mouse moves up to the upper corner of the webpage a little pop-up will come up and usually it's for you to download something or maybe you get a coupon well you could use that as a survey and it could just be something about what made you to change your mind about purchasing today so these are all ideas that you can use so I mean like after you've done this needed research and you know who your target client and customer is your key decision maker you're ready to start the conversation with them basically and that brings us to the next consultative selling step which is ask or asking and this is where your first actual interaction with the customer occurs and what distinguishes this as consultative selling is the kind of questions you ask which are open-ended so you aren't simply asking whether or not your product looks like something they would buy instead you're asking questions that would elicit even more information to get through their stated needs so I'm gonna try something here so everyone can remember that particular phrase because it is very important Amanda are you ready yes when I say stated you say need stated need stated needs well anyway so Amanda and I have decided to pull a Joaquin Phoenix circa 2010 and start a rap career I mean it what would our rap duo be called oh um we'll scheme because I like yarn that's terrible I got one what about Postma student loans Nepos Malone that's what the he's easy the Millennials will tell are talking about these were Millennials should know that I'm not good I'm a self-loathing millennial I guess so going back to our stated means chant an open-ended question gets you a paragraph or a multi paragraph response from the person you're speaking with which you can then mine for so much more information including a whole plethora of stated me word bonus so a closed-ended question gives you a yes or no and often shuts down or slows the flow of the conversation so Alex can you give some examples of good open-ended questions so here are some iterations I guess you could say if like some that I have said in the course of my sales career so I might be talking to a customer and I'd say like I'd love to better understand your departments needs as they stand now so what are some key goals of your department or I might say what is currently holding you back from reaching those goals or I have many customers reporting issues with X Y & Z how are these things affecting your department or if we could overcome these challenges what kind of impact would that have for the department and what do you see as the ideal future what does that success look like to you now to recommend coming up with a you know like a general go-to list of these kinds of questions you know I have some literally as printed wallpaper in my cubicle you know I work in an office but you know if you're doing this in marketing I mean some of these things you can have this kind of quick parts when you're developing email templates and you're trying to you know kind of get people thinking sometimes that's the you know the point of these things and maybe even not to to get the answer immediately but to get them thinking about what the answer to these things might be these are big questions to ask and if you are going to be talking you know two o'clock and I recommend you know verbalizing these things practice with a friend these kinds of questions and see what feels natural in like a mock sale situation I mean you have to put your own spin on it and actually feel comfortable asking these kinds of questions you know because you're the one who's going to be taking ownership of that conversation but if you really think about those questions that I gave examples of they're getting information toward a holistic picture so that's how things have been going the past how things are going now the present and what do you want things to look like down the road the future so Amanda in b2c like digital marketing you know like how do you ask these questions to customers and what questions do you ask so some examples of questions that you would ask in b2c or in even b2b marketing you wouldn't always directly ask them unless you were doing some sort of survey or something like that one way you can ask is by being really thoughtful from a customer experience side about the structure and organization of your website especially your navigation and well no that's not a direct question but your consumers are coming to your website with questions on their mind that they want answered and they expect your website to answer those questions so you can preemptively answer them by being very thoughtful about what you have in your top navigation what you have on your homepage your homepage really should answer a lot of those questions up front it really shouldn't be the way that many businesses position their homepage which is just kind of like hey welcome to my site without any further information so that's one way to do it you could also use heat maps which I referenced earlier and if you're not familiar what a heat map tool is it's a tool that uses a tracking code and it doesn't track users specifically it anonymously tracks their tivity on your website by either the where their finger is going or where their mouse is going it's really cool and it literally doesn't like heat pick heat picture like so the parts that are really hot on your website that are getting lots of clicks lots of taps will be very red and then you'll kind of see like as your homepage Scrolls down that trails away but it really shows you where the questions are where their holes with what you've got on your website that questions are not being answered and your sales funnel will kind of help you answer those questions too and I talked about that earlier as well but you can check out where consumers or customers seem to be falling off in the funnel that's showing you where there's a problem or where there are questions that need to be answered in you're leaving gaps there the other place where you can literally ask questions are on your social media channels on those places it's very natural to foster conversation and you can ask open-ended questions you can ask for their opinion you can put up polls those kinds of fun things that really do get people talking and not only will that give you information from a research perspective but it will also just get the engagement going which is always a good algorithm signal for social channels and then the last way that you can really do this is by asking for reviews you can do this post purchase experience through your automated emails that go out after they've received the product and then you can use that feedback to shape the experience for new customers so when you have this whole picture of your customer you kind of know a story right it's a story of you know what they've been struggling with where they are at that moment and where they want to be and in that story should be the details you actually need and how do you gain these details well that's through the next phase of consultative selling which is listening so or the listen phase so after you ask your awesome open into questions its key to not just listen in consultative selling just as it is you know just having the information coming to your ears but to actively listen that's the keyword actively so this means keeping an ear open to listen for either direct or indirectly stated needs remember the chant when I say you're supposed to say stated ah see I already messed it up no rhythm anyway stated needs often needs are indirectly found so you have to ask further qualifying questions to get to them so I like to imagine like you have a pickaxe and you're mining for these giant gold nuggets that are just a few feet away and it may take several swipes to get there you might get there with one swipe but you know often you know you have to kind of get to the need behind a need Amanda do you have a like an awesome metaphor for this yes how about when our dog Aslan is has buried some piece of tree inside of our count like a piece of old grilled cheese yeah that's usually wedding that our baby threw on the floor and he's buried it under the couch or in a blanket yeah a little bit of mold on there - there's not mold on there there's not mold but you know definitely fuzz on there but my favorite metaphor is gold I like the gold I like the digging metaphor you know and you know it's the consultative selling way of saying you know it's like Alec Baldwin's character and Glengarry Glen Ross oh you know he says ABC always be closing except in this case it's a BL always be listening you have to listen like you're going to be tested on it you know and that's not passive where you're kind of like waiting for your time to jump in and regurgitate or feature dump it a customer you need to be ready to almost repeat verbatim what they said and sometimes that is a technique that helps actually repeating back some of the stated needs to the customer you know not only for you know your benefit but also to show you're genuinely listening you know you might say so to confirm you are saying that the cost and accessibility you know factors are the two most pressing concerns or to clarify you're most interested in adopting something that has a low learning curve and a lot of support for implementation so besides that you know like I guess tone pitch enthusiasm these are all things cues that if you had the benefit obviously if talking to a customer in person or on the phone you might be able to get those cues and if in person you get that benefit of body language as well which it's its own thing you know we could deep dive into in a later time but sometimes you don't have the benefit of being on the phone or in person you know especially in the world of digital marketing but there are ways that you can listen to customers so Amanda like what are ways that listening is done in the digital marketing realm yeah so it definitely does happen I think what you've touched on here is in marketing what we call the transformation so you're marketing to the transformation your client will experience after their they've worked with you after they've bought your product or they've bought your service and you're listening for the cues that will help you open their eyes to that transformation that it's what they've been looking for is I think the thing that we can sometimes forget as salespeople or as marketers is that our clients and customers are not buying products and services they're purchasing a transformation so it's really our job to help them visualize that and that's why this model of selling and this model of marketing really works so to answer your question about specific types of listening you can there's several ways you can do this so my clients who sell actual products or even if they sell info products like courses or things like that I really do recommend that they get on the phone with their customers and interview them or even if you don't have any customers at this time find some people that you can get a little mini focus group going and offer to treat them to coffee and just ask them questions interview them and figure out what it is that they're looking for so that you can tailor what you're going to be providing to your the needs of your client base or your customers so that it actually resonates with them you'll get so much valuable information from these interviews and then you'll also get literal words that they're speaking then you can then pull specific phrases and words use it in your copy use it in your marketing put it on your website use it to build out the FAQ use it in the product description all that stuff as for actual listening there are tools called social listening tools that a marketer or business owner can use or a sales team can use some of them are paid there's tools like HootSuite or sprout social they're pretty robust and they also have like scheduling capabilities for your social media posts but you can just start small with something free like setting up some Google Alerts and what all this does is you'll receive an email anytime somebody mentions the specific things that you want to track so social listening is not literally brands or businesses spying on you and trying to see what you're talking about it's them tracking specific phrases such as like their actual brand name or their business name their product name certain keywords or strings of keywords or even their competitors if they're curious what their competitors are doing and the purpose of that is to find the conversations that are involving their brand their business their product their service that they may not be aware of because they're not being specifically involved in them as a first person but they still want to know especially if there's a problem and they want to have the opportunity to address it and then not to keep repeating this over and over again but serving is such a powerful tool and I I've been shinned it many many times but you really should survey you should figure out ways that you can survey there's so many ways you can build it in and the information is just invaluable okay the last thing that I really want to emphasize is actually two things if you hear a snoring sound it's my dog here our dog he's laying beside us and he snores microphones I know you never know what they're gonna pick up he's old and he's snoring right now so you might hear him and then the other thing don't quite have our podcast studio full disclosure we're in our kitchen right now you know just know you don't have to be fancy you just need microphones some laptops and that's it no we're keeping it real so okay so he's no longer snoring he's walked away so I'll get back to my other yeah we were talking about which is if you're in b2b or b2c really what I think all of us boils down to everything alex has talked about everything I've talked about as just being so in tune with your customer or your ideal client at multiple levels that when they come across you or they have the opportunity to speak with you on a sales call that they feel at home with you that they're comfortable with you and you've created a film familiarity with them and they're ready to just see what you've got to say and you can do that through so many different levels on your website your messaging your sales calls your emails all of it just learning about your customer and what he or she needs so to ramp up the listen portion then I'd like to share a personal technique that I like to do so in my case I'm mostly on the phone with customers and what I'll do is I'll get out a piece of paper and as I hear a stated need from them I write it down and that's column one on the left hand side of the paper then I look at that bulleted list of needs and then on the right hand side of the paper I list some specific features or aspects of the product or solution that I'm selling that I believe might best meet the stated needs so only things that I think would apply and then it's just a matter of drawing a dotted line from one to the other so Amanda do you remember giving exams in college and high school like those matching problem types it's kind of like what this is so it's you know matching author to a genre of literature they write or gosh I don't match a Pokemon to their evolved form that's a terrible example it was a terrible example did you go to Pokemon school and I didn't know about it I did it's my pokemons voice Amanda what do you call an devolved sales Pokemon I don't know Alex Rosen so if I throw a ball at you you will be trapped inside of it not just like any ball it [Music] throw like a medicine ball at me or something catch it's a radio drama devolved into plot twist all right okay all right so no we're done with the Pokemon we're putting that behind us and we're gonna leave off it for today's episode at this point and the customer sales journey with consultative selling so as a recap we've covered up through figuring out what the customers needs are but now the question is what do you do with those needs you'll have to tune in next week to our thrilling episode where you'll learn what few final steps come before the close and you'll also learn who the smoke monster was and lost there's the guy with my wife only Charles people there's the guy all right we'll hash you the sound off thanks for listening [Music]