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Consultative selling suggests that sales professionals think bigger and go beyond just recommending their products and services. They also offer their ideas, their perspectives, their insights, their suggestions, and even their warnings based their experience. An expression that I first heard in an executive business program at Columbia Business School has stayed with me for years: "It's not just what's in the bag, it's what's in your head."
Of course, consultative selling includes concepts like effective planning, building mutually beneficial relationships, resolving issues, gaining commitment, and following through effectively. But the essence of consultative selling is all about using problem solving skills to thoroughly understand clients in order to bring them outstanding solutions that address their business needs.
Before we introduce the consultative selling model and demonstrate its similarity to problem solving, there is one anecdote that illustrates the process better than any words, graphs, charts, models, or sequences ever could.
Jim Schwarz of Compass Management was the guy who let the customer off the hook when he was jammed and asked if this was still a good time to have the meeting. Jim spent most of his sales career in the packaged goods industry. One of his most exciting jobs was when he was a national sales manager for Pepsi. Shortly after he joined the company he was asked to manage selling Pepsi products to the airlines industry, which Coca-Cola dominated. Pepsi was trying frantically to break into that market and Jim was asked to make that happen.
Jim often tells the story of when he was about to call on Eastern Airlines. (Anybody remember Eastern? Frank Borman, the former astronaut, ran the company. "We have to earn our wings every day" was their memorable tag line.) They were a great airline in their day. Jim was preparing for his first sales call and had put together his sales presentation. They called them "decks" in those days. He had never even heard the term consultative selling at that time.
His presentation was impressive. It spoke about the Pepsi Challenge. It reviewed all the data about how customers preferred the taste of Pepsi. It explained how Pepsi had outsold Coke in most grocery stores. It had some impressive comparative data. It told a wonderful story about Pepsi, but it said little if anything about Eastern Airlines.
The only strategy that Pepsi had initiated was to try to offer Eastern pricing incentives. But anything they tried was met and enhanced by Coke. There was no way they could buy the business. Coca-Cola had deeper pockets than they did. They knew that.
Shortly before the presentation, Jim received a call from one of their marketing consultants, who suggested that Jim approach the call quite differently. He suggested that he not bring the deck. In fact, he suggested that Jim go into that initial meeting with Eastern with nothing but a pad and a pen. Jim smiles when he tells groups how shocked he was at such an off-the-wall recommendation. "Going into a sales meeting without a formal presentation would be unprofessional and unprepared. Like trying to sail without a rudder," Jim recalls. This was something he had never done and even thinking about this approach made him uneasy.
But the marketing consultant was quite persuasive and convinced Jim to do it. He offered to join Jim on the call. They flew to Miami (on an Eastern airplane, of course) and went to the meeting at Eastern's headquarters. The meeting was scheduled to last an hour. Present in the meeting were the VPs of Catering, Operations, Hospitality, Marketing, Inflight Services, and Procurement (called Purchasing in those days).
Jim and the consultant set the stage and said they were there to learn what they could about Eastern's situation. And then they started to ask questions. Lots of questions. Some they had prepared beforehand and others came up spontaneously as they went along. They learned about the company's challenges, their goals, their objectives, their customer base, and their opportunities. The hour meeting became a two-hour meeting, and Jim was blown away at how receptive the audience was and how eager they were to answer the questions. And he was thrilled at how positively the meeting had concluded. After the two hours Jim had dozens of pages of notes.
It was a great meeting and it felt productive, but when Jim returned to Pepsi headquarters the big question was "now what?" He had learned an awful lot about Eastern's situation, and was struck by the fact that their single biggest need was to fill the seats in the airplane. They made it clear that this was unequivocally the Biggest business issue they faced. If an airplane took off with 12 empty seats, that meant lost revenue that could not be reclaimed.
As Jim tells the story, "So Eastern needs to sell more plane tickets and I'm selling sugared, artificially flavored carbonated water. And I'm here to provide a solution. Uh-oh!"
But that's where the story gets interesting. Jim called a meeting with his team to figure out if there was a way to help Eastern sell tickets. Pepsi had many talented creative people - they always have - and when they attacked that task they generated many interesting ideas. One particularly intriguing suggestion was to tap into their bottling network. They had over 400 bottlers across the country. Consistent with the industry, when bottlers promoted their products they would often include giveaways, which they called "dealer loaders." Typical gifts ranged from television sets to bicycles to cameras. It was common practice. But it was getting a bit repetitive and didn't generate a whole lot of excitement. That provided the team with the opening.
They concluded that in the future, instead of offering another tired promotional item, their bottlers could buy coupons from Eastern to allow people to fly on Eastern at a discount. There were restrictions, of course, as there are today, but the idea enabled people to fly anywhere in the United States that Eastern flew at a lower cost. They thought this could be a new way to help the bottlers promote their products and help Eastern fill airline seats.
The bottlers loved it, and when the idea was presented to Eastern, they could not wait to sign up. It was a totally new and different approach and the airline was happy to switch from Coke to Pepsi if this would help sell tickets and reduce the number of empty seats on the airplanes.
Pepsi anticipated annual coupon sales of $700,000 from the promotion in the first year. Sales actually reached $2 million. More importantly, Pepsi won the business at Eastern. It was a classic win/win. Coke had nothing to match it. It changed the game.
Meet the author
Founder & CEO, the Baron group
* Baron is an adjunct professor at Columbia University Business School where he teaches Entrepreneurial Selling
* He has been training business professionals in creative problem solving, innovation, consultative selling, and sales management for more than thirty-five years. His clients include Fortune 500 companies and universities
* His first book, Selling Is a Team Sport, explains how sales teams can apply problem solving skills to both internal strategy sessions and sales interactions
Reprinted by permission of Wiley. Excerpted from Innovative Team selling: How To Leverage Your Resources and Make Team Selling Work. Copyright 2013 Eric Baron. All rights reserved
