Consultative selling is a philosophy rooted in building a relationship between you and your prospects, by asking questions, listening to their needs and personalizing your product or service to them.
Good sales is all about relationships. Practicing consultative selling instead of product-based selling helps you build longer-lasting relationships, which is the best way for your company to thrive in the competitive sales industry.
Below, you’ll find a concise consultative selling definition, a four-step practical guide and techniques that will help you use this strategy to drive more sales.
Key takeaways from consultative selling
Consultative selling is a customer-centric sales strategy in which you use conversations to learn as much as possible about the buyer before offering a personalized solution.
By focusing on the customer’s needs and truly understanding their challenges, you’ll build deeper trust and confidence that your recommendations will help.
To use consultative selling well, you need to position yourself as an authority, research your prospects, lead each conversation and build tailored offers.
A CRM system like Pipedrive helps you track customers and have more effective conversations. Try it free for 14 days.
What is consultative selling?
Consultative selling is the strategy of putting your relationship with your customer first, and worrying about selling them your product afterward.
At its core, the consultative selling approach focuses on your customer, their needs and their biggest pain points before you even think about offering up a product or service as a solution.
It builds a trusting customer relationship that helps you close deals and win repeat customers, even if it might take a little longer than getting right to the point.
Why consultative selling works
Sales is about building relationships. Using a process that prioritizes trust over quick wins makes logical sense, and the data backs it up.
B2B buyers are increasingly skeptical of vendor information. Forrester research found that vendor salespeople are among the lowest-trusted information sources in the entire B2B buying process.
That skepticism leads to low buying confidence, which means reps need to earn trust before they can earn a sale.
Consultative selling does exactly that. A rep who takes time to understand what a customer is looking for will always outperform one who goes straight for the hard sell.
In short, the time you and your sales team put into consultative selling will pay off in the long-run, because this sales methodology values customer relationships.
While using customer relationship management (CRM) software automates some of that work, you still need to build the concept of quality relationships into your sales strategy and your consultative selling training program.
Consultative selling vs. product-based selling
Despite the benefits of being able to tailor solutions to prospects, a consultative sales cycle is a very different beast from product-based solution selling.
Here’s how these two approaches differ:
Product-based selling approach | Consultative selling approach |
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When purchasing a product, buyers now look for a level of trust in the salesperson before they’re willing to spend any money. The more you earn that trust, the more likely you’ll land the sale.
Buyers are swamped with options and information about products and services, and trust in brands is low. Only 58% of consumers trust businesses, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.
Sales reps should put their customers first and products second to reap the rewards.
Benefits of consultative selling
Consultative selling takes more upfront effort than a traditional sales pitch, but the payoff is significant. Here are the main benefits:
Higher close rates. When you understand a prospect’s specific situation before proposing a solution, your pitch is more relevant and more likely to land. You’re not guessing at their needs; you’ve already confirmed them.
Stronger customer loyalty. Buyers who feel genuinely understood are more likely to return and refer others. A successful consultative selling approach builds the kind of trust that turns one-time deals into long-term relationships.
Lower price sensitivity. When the value of your solution is clear and tailored, price becomes less of an objection. Buyers focus on the outcome, not the cost.
Shorter sales cycles over time. The initial investment in relationship-building pays back quickly. Once you’ve built a reputation as a trusted advisor, prospects come to you with less convincing required.
Better fit, less churn. Because you’re only offering a solution when it genuinely fits, you end up with customers who are happy with what they bought, which means fewer cancellations and less reactive customer support.
The result is a sales approach that feels less like selling and more like problem-solving, which is exactly what today’s buyers are looking for.
So, how can a sales professional start using a consultative sales approach? Here’s a four-step guide to the consultative sales process.
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Make instant improvements to your lead qualification process with this four-step guide full of actionable sales advice.
Position yourself as a trusted authority
To build up the all-important trust with a prospect, they need to know that you practice what you preach. You need to be a trusted authority in your field, not just act like one.
In your prospect's eyes, you need to go from a salesperson to an expert. Here’s how to control that messaging.
1. Have evidence to back up what you say
You must be able to back everything you say to your prospects with evidence if you want to earn trust and gain a competitive advantage.
Whether this is during a consultative sales call or within your sales enablement content, make sure you always have evidence to back up any ideas or claims you’re making.
If you’re claiming to have 10,000 happy customers on your website, have some testimonials ready for your sales pitch to back up that figure.
Ask yourself:
Is there a gap in the industry that needs to be filled?
When it comes to my clients, what is their biggest pain point or challenge they want to overcome?
What are the unique sales skills that I can offer my customers for their benefit?
What problems and pain points did my previous clients share, and how did I solve them?
Answering these questions can help you to position yourself as a problem solver in your chosen industry.
2. Don’t shy away from criticism
Sooner or later, you’re going to receive criticism, and you should take it as a chance to improve.
When building yourself up as a trusted authority, it’s how you deal with that criticism that matters. Instead of hiding from it, respond to the comments thrown at you. Use the process to become a better salesperson.
Follow sales training best practices: don’t respond negatively and avoid having the last word when talking to an unhappy customer.
Responding to criticism is all about showing the public that you’re taking everyone’s opinions onboard, and that you care enough to respond.
3. Create great content and provide real value
Creating valuable content for your audience builds trust.
By creating content regularly, ensuring it aligns with your business’s value proposition and making sure your content delivers value to your prospect, you become more influential over time.
Some of the best ways to provide value through content are through:
High-quality blog posts
Shareable infographics
Case studies and whitepapers
E-books
Webinars
You don’t have to create content to gain the trust of your customers; curating content can help you become more influential as well.
Don’t shy away from sharing stories and information that will help your target audience overcome relevant challenges.
Conduct in-depth prospect research
Uncover as much information about the target account and prospect as possible, and have that information ready in your sales dashboard.
Researching prospects before contacting is one of the foundational consultative selling skills. It can be the difference in landing a new client and never having your phone calls returned.
Uncover key information about your prospect, including:
The size of the prospect’s company
Number of employees
Their average sale size or annual turnover
Their typical product or service offering
Their target market
A CRM like Pipedrive gives you a central place to log everything you uncover (company details, past interactions, notes from previous calls), so it’s all ready before you pick up the phone.
Here’s what a well-prepared prospect profile looks like in Pipedrive:
Look for in-depth information that sheds light on the problems your prospects face in their roles and organization.
Search for news or current event publications that mention their company and use this to form a comprehensive understanding of your client’s current state.
Who are their competitors? What content are they publishing, and have they established themselves as an authority? Are they using their social media channels?
The more time you invest in research before the first contact, the better positioned you’ll be to lead a meaningful conversation rather than a generic one.
Use sales prospecting tools designed to maximize efficiency and boost lead generation. The right software can take you so much further than your prospect’s LinkedIn profile.
Here’s a quick breakdown of some of the best solutions for prospect research that you can integrate with your CRM and other sales tools:
CallRoot: for better cold calling
With CallRoot, you can work out which campaign (online/offline) or keyword is generating the most sales calls.
You can also track and record incoming phone calls, dynamically insert tracking phone numbers and find the source of every incoming call.
Triggerbee: for building meaningful relationships
Track visitors to your website in real-time, see where they came from and accrue data to find out if they could potentially become a lead with Triggerbee.
It gives you website analytics to capture the behavior and interest of prospects, forms that collect visitor data and display relevant offers and content and integrations with Pipedrive so you can do everything from your CRM without switching context.
Sellscope: for reaching key stakeholders
Lead databases go out of date very quickly, so to get high-quality data you often need to do a lot of time-consuming research yourself.
Instead, identify key decision makers with Sellscope, a company that provides you with a team of specialized researchers who build, define and segment lead databases.
In addition to enriching the lead data in your list, Sellscope can also identify other companies that could fit the bill.
Social selling or building relationships with prospects directly through platforms like LinkedIn is a natural extension of the consultative approach.
Instead of cold outreach, you’re starting conversations with people who’ve already engaged with your content, which means trust is already forming before the first call.
Connect Pipedrive to LinkedIn via the Pipedrive Marketplace to track those social interactions alongside the rest of your prospect research.
Lead the conversation
When talking to a prospect, it’s important to ask the right questions at the right time before bringing up pricing or too many details about your product. Focus on solutions to their problems first and foremost.
During these sales conversations, prospects need to be heard. Being pushy in a conversation or not offering help to a prospect when you initially approach them can quickly decrease your chances of closing a deal.
Always lead a conversation with a prospect by asking questions. Understanding a customer’s needs is crucial in a consultative selling approach, and asking the right questions is the only way to get a glimpse of how to solve their problems.
Start with the simple consultative selling questions:
Is your prospect happy with their current vendor?
What is the biggest challenge in their business right now?
Have they shown interest in learning more about your product?
Is there a genuine need for your product?
Is your product within their price range?
Be ready to think on your feet and come up with a list of your own investigative questions that, when answered, could lead to another line of conversation.
For example, if you ask your prospect what their biggest challenge as a business is, and they answer with something that can’t be fixed by your product, that’s fine.
Use it to learn more about their company and make the most of the opportunity to connect with your prospect by lending them a listening ear.
If your product offers a solution, use this as an opportunity to subtly highlight it.
Pipedrive’s CRM email tracking automatically logs every call and email against a contact record, so when you follow up, you’re continuing the conversation, not starting from scratch.
Make sure you ask probing questions that show you have a genuine interest in their business and a desire to understand the root cause of their problems.Eventually, you’ll be able to question your prospect on what they want to achieve with your product.
Build a tailored solution
The biggest challenge reps face is (usually) closing more deals. However, your prospect doesn’t care about your problems. They’ve got their own to take care of. Make sure you focus on their problems, not your own.
Building a tailored solution for your prospect is a three-part process.
1. Fully understand your prospect’s needs
Let’s say you’re trying to close a marketing deal with a prospective client. If a prospect has repeatedly said their Head of Marketing is keen to increase website conversions, it should become your focus.
In your pitch, focus on how you can help your prospect lift conversion rates and measure them successfully so they can show the rest of their team.
This will help them to see that their problem will be solved with a tailored solution.
2. Immerse yourself in your customer’s pain points
Prospects are much more likely to buy a product based on emotion, especially when it comes to closing B2B sales.
In fact, the LinkedIn State of Sales Report highlights that 72% of top performers, who meet quotas of 125% or higher, say they “always” put the buyer’s needs first.
If you can position your product to give them personal value and tap into the emotions behind their decision-making process, it will be worth double the value to the prospect.
Aim to connect with your prospect about how they feel in their role, and weave your product into the conversation. The overall goal is to show them that you can help them shine in front of their colleagues (and their boss).
Let’s take the prospect with the marketing deal. They want to increase sales conversions while also getting their Head of Marketing off their back.
Talk to them about how your solution to his problem won’t only solve his conversion problems, but also make them look like heroes in front of their boss, too. You’ve created a win-win situation.
3. Show your product in action
Closing a pitch shouldn’t be a case of rattling off a list of product or service features and crossing your fingers that your prospect will come on board.
You need to give your prospects the chance to experience your solution themselves and then make a decision in their own time.
For example, to win over a prospect who wants to look good in front of their Head of Marketing, show them relevant results rather than just listing your product features.
Use your years of experience to highlight a relevant case study that solved similar pain points, such as increasing conversions and website traffic. Present your evidence through screenshots or analytics charts to demonstrate you can solve the prospect’s pain point.
By doing your homework in the lead-up to closing a deal, you’re more likely to hit a home run.
Pipedrive in action: M&A advisory firm Raincatcher uses consultative selling to manage high-stakes deals that often take over a year to close.
It uses Pipedrive to track every conversation with clients throughout that process, building a detailed relationship history that lets advisors walk into any meeting fully prepared.
Knowing your client deeply enough that they trust you with a decision worth millions pays off. In just 18 months with Pipedrive, Raincatcher doubled the value of its pipeline from $100 million to over $200 million.
Consultative selling examples: the 3 principles of consultative selling in practice
The most effective consultative sellers have three things in common: they research deeply, ask the right questions and listen more than they talk.
Here’s a real-world consultative selling example of what that looks like in practice.
Lou Diamond, president and CEO of the salesperson development firm FOBIA, was conducting a workshop for Merrill Lynch financial advisors.
During a role-play exercise (a consultative service strategy you can use to great effect in your own sales meetings), one advisor had been struggling to win over an elderly woman who refused to manage her finances despite the risk to her family.
After going back and forth with no progress, he finally stood up and said: “Don’t you see? I care more about your money than you do.”
“The whole room went, ’Wow,’” Diamond recalled. “He not only said it, he believed it.”
That authenticity is the defining quality of a good consultative seller. As Diamond puts it: “You need to be coming from who you are first, then making it all about them.”
With that in mind, here are the three principles of consultative selling: research, ask and listen. Each one comes with practical sales techniques you can apply immediately:
Technique | When to use it |
Mirror and validate | When a prospect raises a concern or objection |
SPIN questioning | During discovery calls to uncover real needs |
Lead with insight | At the opening of a first meeting or cold outreach |
Embrace the pause | After any open-ended question, especially in early conversations |
Recap and confirm | At the end of each call or meeting before next steps |
The principles give you the mindset. The techniques give you the tools. Together, they form the foundation of an effective consultative selling approach.
1. Research
Before initiating contact with potential customers, it’s wise to devote ample time to researching them and their business.
Part of that research is lead qualification. Is this person interested in my product? Do they have the authority and the budget to make a purchasing decision?
Another part is competitive research. Which products, besides yours, might the buyer be considering? What do those products have that yours don’t? What does yours have that theirs doesn’t?
Proper research means becoming an expert in the buyer’s business and anticipating any and all questions the buyer may ask.
Lead with insight: One way to put that research to use is to open your first meeting with a single insight about their business or industry that they may not have considered. It immediately positions you as an advisor rather than a vendor.
With this technique, you’ll always enter the conversation with every conceivable answer at the ready.
2. Ask
The buyer has the full picture of what they need – you don’t. The only way to get it is to ask the right questions.
SPIN questioning: One proven framework for structuring consultative selling questions is SPIN selling: situation, problem, implication, need-payoff.
Start broad (what does your current setup look like?), move to the problem (what’s not working?), explore the implications (what’s that costing you?) and finish with the need-payoff (what would it mean to solve that?).
Imagine you’re selling data backup and recovery software. You might begin the conversation with a basic question, such as:Can you walk me through your backup process?
Then, use their answer to drill into more detail. Do you backup daily? How much time do you spend on daily backups? What happens next? Are your backups completing properly? Have you ever lost any data? Did you lose business?
By starting with the basics and drilling into specifics, you can begin to frame your questions around what your solution does differently.
3. Listen (actively)
The better you are at asking questions, the less you’ll need to say and the more listening you’ll need to do.
Truly understanding requires active listening, which helps you absorb what your prospect is saying (and isn’t saying). An active listener can read the subtext of the conversation. They can pick up verbal and nonverbal cues to flesh out their understanding.
Consider these active listening tips and techniques:
Remove distractions, take notes and give the buyer your full attention
Ask open-ended questions and resist the urge to fill the silence by pausing before responding
Show you’re listening with brief acknowledgments (“OK,” “Right”) and occasional clarifying questions (“Can you expand on that?”)
Paraphrase what you heard to confirm understanding: “If I’m understanding correctly, you’re saying...”
Mirror, validate and embrace the pause: Two consultative selling techniques that reinforce active listening: mirroring – briefly reflecting a prospect’s concern back to them before responding – and embracing the pause.
After asking a question, resist the urge to fill the silence. The most useful information often comes after the first answer.
Make sure to listen to the buyer’s values.
Do they put particular importance on their team’s welfare, or are they more concerned about themselves?
Do they value low cost over high quality or vice versa?
If you practice active listening, you’ll have learned much but said little.
Want to Learn How to Influence Your Prospect’s Buying Decisions?
How to use consultative selling to close more deals
You’ve done your research, built a relationship and listened. Now it’s time to complete the final two steps in the consultative selling process to drive the sale home.
1. Communicate your “reason why”
Every good consultative seller has a reason why: a genuine belief that their solution will help the person in front of them. That’s what separates advisors from salespeople.
Communicating your reason requires a soft touch. Rather than stating your reasoning outright, let it color the conversation; be enthusiastic and empathetic; don’t be afraid to challenge the buyer over something you truly believe in; be authentic.
2. Follow up
Closing a deal can take time.
The buyer may need to bring your solution to their team for input. They may need to speak with their CEO to determine whether your solution aligns with their business strategy.
Part of following up involves helping the buyer work out the finer points. Patience is the key.
If you asked good questions, actively listened and took comprehensive notes during the initial conversation, following up will be a matter of translating the information gathered into top-of-mind opportunities.
For example, if a week goes by without a word from the buyer, consider sending them an article that ties in with something they mentioned when you last spoke. If another week goes by, send them something else.
If a few weeks go by and still no word, email the buyer with a question, such as:
“What is your timeline?”
“Do you need anything else?”
“Are other decision makers involved?”
“Can you jump on a 10-minute call?”
Always be thinking about how to build on the initial contact. What will interest them? What will entertain them? What will help them? Perhaps most importantly, what is relevant to them?
Pipedrive’s activity and goals reminders and automation mean you never have to rely on memory to stay top of mind.
This functionality ensures that every follow-up is tracked, scheduled and tied to the conversation that preceded it.
Before ending any conversation, summarize what you heard and confirm it’s accurate. It keeps both parties aligned, reduces the risk of misaligned proposals and gives you a clear bridge to the next step.
Final thoughts
To nail consultative selling, you need to work hard to understand the buyer’s unique needs and objectives.
The process takes in-depth research, listening without hard-selling and building an authentic, personalized relationship.
A CRM like Pipedrive supports every stage of that process, from building rich prospect profiles before the first call, to logging conversations as they happen, to automating follow-ups that keep relationships warm.
Try Pipedrive’s 14-day free trial to see how it can turn generic sales conversations into a reliable engine for closing deals.
