Summary
Our research has shown that the traditional selling skills taught to sales professionals are not strong differentiators between high and low sales performance, particularly in the case of complex sales that involve multiple influencers and decision-makers. In fact, we often find that sophisticated buyers are aware of conventional sales techniques and may be negatively influenced by their use. This two-day program teaches a three-part process that enables sales professionals to: uncover key customers business issues and problems without subjecting buyers to a series of predictable questions; develop credibility and trust; minimize objections and prepare customers for internal selling. The goal of this program is to help salespeople become an integral part of the client's problem-solving team; someone who is valued by clients for understanding and meeting the client's business interests. This program can be expanded to two-and-a-half days by including the Sales Practices Survey that enables sales people to compare their self-assessments with direct customer feedback on their effectiveness against critical key customer-driven performance measures.

“Simple” selling, where the amount of the sale is low, the product is a commodity, and competitive offerings are well understood by the buyer, can be done effectively with traditional selling skills. But selling today’s professional services, high-tech products and intangibles, which usually involves closing high-value transactions with multiple decision-makers, requires a different set of skills. In fact, traditional selling skills may work against the sale!

The sales professional’s role is changing. We expect them to learn and understand our business, our objectives, and our needs. We expect them to help solve the problems we encounter, rather than simply sell us a product or service. We dismiss those who fail to do so.

Course Outcomes
Sales professionals who complete this program acquire and strengthen the skills they need to move from simple to complex selling transactions. They adopt consultative roles, developing an in-depth understanding of their clients’ business issues and needs through the use of strategic questioning skills. Instead of presenting features as responses to objections, many present benefits as solutions. Specifically, they:

• Learn to use different approaches to simple and complex selling opportunities;
• Manage effectively each of the stages of the consultative sales process;
• Use an effective questioning model to improve their success rates;
• Develop specific questions to use with individual products/services to identify customer needs;
• Develop more sophisticated approaches to differentiating their product/service from the competition, including helping their customers to see the product benefits that create their competitive advantage;
• Develop presentations that help customers feel good about making decisions; and
• Identify and perform key activities that leverage their success and build consistency. 

As a result of implementing this program in your sales organization you can expect more sales, higher-value sales, stronger client relationships leading to more repeat sales, and higher sales team productivity.

This program utilizes a combination of learning activities to take participants beyond learning about the concepts and practices of consultative selling to actually experiencing and applying them in their own job situations.