When I was a sales leader, I used to ask candidates during interviews how they would describe their selling style and most would answer ‘consultative’.
Yet when I asked them to explain what that actually meant, very few could give me a clear answer of what consultative selling actually was.
The term itself is hardly new. Mack Hanan wrote a book called Consultative Selling back in 1970.
Personally, I’d associate much of his approach more closely with what we now call value-based selling, although the two share many of the same principles.
I believe consultative selling is one of the most misunderstood approaches in the sales profession. It’s not simply about asking a few discovery questions before launching into your sales pitch.
It’s about using your experience and professional judgement to help buyers understand their problems and make better decisions.
In this article, I’ll explain what consultative selling really means, why so many salespeople get it wrong and how you can improve your sales results by applying it properly.
Table of Contents
- What is Consultative Selling?
- The Benefits of Consultative Selling
- Who Should Use Consultative Selling
- How Consultative Selling Works
- Consultative Selling Example
- Final Thoughts
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Consultative Selling Training
- About the Author
- Related B2B Sales Articles
Key Takeaways
Consultative selling is about thinking like a consultant, not just acting like a salesperson. I believe the best approach is to understand the buyer’s situation, offer honest advice and recommend what’s right for them, rather than simply trying to make a sale.
Understanding a problem isn’t the same as understanding what’s causing it. Good consultative selling means asking the right questions to uncover the root cause, establish the business impact and determine whether the problem is important enough for the buyer to take action.
Not every buyer with a problem represents a genuine sales opportunity. Sometimes your solution isn’t suitable, and sometimes the buyer has no real urgency to act. Knowing when to recommend your solution and when to walk away is what separates genuine consultants from salespeople who are simply chasing deals.
What is Consultative Selling?
Consultative selling is a sales approach where you act as a trusted adviser, using questions, experience and professional judgement to understand a buyer’s problems before recommending a solution.
Rather than concentrating on what you want to sell, you concentrate on what the buyer needs to achieve and how you can help them get there.
My interpretation of consultative selling is quite simple.
I believe salespeople should approach their conversations like experienced consultants who charge by the hour.
Imagine somebody had already paid you for an hour of your professional advice.
You wouldn’t need to spend that hour trying to convince them to buy something.
Your responsibility would be to understand their circumstances, work out what was causing their problems and offer the best advice you could.
That’s how I want salespeople to think.
Of course, you’re still a salesperson. You have targets to achieve, opportunities to create and products or services to sell. I’m not suggesting you forget any of that.
What I’m suggesting is that your recommendations should be based on what’s right for the buyer, not simply what you happen to sell.
Sometimes those two things will align perfectly. Sometimes they won’t.
A good consultant is comfortable with both.
The Benefits of Consultative Selling
One of the challenges we face as salespeople is that buyers often have certain expectations about how we’re going to behave.
They expect us to ask questions, identify something we can sell them and launch into a carefully rehearsed presentation.
And, to be fair, plenty of salespeople do exactly that.
A consultative approach challenges those expectations.
When you take a genuine interest in understanding somebody’s situation, ask thoughtful questions and offer advice based on your experience, you begin to demonstrate that you’re more than somebody who knows how to present a product.
You become somebody whose judgement the buyer can value.
That matters because buyers aren’t always certain what’s causing their problems or which solution will help them most.
They might know something isn’t working, but they don’t necessarily understand why.
Your experience can help them make sense of it.
There’s a commercial benefit for you, too. The better you understand the buyer’s situation, the more accurately you can qualify the opportunity and position your solution.
You also become much better at recognising when there’s no genuine opportunity to pursue.
However, there’s an important catch.
I’ve seen plenty of salespeople behave like consultants during the opening minutes of a discovery call, only to abandon the approach the moment they hear something their product can fix.
The consultative cape comes off, and out comes the salesperson, ready to close the deal.
They’ve heard enough to justify a presentation, but not enough to justify their recommendation.
Perhaps the problem is relatively minor. Perhaps the buyer has more pressing priorities. They might not even have any intention of doing something about it.
A genuine consultative approach means being willing to hear those answers and allow them to influence what you recommend next.
That’s where professional judgement becomes more valuable than a good sales pitch.
Who Should Use Consultative Selling?
I believe consultative selling should be a natural part of any sales process where buyers need help understanding their problems or deciding how best to solve them.
It’s particularly valuable in B2B sales, especially when selling software, technology, professional services or other solutions where the buyer’s individual circumstances determine whether your offering is suitable.
A product that delivers outstanding results for one company could be completely unsuitable for another. That’s why understanding the buyer’s situation is so important.
You don’t need to be selling six-figure enterprise contracts to take a consultative approach, either.
Sometimes a handful of well-chosen questions will tell you everything you need to know. Other situations might require several conversations with different people across an organisation.
The important thing is to match the depth of your consultation to the complexity of the decision.
If somebody knows exactly what they want and simply needs you to process an order, there’s little value in dragging them through a lengthy discovery process.
That’s not consultative selling. That’s making someone’s life unnecessarily difficult.
How Consultative Selling Really Works
I don’t believe every sales conversation should follow an identical script. Buyers have different needs, personalities and circumstances, and your approach should reflect that.
However, there is a natural progression I recommend following when using consultative selling.
The objective is to understand the problem, establish its importance and agree on the most appropriate next step before you start selling your solution.
1. Understand the Buyer’s Problem
When a buyer tells you they have a problem, resist the temptation to assume you know exactly what they mean.
Let’s say somebody tells me their sales team is struggling to close deals.
That might sound straightforward, especially when closing and negotiation training are services I offer.
But what does struggling to close actually mean?
Are they losing opportunities to competitors? Are buyers continually postponing decisions? Are deals progressing through several meetings before disappearing altogether?
These are very different situations, and potentially different problems.
I’d begin by asking a few simple questions.
“Can you give me a bit more context?”
“What exactly do you mean by that?”
“Can you talk me through a couple of recent examples?”
There’s nothing particularly clever about these questions. That’s precisely why I like them.
They encourage buyers to explain what’s happening in their own words rather than forcing them down a particular line of questioning.
Examples are especially valuable because they move the conversation away from general opinions and towards things that have actually happened.
And when the buyer answers, listen.
Don’t spend that time preparing your next question or thinking about which part of your presentation to show them.
Take a moment to understand what they’ve told you.
2. Investigate the Root Cause
Once you’ve established what’s happening, the next challenge is understanding why.
This is where your experience becomes particularly valuable.
Buyers will often describe the symptoms of a problem without recognising what’s causing them.
A sales team struggling to close deals, for example, might have perfectly good closing skills. The real problem could be something happening much earlier in the sales process.
Perhaps they’re failing to qualify opportunities properly.
If you immediately recommend closing training, you risk treating the symptom while leaving the underlying problem untouched.
I believe salespeople are naturally good problem-solvers. Much of our working lives involves overcoming challenges, adapting to different situations and finding ways to make things happen.
Unfortunately, the pressure to sell can sometimes get in the way of those instincts.
We recognise a problem we think we can solve and become so focused on positioning our solution that we stop investigating.
Experience should help you recognise patterns, but it shouldn’t lead you to make assumptions.
Use what you’ve seen before to guide your questions, not to decide the answer before you’ve heard the evidence.
The better you understand what’s causing a problem, the stronger your recommendation will be.
3. Understand the Impact of the Problem
Identifying a problem is only half the job.
You also need to establish how much it matters to the buyer.
A company could have dozens of problems that your solution would fix. That doesn’t mean it’s willing to spend money fixing them all.
This is where I use a questioning approach I call the Impact Funnel.
The concept is simple. You start by exploring the wider business impact of a problem and gradually work your way towards the individual experiencing it.
| Level | Example question |
|---|---|
| Business | “What impact is this problem having on the business right now?” |
| Team | “And what impact is that having on your team?” |
| Individual | “What about you personally? How is this affecting your day-to-day work?” |
The objective is to understand the consequences from different perspectives.
A problem might be costing the business money, creating extra work for a department and putting considerable pressure on the person responsible for sorting it out.
You won’t necessarily discover all of that by asking a single question about business impact.
The personal question is one that some salespeople feel uncomfortable asking, but it can reveal important information that financial figures alone won’t tell you.
Naturally, you need to exercise some judgement. Listen carefully, acknowledge the answers and allow the buyer to decide how much they want to share.
This isn’t an interrogation.
Another questioning approach I like to use is something I call Back to the Future.
Rather than concentrating entirely on the problem as it exists today, I encourage buyers to consider three different situations.
The present: What impact is the problem having on the business right now?
The positive future: If you managed to solve the problem, what difference would that make in six months?
The negative future: If nothing changes, what would the situation look like in six months?
You can adjust the timeframe to suit the circumstances.
What matters is understanding the difference between the buyer’s current situation, what they hope to achieve and the potential consequences of doing nothing.
These questions help establish whether there’s a meaningful reason for the buyer to take action.
You don’t need to ask every question in the Impact Funnel or work through every possible scenario. The objective isn’t to see how many questions you can squeeze into a discovery call.
It’s to understand whether the problem is important enough to justify doing something about it.
4. Confirm Your Understanding
Before you start recommending anything, take a moment to confirm that you’ve understood the situation correctly.
I like to give the buyer a short recap of what I’ve learned, bringing together the problem, its likely cause and the impact it’s having.
You might have spent most of the conversation asking open questions, but this is where closed questions become particularly useful.
“Have I understood that correctly?”
“Is that the main issue we need to address?”
Simple questions like these give the buyer an opportunity to correct anything you’ve misunderstood or add information you might have missed.
They also help establish agreement about the problem you’re trying to solve.
There’s little point delivering an outstanding presentation if you’re presenting a solution to a problem the buyer doesn’t recognise.
5. Recommend the Most Appropriate Next Step
Once you’ve established a clear understanding of the problem, its cause and the impact it’s having, you’re in a much stronger position to recommend what happens next.
That doesn’t always mean launching straight into a presentation.
When I’m having an initial consultation with a potential client, I might explain that, based on what they’ve told me, I believe I can help.
I’ll often give them a brief indication of how, but rather than trying to sell a complete solution there and then, I might recommend arranging another meeting.
That gives me time to properly consider their circumstances and prepare something relevant.
It also gives the buyer a genuine reason to attend the next conversation.
Of course, if you’re already at the presentation or demonstration stage, your recommendation should reflect what you’ve learned during discovery.
Concentrate on the features, capabilities and outcomes that address the buyer’s actual needs.
You don’t need to demonstrate everything your product can do.
You need to demonstrate why the parts that matter will help the buyer solve their problem.
A Real Example of Consultative Selling
One of the most common requests I receive as a sales trainer is for help with closing and negotiation.
It’s understandable. When a sales team is struggling to win deals, the natural assumption is that its closing skills need improvement.
But that isn’t always the case.
I recently had a conversation with a client who believed their team needed help closing more deals.
Rather than immediately recommending a closing workshop, I asked for some context and examples of opportunities they were struggling to convert.
As we discussed those examples, I became increasingly interested in what had happened earlier in their sales process.
So I took the conversation back to discovery.
I wanted to know how the team qualified leads and, more importantly, what criteria they used to decide when a lead should become a sales opportunity.
That’s when the real problem started to emerge.
The company was generating plenty of inbound leads, and the salespeople were having good initial conversations.
However, they didn’t have a clear qualification framework that defined when a lead was sufficiently qualified to become an opportunity.
In practice, if a salesperson had a positive conversation with somebody and agreed on a next step, that was often enough to create an opportunity in the pipeline.
The trouble was that many of those leads hadn’t actually been qualified.
They were interested enough to have another conversation, but that didn’t necessarily mean they had a compelling reason to buy.
Consequently, when those opportunities failed to progress or eventually fell apart, it looked like the salespeople were struggling to close deals.
The problem wasn’t necessarily their ability to close.
It was the quality of the opportunities they were trying to close.
That discovery completely changed the direction of my recommendation.
Rather than concentrating on closing techniques, we needed to address how the team qualified leads and determined which ones deserved a place in the sales pipeline.
This is also why I call the final module of my Bold Sales Methodology Predictable Closing.
I believe the work you put into the earlier stages of your sales process should make the outcome of your opportunities more predictable.
If you do a poor job of discovery and qualification, no amount of clever closing techniques will magically transform every weak opportunity into a sale.
This client came to me believing they needed one type of training, but our conversation revealed something different.
That’s the value of taking a consultative approach.
Instead of simply selling what the client initially requested, I was able to help establish what the team actually needed to improve.
What Happens When Your Advice Doesn’t Lead to a Sale?
This is where I believe consultative selling really separates professional salespeople from those who are simply looking for their next deal.
It’s easy to act like a consultant when everything the buyer tells you supports the sale.
The real test comes when it doesn’t.
When Your Solution Isn’t Suitable
If somebody asks for help with something outside my area of expertise, I’m perfectly comfortable telling them.
I might have enough experience to offer some useful guidance or point them towards somebody better qualified to help, but I won’t pretend to have expertise I don’t possess.
I believe the same principle should apply when selling products.
If your solution has a limitation that could affect the buyer, you should be upfront about it.
Sometimes the buyer will be happy to work around that limitation. Other times, it might mean your product isn’t suitable.
Either way, you’re helping them make an informed decision.
There’s little value in winning a customer by allowing them to believe your solution will do something it cannot.
When the Buyer Has No Urgency to Act
Another situation I frequently encounter is a buyer who has a genuine problem but doesn’t appear particularly motivated to solve it.
This can be frustrating for salespeople.
You’ve spent time understanding the problem. You’re confident your solution could help. The buyer even agrees that what you’re offering sounds interesting.
But there’s no urgency.
When this happens, I prefer to address it directly rather than pretend everything is progressing nicely.
I might say:
“I know we’re having this conversation today, but I’m not sensing much urgency to fix this. Am I reading that correctly?”
It’s a straightforward question, but it gives the buyer an opportunity to explain something I might have missed.
Perhaps the problem has existed for years, and they’ve simply learnt to live with it. Perhaps other business priorities are taking precedence.
If they confirm that addressing the problem isn’t particularly urgent, I might follow up with:
“Is there anything that could happen in the near future that would make this more of a priority for your business?”
The answer helps me understand whether there’s a realistic reason for the situation to change.
If there isn’t, I’m comfortable bringing the sales conversation to a close.
I’ll thank them for their time and, if I have something useful to share, offer some advice or resources that might help make the problem a little less painful.
What I won’t do is invent a reason to schedule another meeting simply to keep the opportunity alive.
Just because somebody has a problem you can solve doesn’t mean you have a sales opportunity.
That’s an important distinction, especially for sales leaders.
If your team consistently ignores what buyers tell them about their priorities, you’ll eventually have a pipeline full of opportunities that aren’t going anywhere.
Salespeople will spend weeks or months chasing deals that had little chance of closing in the first place.
And the frustrating part is that the warning signs were often there during the very first conversation.
A consultative approach helps you recognise those signs and make better decisions about where to spend your time.
Final Thoughts
Consultative selling isn’t about becoming less commercial or losing your desire to win business.
I love selling, and I always will.
But I also believe that being good at selling means knowing when to recommend your solution, when to investigate further and when to acknowledge that you aren’t the right person to help.
The question I encourage salespeople to ask themselves is simple:
If this buyer had already paid me for my professional advice, would I still recommend exactly what I’m about to sell them?
If the answer is yes, you’ve got a good reason to move forward.
If it isn’t, perhaps there’s more work to do before you start presenting.
I still want to win the business. I just want to be confident I’m helping the buyer solve the right problem.
About the Author
I’m David Craig White, a British B2B sales trainer, coach and consultant with more than 20 years’ experience helping sales teams get results.
When I’m not writing B2B sales articles, I’m providing B2B sales training, coaching and sales consulting to B2B sales teams, sales leaders and business owners.
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Consultative Selling FAQs
Consultative selling is a sales approach where I use questions, experience and professional judgement to understand a buyer’s problems before recommending a solution. The objective is to help buyers make better decisions by offering honest, expert advice rather than simply trying to make a sale.
You can learn consultative selling by developing your questioning, active listening and problem-solving skills. I recommend practising how to identify a buyer’s problems, investigate their root causes and understand their business impact before recommending a solution. The key is to think like a consultant rather than a salesperson trying to close a deal.
An example of consultative selling is investigating why a sales team is losing deals rather than immediately recommending closing training. I experienced this with a client who believed their salespeople needed better closing skills. After investigating, I discovered that poor lead qualification was the real problem, which completely changed my recommendation.
Consultative selling focuses on understanding a buyer’s situation and offering expert advice, while value-based selling focuses on the business outcomes a solution can deliver. Both approaches work together, but consultative selling places greater emphasis on determining what’s right for the buyer, while value-based selling demonstrates why an investment is worthwhile.
Consultative selling focuses on understanding a buyer’s problems and recommending the most appropriate course of action, while solution selling focuses on identifying problems that a particular solution can address. I believe the main difference is that genuine consultative selling sometimes means advising the buyer not to purchase your solution when it isn’t right for them.
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