The Limits of Needs-based Selling and Consultative Selling
These are popular concepts in today’s sales world:
Consultative Selling Amazon 568 mentions
Consultative Selling Google 270,000 mentions
Needs-based Selling Amazon 158 mentions
Needs-based Selling Google 22,800 mentions.
Both approaches ask questions to define buyer needs, so that the seller can alter or position the product to address those needs, thereby raising the value to the customer and the likelihood of closing the sale.
This may sound stunningly obvious and commonsensical. To that extent, it’s a tribute to the triumph over the old product-focused approach of convincing people they needed whatever it was you had to sell.
(At the same time, sounding obvious doesn’t mean it gets practiced all the time, or even usually. Product-based selling is far from dead).
The mainstream view among sales practitioners is that needs-based selling and consultative selling represent the state of the art, the high road, professionalism in selling.
But it’s just not true.
Reading the consultative or needs-based books, websites or training programs, you’ll find two beliefs—implicit or explicit—that limit the value of these approaches to selling. Those beliefs are:
1. Their primary intent is to close the sale
2. A secondary intent is to qualify prospects.
Those may sound obvious and benign as well, but look at it from the customer’s side. Together, those two beliefs mean that if you’re paying attention to me as a customer, it’s only for as long as you think this transaction will result in a sale for you.
That means:
a. while you’re definitely in it for you, you’re only in it for me if it bodes well for you, and
b. while you’re willing to talk about my needs, you’re not willing to do so unless you see a sale close at hand.
Either way, it certainly appears you don’t have my interests very much at heart.
There is another way. It’s called Trust-based Selling®. It says focus on buyer needs, so that you can better articulate them and get them met. Period.
You don’t focus on their needs because it’ll get you the sale—you do it so you can help them better articulate their needs and get them met. Period.
You don’t focus on buyer needs in order to screen out buyers who don’t need what you have to sell. You do it so you can help them better articulate those needs and get them met. Period.
The key difference lies in liberating sales from the transaction. Trust flourishes only when then quid and the quo have some blue sky between them. Screening at the transaction level screams “I only care about your wallet;” trust-based sales screens at the strategic customer selection level, not the tactical transaction level.
For needs-based or consultative selling to become trust-based, you need to migrate away from the tight leash of the transaction. Loosen up. Get free of the “pay me now or I quit doing this consulting” mentality.
Trust-based selling says, if you consistently do the right thing by your customer, then when the customer needs what you’re selling, you’ll get the first call. And you’ll therefore make more money.
The highest profit comes when you make profit a byproduct—not a goal—of a truly customer-centric sales process.