The backbone of consultative sales is not only building a stable and lasting client relationship, but it’s nurturing and solidifying trust with your clients and proving that you are the expert in the problem they are facing or goal they are aiming to achieve.
Connecting concepts and ensuring your client understands topics that may be outside of their expertise isn’t simply a presentation or quick conversation. Demystifying technical topics is guiding and consulting leadership and operations personnel alike to truly understand the root cause of problems, synthesize individual objectives into a shared goal, and decide on strategies to ensure long-term success.
This process begins from the very beginning of the client interaction. Here are five strategies to demystify technical topics and ensure a successful consultative sales relationship.
First Things First: Solidify Your Expertise
Before you can even begin consultative selling, you must establish your expertise with your client. Even more importantly than solidifying yourself as an expert on your product is earning the trust of your client to create an environment where you have standing to effectively consult them through highly technical topics.
The crux of this process lies in active listening and asking the right questions to have a comprehensive view of the client, the issues they are facing, and the best avenues to provide a solution.
“It’s important to ask a lot of questions and then keep drilling down to get to the heart of what the client is experiencing and their issue,” said Derek Koziol, Senior Global Director of Global Sales at PTC in Boston, Massachusetts. “This will happen over multiple sessions and will earn you the right to make suggestions and position your product.”
If you haven’t listened to your client during the discovery phase and aren’t educated in your client’s pain points and dynamic, you simply can’t be successful in your consulting, at least not in the long-term.
For example, maybe you have successfully onboarded a client with 12K users of a software you have sold, but after a year you find that you have been rapidly losing users over time and the client isn’t happy with the product. You may find that the pitfalls they are experiencing could have been resolved upfront if you asked the right questions regarding their expectations and had implemented additional tools or support. Rather than losing that contract and revenue, you could have gained a long-term client just by establishing trust and ensuring you have a comprehensive understanding of the client.
It’s not enough to be an expert on the product, you must become an expert on the client – their strengths, weaknesses, and their team dynamics.
Bring Teams Together
As a consultative salesperson, bringing your client’s cross-functional teams together is a paramount initial step of a client interaction to ensure long-term success. Ensuring team members are on the same page is also integral in introducing and explaining technical solutions later in your client interaction. This can take form in a variety of different ways, but the importance of these exercises lies in the ability to bring teams together to coordinate shared objectives and avenues to achieve them.
Koziol describes an interaction with a client that highlights the importance of bringing cross-functional teams together during a multi-day collaborative alignment workshop.
In this collaboration, the client continuously failed to integrate the right teams and individuals into these initial sessions, expertly highlighting pitfalls in communication across business units and providing an opportunity for Koziol to consult on solutions to bridge these gaps. Had another salesperson simply targeted surface issues, this ongoing lack in communication would surely hinder long-term success of whatever product was implemented.
As a consultative salesperson, it’s important to continue to bring teams together for discussion for several rounds covering the same topics to truly pinpoint the concerns and setbacks and pave a path to success and ongoing improvement going forward. Allowing teams that typically don’t interact to come together and collaborate allows better understanding of all business units.
Utilize Visual Tools & Strategies
Providing visuals during each step of your process with a client is a way to adequately provide a roadmap of technical concepts, provide a tangible reference to actionable insights and suggestions, and provide a long-term checklist of expectations for your partnership with the client.
It’s also important to note how these practices can aid you and your business in the long run. Taking copious and comprehensive notes provides a reference and checklist for your partnership. This creates a source of truth that both parties have agreed on that you can fall back on in the event of a disagreement.
“There are so many ways to provide a visual element to a meeting,” said Koziol. “You can do process mapping through a projector and laptop, you can use a whiteboard, or you can even use sticky notes on a board or wall. You can document the process and conversation while also showing the client that you care about what they are saying.”
While these are important practices for “in-the-moment” consulting, utilizing visual tools are also invaluable when disseminating highly technical concepts to a client. Additionally, providing various presentations of the same information ensures that everyone in the room has an opportunity to visualize the concept.
For example, when presenting how digital transformation with the digital thread can transform processes across all business units, you can provide an illustrated presentation visually segmenting business units as you walk the client through the benefits of the digital tools. Then, to appeal to other visual learners, you can remove the illustrated guides and focus on columns listing the details and benefits of the tools.
Regardless of the mode, these visuals can make or break your presentation of highly technical concepts.
Ask The Right Questions (Or Say Nothing At All)
One of the hallmarks of a successful consultative salesperson is knowing the right questions to ask to best understand your client and the problems they are facing. This is the only way to truly provide targeted consultation and achieve shared objectives. Building this relationship and understanding of your client is also integral in knowing how to share solutions and information throughout your partnership.
Driving these questions, while important at the beginning of a relationship, are arguably even more important in high-stress times.
“You can forge your greatest partnerships in the times that the client may be frustrated and unhappy with the product,” said Koziol. “Many salespeople in these conversations are defensive and are just waiting for their opportunity to speak. But in these moments, you can really strengthen that trust with active listening and provide a solution for the client.”
Becoming defensive of the product and allowing your personal feelings to cloud the interaction is the antithesis of how a successful consultative salesperson should react in these moments. Instead, if appropriate, take notes during your conversation and not only allow the client to voice their frustrations and concerns while you actively listen, but ask a lot of questions yourself to not only show that you are remaining engaged with the conversation, but that you are taking steps to note and understand the issues at hand to work on coming to a solution.
You may be leaving the meeting without saying much, but you’re leaving the meeting with a better understanding of what the client is struggling with, how you can provide a solution going forward, and a comprehensive record of what is expected from you and your organization in the client partnership.
Bring Multiple Perspectives to the Table
Lastly, you won’t be the only individual working on your client’s solution, so you shouldn’t be the only one providing insight on it or gaining information during the exploratory phases, particularly when selling highly technical products. Each individual on your team holds different expertise and unique ways to disseminate the same information, ensuring you will be able to connect with your client and demystify these topics.
Your goal is not just to bring the product to the client, but the support of the whole team. Each individual on your team carries different experience and can bring many perspectives and solutions to the table that you may not have thought of.
For example, your marketing team may have a possible solution for presenting a concept in a client presentation, but you as a consultative salesperson that interfaces directly with a client knows how to better lead that conversation in a way that will properly disseminate the topic.
Additionally, there is great value in having a team present to navigate issues rather than individually trying to consolidate problems into a solution. The more experts at the table, the better the experience for not just the client, but for your organization.
The practice of consultative sales is creating value and trust with a prospect and exploring the needs of a client before offering a solution. When navigating highly technical topics, it is important to ensure you are adequately presenting not just the information, but doing so in a way that aligns with your client’s specific problem and dynamic. With these five strategies, you can better demystify even the most complex and technical concepts to clients and pave a road to long-term success.