Advanced Consultative Selling - Course Outline

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The consultative salesperson’s job is to solve problems for the customer. Unlike a “vendor” who sells solely based on price, a consultative sales person sells using analytical and problem solving skills combined with the ability to forge a strong relationship with the customer. The consultative salesperson is a diagnostician - using inductive and deductive reasoning to really understand the prospect's needs and align his or her solutions to the goals and issues of the customer, whether residential or commercial. This sense of alignment can convince the prospect that the salesperson might actually be able to add business value beyond what property or other “product” he or she is selling. That is how strong relationships are formed - both parties add value to each other.

Think of the consultative sales person as being like a doctor. Doctors have two primary functions - diagnosis and treatment. The “vendor” focuses on the treatment exclusively and prescribes whatever he or she is selling this week, month or year. Then they rely on price to close the deal. Any doctor can write any prescription. The key is writing the right prescription to solve the problem. That is where the diagnostics come in. Our Advanced Consultative Selling class teaches diagnostic and treatment skills. It helps the sales person develop:

• Enhanced questioning ability to really learn the customer’s issues
• Strong inductive reasoning skills to understand the key issues and motivations
• Superior closing skills based upon the diagnostics used in the engagement
• Substantially improved ability to foster long-term relationships and generate referrals
• Greatly improved sales presentations skills
• Reduced reliance on old and tired techniques or cliches
• Greater ability to understand opportunities and how they tie to still more opportunities
• A huge increase in confidence

The single most frequent complaint about the real estate professional is “They don’t listen." If salespeople spent as much energy understanding the prospect’s issues as a mortgage lender might spend preparing to approve a mortgage, we would have happier customers that viewed their relationship with you as being long term, not event driven.

This advanced, two-day class is designed to meet that need. It is for the more experienced sales professional. It takes them to a much higher level of skills development by using a series of instructional lectures, role-playing and case work. It uses a series of exercises that will hone their skills and dramatically improve their confidence and success rate on calls. This class is not about memorizing scripts, it’s about learning how to think and act for the benefit of the prospect, whether in trying to gain listings, close property sales or get referrals.

It recognizes that the best place to invest your scarce training dollars is in making sure you or your people not only get in the door of prospects but sell effectively. Investing in a higher level of training for you or your sales staff can close more sales rather than simply increasing the number of “sales calls.”

Good consultative salespeople understand that relationship management is about the customer’s needs and problems. More than that, they know what those needs and problems are and are constantly thinking about ways to add value by satisfying those needs and solving those problems.

This class takes you beyond the basic skills acquisition phase of training. It helps hone and solidify skills to allow you to bring real value to the interaction with customers and prospects. At the completion of this training you will have the tools to better understand the customer’s needs, you will sell more, sell more deeply and forge a stronger relationship with your customers. That is what relationship management was always meant to be.