Selling That Makes a Difference - Consultative Selling

The only way to get your service or product or value into the hands of those who need it, is to sell it. Call it what you want, but it's sales.

When I interviewed at Gallup nearly two decades ago, I told the hiring manager that I wanted to help people be happier at work, free and clear of any sales expectations. He smiled and said he would help me get comfortable with selling.

He failed.

Seven years in, I was the youngest Subject Matter Expert in the company and carried no quota. No selling, just helping.

Personal Mission

How did I get to hang out with the Gallup PhD's, world renowned data scientists, and seasoned industry vets only seven years into it? Boy I learned a heck of a lot from them! A big reason I was there is because I had personally experienced the deep pain of toxic work and had a massive drive using Gallup as my platform to create rewarding work for others. And that we did!

My personal mission drove me to consume and curate the best research, the most effective practices, and reliable advice from everywhere and anywhere to help my clients.

I was eagerly seeking to do all I could to remove barriers to performance for people whose pain I knew all too well. I yearned to liberate them! I knew there was a better way! And I insisted on the data so I could know, not hope or hypothesize, but know that what we were doing was working.

You Have to Sell to Help

In 2018, Vipula Gandhi , a prescient EVP asked me if I would take on a quota. No, thank you. Patiently she helped me see that I had already been selling, and quite a bit. She reflected, "You've been helping your clients solve their problems to building great workplaces, right? Do you realize that every relationship you take on has grown in multiples? You may not call it selling, but that's what's happening."

Vipula and her team then showed me that when I had been making promises of better workplaces to my clients, I was selling. I was selling when I was getting buy-in at the client and internally, promising a vision of how we could unlock hidden value in the culture of clients to better serve their customers. I began to see that selling is a matter of utmost integrity. It is the business of making and keeping promises.

I was (and am) anxious to see people at their best and thriving at work. That is my way of helping people, families, and societies thrive. Selling allowed me do more of what I did best to make more of a difference in what I cared about most.

I was constantly on the lookout for what was getting in the way of people giving their fullest contribution at work. I was constantly finding solutions I knew would help, never willing to engage in a check-the-box exercise.

I sought the root problems, I envisioned complete solutions, and I did all I could to ensure we delivered on the promises we made in our contracts. I soon discovered, as the data played out, that it took real money to make real change. And I couldn't keep my best people - or our clients - without giving my teams the financial freedom to do their best work.

For the next five years my teams:

• Exceeded sales targets by an average of 45% each year.
• Had a near 30% increase in margin on the portfolio.
• A P&L that was consistently top five globally, securing the #2 spot in one of the toughest revenue years for the company in 2020.
• Importantly and predictive of all these outcomes, had record client retention.

I learned that if I couldn't get the contract, I couldn't help. Without money, I had no mission. The better I did at selling, the more workplace problems I could solve and the bigger the difference I could make in the world's wellbeing.

Turns out there's a name for this. It's called consultative selling.

The How-To of Consultative Selling

There's a whole bunch I could share on the structuring of the business, staffing, team roles and responsibilities, incentives, workflow, and leadership that build on the following first three crucial steps to successful consultative selling. But until you get these three things right, the structural and leadership pieces won't stand:

1. Create a shared definition of consultative selling that creates clear expectations.

The definition for consultative selling that I've found most effective is:

Helping clients scale their purpose.

Socializing that definition is a major win, in and of itself, because it clarifies and aligns expectations. Turns out being clear on expectations is the bedrock of employee engagement and performance with productivity gains of 5% to 10% to those who get just this part of it right.

A shared definition clarifies consultative selling's core objective, to take our client's purpose farther and deeper into the world. In other words, the better our clients do, the better the world does.

Like all well-define objectives, this definition helps you say "no" to work you or even the client might want you to take on. Consultative selling - real problem solving that accelerates the impact of an organization in the world - requires the kind of projects that get at the very raison d'etre of an organization. These are nothing short of what matters most to why the client organization exists.

It is also a definition of work that attracts the kind of talent that not only thrives on high-impact work but bristles at busy work. If it's a project just to make money, say goodbye not only to the business and your own integrity, but to your highly talented friends and teammates too.

2. Establish a lead qualifying methodology to build a portfolio of work appropriate for consultative selling.

Jim Collins found the first step to taking a good organization to great is getting the right people on the bus. He was studying established companies, who were already good. What he wasn't studying was companies at an inflection point that need to introduce a new growth engine. What I found is that to build a strong consultative sales capability, especially if it's not in your core DNA, you have to "build it and they will come."

Establish a systematic way of identifying and qualifying attractive leads and opportunities. Build that portfolio of consultative work and it will attract the right talent.

There is important fulfillment work that needs to be done in the world. It requires a discipline of execution. It rewards focus and efficiency. It isn't easy and is as valuable as any kind of work there is. However, the clients of this kind of work don't need, and often don't want, consultative help.

To establish successful consultative selling, you need a proven methodology that strategically builds a portfolio of opportunities where the client wants and expects what consultative selling brings.

This kind of portfolio creates opportunities that excite the right talent and the right talent can then self-select into the work. You'll get the right people on the bus when they know it's the bus they want to be on.

This starts with classic lead qualifying discipline. In my view, the two best resources for the fundamentals of qualifying B2B leads effectively are (1) Miller-Heiman's (now a part of Korn Ferry ) The New Strategic Selling and (2) Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig 's Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play.

In addition to what Miller, Heiman, Khalsa, and Illig provide for qualifying (and closing) strong leads, with consultative sales you're looking for opportunities that will affect the entire reason the client exists. Will the problem solution require systems thinking, root cause analysis, and change across the enterprise? If not, then if we do take on this project - even if a fulfillment effort for now - is the buying center a group that has the influence and track record to get to those kinds of problems? If so, do we have a credible and shared plan for how we'll grow our partnership to have the level of impact we aspire to?

Filtering opportunities with this line of qualifying questioning will build a portfolio that attracts the right consultative sales talent. Trust me, word will get out. You don't have to do much once these kinds of opportunities are hitting. Consultative selling talent will find you, by nature of who they are.

3. Understand and utilize a validated profile to identify the right talent.

By nature, consultative selling talent makes the client's business their business. They think like a CEO and act like a COO. They have a personal mission for clients that they are using their organization's capabilities to achieve.

Consider what Satya Nadella said about Microsoft that enabled them to hit a record share price in 2023, leap frog into AI with ChatGPT and OpenAI , and earn him CNN 's CEO of the Year award:

It's about helping employees live out their own personal mission in the context of Microsoft's. Microsoft no longer employs people, people employ Microsoft.

The first criteria to identify effective consultative selling talent is if they have a clear vision of how the organization's capabilities help them achieve their personal goals. They employ their organization to scale their impact in the world.

The right talent can illustrate and has demonstrated creative use of company assets to address customer needs in innovative ways. It happens by sheer consequence of their purpose-driven goals.

They refuse (or disengage) with any other work than that where they see it scaling their purpose and impact in the world. Consequently, they become true partners, embedded in the client, developing trusting relationships to deliver customized, evidence-based solutions. Their clarity of purpose gives them the courage to take strategic risks and persuasion to bring others along.

Importantly, consultative selling talent understands how the client and their own business works, to find solutions with the greatest returns to the client and that they know their organization is able to deliver as well as or better than anyone.

Their mission makes them highly motivated to learn, to provide clients with expert advice, knowledge, and service. They have a track record of establishing proximity and familiarity to build the needed expertise and trust for clients to believe their promises. They are similarly motivated to establish proximity and familiarity with their teams to build the needed trust and capability in the team to deliver on the promises made to clients.

Making A Difference

How can I make a difference if I don't have the work? I can't. I have to sell to make a difference. But I don't have to sell out. The stereotypical selling to make as much money as possible is selling out, short-sighted, selfish, and stupid. Consultative selling is the absolute opposite.

Consultative selling is your chance to do more of what you do best to make as big a difference as possible in what you care about most. It is the way to scale your impact and maximize your fulfilment in rewarding work.

Successful consultative selling requires you start with these three fundamentals discussed above:

1. A shared definition of consultative selling that captures its core impact.
2. A methodology for creating a portfolio of consultative client partnerships.
3. A defined talent profile and effective identification criteria.

Once these are in place, you have the foundation to then consider the full talent lifecycle and how to optimize it for consultative selling, from the expectations your employer brand and onboarding set to the behavior your workflow processes and performance incentives encourage.

Consultative selling is an essential mindset and skillset to creating rewarding work, emotionally and financially. It is both building and breaking down boundaries with your clients to enable you to make a difference in their world.

When done right, consultative selling means the better you do, the better your clients do, and the better the world does.

That's my kind of business to be in! I'll engage with that. I'll make sacrifices for that. I'll take ownership of that. And so will your employees.