A printing-industry sales expert explains how to jumpstart consultative-selling practices

Consultative selling — the strategy of becoming a trusted advisor for clients — is a key element for printing and imaging solution providers that want to transition away from straight hardware sales. In the following interview, Walter Santiago, founder and managing partner of A Fluent Vision, discusses how his company helps clients create a consultative-sales infrastructure and how to avoid elongated sales cycles.

Q: What do companies that succeed at consultative selling do right?

A: When you sell solutions, you have to be much more concerned about the end users' business. And in doing so, sales managers have to push their sales reps to ensure that they follow a sales methodology.

Q: What are the key elements of a sales methodology?

A: One thing that's easy for managers to do is insist that every time a sales rep sells anything in volume, the sales rep asks, "What business unit will that product be going into? What benefits is this going to have on the business? What timing in terms of a return on the investment do you have in mind?" If they can ask those three questions for every opportunity, it will immediately begin the process of teaching their reps on how to be consultative.

Q: What are the first steps a solution provider should take to begin the transition to this type of selling?

A: The first thing I would do is work with my existing clients to try to go deeper and wider with them instead of going out and opening up brand new accounts. Ask your reps to understand the business of their existing clients, because when they understand that then they can create what I call "small verticals." With those vertical markets you can take that information and begin to replicate it elsewhere.

The second thing that I would do is ask the [solution provider] to consider going through a consultative-selling workshop. Even if it's a one-day session. The reason for it is that they need to create a sales methodology that as an owner and a sales manager they can manage.

Third, along with that sales methodology develop a forecasting process that allows them to measure where in the sales cycle they are in and what needs to be done in order to move to the next step.

If they can accomplish those three things, it will definitely get them to begin thinking about how they can start consultative selling.

Q: Does this approach create longer sales cycles compared to just selling boxes?

We always hear that the sales cycle will be so much longer. It may be longer, but that's because you are still trying to transition into this new way of selling. Or it might be longer because you are not sure on how to capture the information you need to qualify your customers. Finally, the sales cycle may be longer because you are not really qualifying customers — you are talking to people that might not necessarily buy. You think you are working with a prospect, we they are still really just a suspect.