A consultative sales approach is founded on a different relationship with the Prospect.

First, your intelligent questions, perform a service for the prospect:

because you as the consultant sales person work with a cross-section of
users, you are able to provide wider context drawn from a wider perspective than
just this individual or this organization.  In other words, by the variety of the work you do, you likely have a wider perspective than this Prospect.  I'm not suggesting that you carry secrets from one Prospect to another: not at all.  But you have the breadth of experience to help Prospects break out of the "we've always done it this way" mindset.

Second, you develop personal credibility via the intelligent, savvy questions you ask. Think of the prospect not
just as someone who may buy from you, but even more as a client of your consultative selling probing skills.

Third, your questions may alert this prospect into becoming aware of needs that may have been there all along, but unrecognized . . . or seen as "just something we have to live with," rather than an opportunity to make things better.

If
you do your sales job well, then you both help the prospect open up to
these broader concepts of needs before solutions, AND show how what you
offer is the best way of filling those needs.

For the reasons we
discussed in the earlier post, usually the best way of accomplishing that is by
asking appropriate questions that lead the prospect to expressing the
need for what you offer.

In your question-and-answer consultative selling dialogue with the Decision Maker, or prospect, you have two key objectives to accomplish.

First objective, to educate yourself about the problem and resulting needs.

Second objective — equally important — to "bring the client with you" through your analytical process.
You may already be virtually certain, from your experience with other
clients, what the prospect's answers are likely to be. From that, the
needs are clear . . . but typically clear only to you because — you
can take credit! — you are the expert on your product and what it can
do.

You may feel that some questions and answers may seem so
obvious as hardly to be worth mentioning. But keep in mind that you
have been through this analysis before, while it's all new to the
prospect or decision maker.

By asking the questions, you get the
prospect working together with you through each mental step. If you ask
the right questions, you help the prospect look with fresh perspective.

Once the prospect has put into her own words sound reasons in
favor of your proposal, you can then echo those words later as
"authority" supporting your case. The prospect's own words, echoed back
later, in which they spoke of the need, what that need is costing, and
the implications flowing from it, are going to carry far more weight
than anything you could say.

Besides, even though you may be
totally confident that you know what the answers are going to be, you
may be surprised by the responses of this unique Decision Maker and
organization.

Useful question-and-answer dialogues of the kind
that lead to sales don't often happen by chance. It helps to work
systematically through a well-planned sequence of questions that brings
out the facts of the situation, logically leading to the conclusions
you seek.