Consultative selling
Selling by diagnosing the buyer’s problem first and proposing only what solves it, including telling the buyer when the vendor is not the right fit.
The term goes back to Mack Hanan’s 1970s book of the same name. In practice the seller behaves like a doctor before a diagnosis: asks, measures, then recommends. Job ads for presales and forward deployed engineers list it because technical people who can do this turn a demo into a decision. The test is simple: a consultative seller sometimes recommends a smaller deal, a different product or doing nothing.
Related terms
- Discovery call (disco): The first real sales conversation, which salespeople call a disco: the vendor learns your problem, its cost and who decides, before any demo or quote.
- SPIN selling and the Challenger sale: Two well-known ways salespeople structure a discovery call: SPIN asks a set order of questions, the Challenger teaches the buyer something new.
- Time to value (TTV) and business case: Time to value is how long from signing until the buyer sees the first measurable benefit; the business case is the one page that justifies the spend.
- BANT, CHAMP and MEDDPICC (sales qualification): Checklists vendors use to decide whether your deal is worth their time: budget, decision maker, pain, timeline and how the purchase gets approved.
