Page 23 - Consultative Selling

SALES PLANNING STARTS WITH PRODUCT PROFILE
DETAILING

If you are using a consultative approach to selling, you will need to put
in a lot of work to equip yourself with the right approach, right
information and do the ground work about your product as well as
about your customer and his line of business. You would need to gather
and study all details of your product and your business so that you are
very well conversant with your product or service. You might wonder as
to why we are emphasizing this point. Isn’t it true that all salesmen will
know their product?. Well, we are talking about getting to know your
product and your business in greater detail and doing your homework
well.

For example, if you are a salesman selling supply chain and logistics products
and services, you will have multiple products such as Air and Ground freight,
warehousing, Inventory management, transportation and many more
complimentary products that form the part of total supply chain solution.
Take the case of warehousing services. Every industry, be it automotive, retail
or fashion, every industry requires warehousing services. Furthermore,
warehousing services are used in raw material warehousing and spare parts

as well as finished goods warehousing.

Though the product and the core processes remain the same, different
industries will have specific requirement whereby the solution needs to be
customized . The racking systems, the infrastructure and the processes used
for an automotive plant is totally different from that of a retail distribution
system. On the other hand spare parts warehousing calls for a totally

different set of solution design. Elaborating further, each customer depending
upon the size of business operations and other considerations, will need the
warehousing product to be designed specifically for his purpose. A parts
service distribution center network for Dell, IBM or parts distribution for
Xerox would be totally different from that of a finished goods distribution
center for the same companies.

Consultative Selling - A new
2/5/2019 23
Approach