Industrial sales have always been difficult however teams and leaders alike share how more difficult sales has become this year. Leaders are looking for ways to adapt to the sales environment and decisionmaker’s of today. If I am asked about the best sales approach for B2B industrial sales my response often surprises leaders. All the various sales methods have some value, and if used in the right sales environments and with application to your industry, they will add value.
The good news is we do not have to rely on our past experiences, gut, intuition or biases, there is research on B2B selling. Gartner’s research and related articles identify three core approaches that B2B salespeople use to engage customers with information:
Giving: The “more is better” model—sharing lots of collateral, data, specs, features, and benefits upon customer request (information‑heavy). I do not recommend this show up and throw up approach today.
Telling: An expert‑led approach where the rep relies on personal authority or experience to guide decisions (trusted voice).
Consultative Sense Making: A consultative sales model where the salespeople assess, sense if you will, with discovery questions where the decision maker is in their buying journey. This approach helps the buyer make sense of existing, often conflicting, information, prioritizing sources, clarifying trade-offs, and guiding customers to the best solution. This method requires a great deal more sales skills, empathy, collaboration, facilitation, emotional intelligence, and market, industry, and competitive intelligence than other approaches.
Quick question: What approach do your salespeople use today?
What could be stalling your B2B sales according to Gartner’s survey? While 89% of B2B buyers find most of the information they encounter to be high quality, too much of it, especially contradictory, makes decision‑making harder and leads to downgraded or stalled sales.
What Is the Consultative Sense-Making Approach?
At its core, Consultative Sense Making is about being a trusted guide (trusted advisor) through the information overload. We guide our customers through all the information, assessments, questions, and design applications, and we help them arrive at their desired outcome.
Instead of inundating, pitching, or directing, the salesperson actively helps the buyer make the best decision based on their experience, data gathered and training that drives the customer’s desired outcomes. This is particularly effective in our industry, as many salespeople have an engineering or technical service background.
This approach positions your salesperson and your company as industry experts and will increase the lifetime value of current and new customers.
What are examples of questions your salespeople must ask in addition to common technical discovery questions today?
- Help me understand your decision-making process today?
- What happened that made your team want to improve this now?
- Where are you in the finding a solution? ( Investigation education, narrow down solutions, choose ideal solution, conducting an air audit…)
- What options are you considering?
- Is there information you find confusing or contradictory that I can help you with?
- What is your desired outcome, and how will you measure it?
From my experience as the sales training manager at one of the leading bearing manufacturers, the best questions start with what, how, where, when not why. “Why” makes the decision-maker guarded and less open to share information you need.
A common fear among salespeople is being seen as a pushy sales rep. The quickest way to make your customer feel like you are a pushy sales rep is by not understanding where they are in the decision-making process, what they have already considered, and what they need.
In practice, sellers using Consultative Sense Making act as an information guide, detecting the right customer needs, delivering insights, simplifying complex data, and working alongside buyers to co-create clarity. This approach fosters confidence, minimizes skepticism, and is strongly linked to higher-quality deals.
In our current environment of more information decision-makers could ever use one or two clicks away, and more competition than ever, salespeople who are skilled at consultative sense-making are the top producers in their industry.
Help your salespeople develop Consultative Sense Making questions for your products and services and you will increase your close rate while shortening the sales cycle.
If you would like to help your sales team become industry trusted advisors and help their customers make sense of all the information they have, let’s schedule a call.
Author:
Mark Roberts is a senior-level sales and marketing leader with over 38 years of experience driving profitable sales growth in market-leading organizations.
He has done so at Timken Bearings, Alpha Enterprises, Vantage Mobility, Gardner Denver, and Frito-Lay. Mark is an author, public speaker, Scaling-Up coach, sales skills trainer, and sales acceleration coach. He has helped scale several manufacturing companies.
In 2018, he received the Business Excellence Award from NSME, and in 2019, he received the Highspot Sales Enablement Award. Sales Hacker Inc. also recognized him in the Sales Enablement Category. He was recently recognized in Soar to Success Magazine for his data-driven approach to growing sales and profits and for his human-to-human sales training and coaching in Top Sales Magazine.
Mark is the founder of OTB Solutions, LLC, and the popular business development blog www.nosmokeandmirrors.com, which is ranked #1 in fixing sales problems. As founder and president of OTB Sales, he helps clients diagnose and improve revenue, profits, and shareholder value. His new book, Driving Explosive Growth, is a no-nonsense approach to growing your business profitably. It was released in 2023, along with his book Voice of Customer which shares how to gain actionable strategic insights from your customers to drive revenue and profit growth.
