One approach to sales is to place importance on educating your leads. The general idea is you become a source of knowledge and advice for your lead, not someone just trying to close.
In this role as a consultant, you explore all your usual avenues: budget, authority, needs, timeline and more from a position of knowledge.
Your aim is to help a lead define what they need and guide them the next step, even if that doesn’t involve you.
This consultative approach is a great way to form honest relationships with potential customers. You can start by seeking relevant information to share with potential buyers to help them on their journey.
How to Be a Consultant that Sells
The best and easiest way to educate your leads is to direct them to worthy content, whether published by your own company or an outsider. This will show them you have a non-bias attitude to solving their pain points, which is important to gain trust.
Discover Content that Educates Your Leads
Let’s say you work in podcast advertising. You sell advertising spots to companies and your hosts read the ads during the show. This is a new way to advertise products, so inbound leads may have questions about the process.
As a consultant, you’d send your lead information on your process and the benefits of podcast advertising. Once they’ve digested the information and decided they’re keen to learn more, they may be the ones asking you to get that call set up ASAP.
As conversations continue, you may wish to include links to:
- Case studies
- Relevant research
- Testimonials
- News articles
- Articles relevant to leads exploring options
Always be looking to provide more information to educate your buyer. They will trust you as a source of non-bias information – a role you must uphold by being willing to send them elsewhere if your product or service isn’t right for them. This is good news for you too – by qualifying your leads, you avoid having a potentially unhappy customer in future.
Other content you may wish to send to leads includes:
How TextExpander Can Help
The key to consultative selling is having a repository of useful links relevant to each stage of the buying process. You could keep all these links in a doc, ready to paste in, but once you have a collection of links, it’s more efficient to have a shortcut, or a quick search-and-expand, so you can always find the link you’re looking for.
TextExpander lets you have all your links across all your sales tools and platforms. Just paste your link into a ‘snippet’, give it an abbreviation to type in its place and call upon it anytime with a few key presses.
TextExpander Snippet Examples
sal.recentstudy – expands a recent study concerning your product or service
sal.exploremore – expands the link to an article relevant to leads exploring their options
sal.casestudy – expands to information on a case study relevant to the lead
sal.news – expands a link to a topical piece in the news relevant to your product or service and lead
By storing your links in TextExpander, you can review and update information easily. For example, if more recent research is released, you can update your sal.recentstudy snippet to expand to the new content. The abbreviation never changes, but the content stays fresh.
Always Be Educating
This approach isn’t for everyone. If you work in a KPI-driven environment, you may be under pressure to use more forward sales approaches. If that’s you, it doesn’t mean you can’t utilize some of the techniques of consultative selling.
Consider pairing your sales process with the inclusion of some helpful links here and there, so your potential customers feel educated as you guide them through your sales process.
For more sales tips, check out our interview with TextExpander Sales Associate, Mike. Do you use TextExpander at work? We’d love to hear from you! Let us know @TextExpander and in our group on Facebook.
