Consultative Selling Techniques

When I was CRO of a $200M SaaS, doing POCs almost destroyed us—months wasted, team exhausted, buyers constantly delaying. Until my VP Sales said, “Kill the POC. We’ll validate value clearly in 3 hours flat”. Here's exactly how we rebuilt our sales process and cut our sales cycle by 50%: BACKGROUND: We were selling 100% enterprise. POCs were the automatic default: Heavy, technical validation lasting 1-3 months. It was painful… - Sales Engineers were overloaded - Buyers kept delaying due to resource issues - Buyers kept wanting more “just one more test” Initially, I thought: It’s Enterprise, that’s the game right? Until our VP Sales, Idan Arealy, joined. Two weeks in, he tells me: “No offense—but these POCs are total overkill.” “Buyers don’t need these endless tests.” “They’re not doubting the tech.” “They’re doubting the value.” “And we don’t need this complexity to prove value.” So he suggested a simpler, smarter alternative: The 'Use Case Workshop'—and it changed everything. Here’s the step-by-step: —— 1. Kickoff (45 min) - AE positions the workshop immediately post-demo: “Here’s what we typically do next to help validate real-world scenarios in just hours—no heavy lift needed. Shall we set it up?" - SE runs deeper disco into problem root causes in a kickoff call - AE sets clear Mutual Action Plan (MAP) 2. Internal Alignment (60 min) - SE & AE clearly define and build initial use-case solutions - Output: Slides outlining impactful solutions & open questions 3. Use Case Co-Design (45 min) - Live session with buyers walking through scenarios - Collaboratively refine solutions LIVE (e.g. Miro, slides): “Walk me through this problem in more detail—we’ll map exactly how solving it looks." 4. Prioritization & Wrap Up (30 min) - Jointly prioritize top 3 impactful use cases clearly: "Which scenarios, solved, would immediately solve [Problem]?" - Lock down committed next steps ↳ Result? - 3 focused hours (instead of months) - Clear, confident buyers ready to champion - 100% faster sales cycles & higher win rates —— POCs are NOT mandatory. Buyers don't want endless tests. Don’t default to what most buyers ask. Design what will solve what they need— With as little friction as possible. That's: Sales Process Design 101. P.S. We built Aligned to help manage the chaos of Complex Sales. 100% FREE Deal Room used by 40K AEs to run POCs, MAPs, etc. Try it https://lnkd.in/d_49kHZE

This one shift in my sales approach doubled my close rate: Ask more questions. Listen more than you talk. I used to jump straight into my pitch. Big mistake. A prospect seemed disinterested? I'd talk faster, louder. A client raised an objection? I'd argue my point harder. Sound familiar? For months, I was pushing when I should've been pulling. It was frustrating. And ineffective. Then it hit me: Sales isn't about convincing. It's about understanding. Here's the truth: Assumptions kill sales. They make us tone-deaf instead of tuned-in. What changed? I started treating each sale like a detective case, not a debate. • Prospect seems uninterested? Time to investigate why. • Facing resistance? Opportunity to uncover hidden concerns. • Objection raised? Chance to learn what really matters to them. The result? My close rate doubled. Why? Because I was addressing real needs, not imagined ones. Don't get me wrong. I still believe in my services. But now, I let the prospect's needs drive the conversation. Questions reveal. Pitches conceal. It wasn't comfortable at first. Silence can be awkward. But the payoff was worth every uncomfortable pause. Now, I ask myself: "What don't I know about this prospect's situation?" The answers usually guide me to the right approach. Question for you: How would you handle it differently if you focused on asking rather than telling? Repost if you found this helpful ♻ #salesstrategy #questionbasedsales

Selling is not helping. Here’s why. When your intent is to help, you assume people need your help. That assumption leads to behavior that feels pushy. It’s a mindset of: “I know what you need—let me give it to you.” Your intent shapes your behavior, and when prospects feel pushed, they naturally pull away. Same intent. Same behavior. Same results. The way out? Let go of assumptions. Here’s the truth: No matter what you sell, people are already getting the job done. They have a solution in place. They’re making progress. They don’t need your help—if they did, they’d be calling you or your competitors. If you’re reaching out, your job is different: Illuminate a meaningfully different idea related to a potential problem they might not have noticed yet. It’s a “potential” problem because it only becomes a problem if it matters to the prospect. People live with problems all the time—they have limited resources. So do you. So do I. So does everyone. Here’s what illuminating a potential problem sounds like: “I’m not sure if this is an issue for you, but many people say it’s hard to find their saved posts on LinkedIn because there’s no way to organize or filter them. How are you currently managing your saved posts?” See what happened there? I’m holding up a flashlight, shining light on a potential problem. Some people will relate to it and open up. Others won’t. That’s okay. You’re not for everyone. Your solution has no value without a problem. Detach. Be humbly curious and listen without steering the conversation toward your solution. When prospects relate to a problem, their brains naturally become curious about your solution. The shift? Selling → Sorting.

Last week I spoke to a CRO who's team hit 225% of quota in Q3 ($74M - 80% of which came from his enterprise team) and won two new logos from Fortune 100 companies. Here are the 8 strategies he implemented to help get them there: 1. Hired senior sellers and directors who know the complex sale and pay them aggressively. He bought years of experience instead of trying to figure out true enterprise selling on the fly. This led to more near term success with large enterprises. 2. Got his internal executives on board to play cameo roles in strategic parts of important sales cycles. 3. Attracted board of advisor members who are mega-connected in the industries his team sells to. Their role is 100% to open doors at the executive level. 4. Gave sellers controlled access to board of directors / board of advisors to coordinate executive introductions. 5. Created multiple paths to executive engagement: - Produced serious, data driven thought leadership content. (Ungated industry surveys and benchmark studies). This kind of thought leadership is how to “sell without selling” at the highest level. - Convinced his CEO to become prolific on LinkedIn and Twitter. To see this play in action, watch CEO’s like Jason M. Lemkin and Sam Jacobs as they speak to their audiences every day (multiple times a day). And for a masterclass in gaining a followership, follow the queen of mindshare, Arianna Huffington. - Sponsors quarterly executive roundtables (execs only, no sellers involved - they engage later) 6. Built out a high-quality internal Value Engineering team. Solid business cases built on customer-derived assumptions are the currency your champions need to get buy-in for big purchases. 7. Built a Key Account program which gives marquee accounts special access to resources and (some) influence on product roadmap. The more special your big accounts feel, the stickier the relationship and the more TAM you can earn across their organizations. 8. Implemented governance structures with large customers. A good governance structure is a series of pre-agreed meetings throughout the year at different levels in the organization to care for and feed the relationship. The CRO told me, “Having a governance structure in place saves my sellers from having to chase meetings all the time and brings customer executives to the table for more strategic conversations.” It is these strategies (and more) which I teach in the Mega Deal Secrets Masterclass. If you are a sales leader looking to build a leaner, more efficient ENT selling capability, DM me to discuss. #sales #enterprisesales

The 7-Minute Dance Every medical sales rep knows the ritual. Wait in the hallway. Catch the surgeon between cases. Make your pitch. Seven minutes, if you're lucky. But here's what we miss: Surgeons aren't avoiding your product. They're avoiding the dance. Because surgeons don't buy products. They buy better outcomes. They buy reduced risk. They buy time. And time is the one thing they can't get more of. The traditional pitch - features, benefits, ROI - it's all about your clock, not theirs. What if, instead of trying to steal their time, you became a time giver? The best reps aren't hallway hunters anymore. They're insight providers. Problem anticipators. Complexity reducers. They show up with: "Here's what your colleagues are struggling with..." "This is what the data shows..." "I noticed something in your approach that could..." Suddenly, those seven minutes aren't about your product. They're about their practice. When you shift from selling time to saving time, the hallway becomes optional. Because surgeons don't need another vendor. They need a scout. An interpreter. A curator of solutions. The game isn't about catching them between cases. It's about becoming the case they want to make time for. How would your pitch change if you measured it in insights delivered instead of minutes stolen?

I’ve learned something very different — Modern buyer doesn’t need another rep who talks fast. They need an advisor who thinks deep. Because the VP of Supply Chain or the Operations Head isn’t buying your pitch. They’re buying peace of mind. They want someone who can identify and eliminate risk before it costs them money, time, or clients. The biggest breakthrough in my sales career came when I stopped walking into meetings with a “presentation” and started walking in with a diagnostic mindset. I replaced my script with a single promise: “I’ll listen before I speak.” That one shift turned every meeting into a discovery session instead of a sales pitch. Now, I ask questions that don’t just confirm a problem — they expose the cost of not fixing it: “What’s the most frustrating bottleneck in your current shipping process?” “If that 48-hour delay happens again next quarter, what’s the exact impact on your inventory turns and retention metrics?” And then… I go silent. That pause, that uncomfortable moment of quiet does the real work. It forces the client to think deeper, to quantify pain, to reflect. And when they speak again, they often reveal the real issue no one else has touched. Top-performing sales professionals spend 57% of conversations listening and only 43% talking. That’s the golden ratio of trust. Because listening doesn’t just make the client feel heard. It makes you the only person in the room who actually understands their business. So, the result? Our deals got bigger. Our relationships got stronger. And our customers stopped treating us like vendors — they started treating us like partners. In freight and logistics, the difference between a rep and a leader is simple: One talks. The other solves. Stop selling. Start solving. That’s how you win in this business — one conversation at a time. What’s one question you ask in every sales meeting that always gets your prospect thinking? #SalesLeadership #FreightSales #Logistics #B2BSales

The answer to your outbound problems isn't: ⛔️ AI ⛔️ More volume ⛔️ SDR agents ⛔️ More relevance ⛔️ Dialers It's your OFFER. Let me explain... Most reps reach out with something like: “Just want to introduce myself and our company…” “Let’s do a quick call so you know your options when budgeting season comes around...” The problem? You have NOTHING to offer. If there’s no immediate need, there's zero reason to take a meeting with you. So you need a way to entice buyers to meet when they have a problem, but are not actively shopping. Here are three types of offers you can use to entice buyers to meet with you: ✅ Offer #1: Good - Pitch The Blind Date Position who the buyer will be meeting with. Hype up the AE, sales engineer, or yourself. Show them that meeting with you will be worth their while. Example: A client of ours sells an automated welding solution. The manufacturing industry is facing a massive shortage of welding talent. Their SDRs pitched it like this: “I’d love to introduce you to Eric. He’s worked with a dozen manufacturers like Caterpillar, Karavan, and more, who are all facing similar challenges. He’ll walk you through how they’re automating the most difficult welds and dealing with the labor shortage. Even if nothing comes of it, you’ll walk away with a better understanding of how the industry is solving this.” Even if the buyer isn’t shopping, they gain value from the conversation itself. ✅ Offer #2: Better - 1:Many Offers These are high-quality, reusable insights that still feel tailored. Think: competitive benchmarks, industry research, or best practice guides. Example: We have a client that sells to ecomm brands. They conducted a mystery shop of 400 competitors to analyze response times, customer service channels, etc. Their reps used those insights to open cold calls with: “Hey Katie, I submitted a ticket on your site, and it took about 48 hours to get a response. It was about 3x longer than folks like Patagonia and the North Face. Again, it’s Jason. Mind if I share more about why I’m calling?” That’s an offer that feels immediately relevant and valuable. It gets a conversation started immediately. ✅ Offer #3: Best - 1:1 Offers These are custom-tailored experiences or resources created specifically for the prospect. It’s you and your organization putting in serious effort to customize the offer. This works best at the enterprise & strategic levels. Examples: - A cyber risk analysis - A benchmarking analysis - A workshop - A personalized audit of a website checkout flow. - Visiting and experiencing the brand firsthand, then sharing insights. - Offering free data, licenses, or pilots. These take more work, but they convert like crazy. ~~~ Which one's most applicable for you?

One five-slide deck helped close the first $100 million at Gong. The product never appears in it. Neither does the company. We used it in the first few minutes of a discovery call, and by minute seven, buyers were telling us everything. Here's the structure. Slide 1: Introduce a change in the world. A shift in their market that represents a threat or an opportunity. For us it was the move from growth-at-all-costs to efficient growth. End it with a question: "How is this showing up in your world?" Slide 2: Show the pain that change inflicts. Make it concrete. Only 48% of reps hit quota. Skill gaps that stayed hidden in an easy market get exposed in a hard one. Then ask: "Which of these is screaming loudest at you?" Slide 3: Show what everyone is trying, and why it fails. 87% of sales training is forgotten within 30 to 90 days. Your buyer has lived this. Watch them nod. Slide 4: Tell one painful narrative that ties it together. A story they can see themselves in, start to finish. Leadership pushes for efficiency, reps miss the number, training gets thrown at it, nothing sticks, morale slides, and the cycle repeats. Slide 5: Pass the torch. "Enough about the problems we solve. Help me understand the challenges you're facing." The whole thing takes five minutes. Then the buyer talks for thirty. Why does it work when generic discovery gets stonewalled? A mentor taught me this years ago, and it's the principle underneath the entire deck: When you describe your buyer's problem better than they can describe it themselves, they automatically assume you have the best solution. The content of our deck changed constantly. The structure never did. Build yours this week. P.S. Articulating the buyer's problem better than they can is one of the 11 skills our research found behind every enterprise deal. Get the full breakdown → https://lnkd.in/g63fcp2D

Using Story to Sell: This simple shift can change everything for your sales team. Because of pressures from quotas, salespeople often walk into meetings thinking about how they can get what THEY want out of it (a sale) rather than how they can help THE CUSTOMER get what they want. This will actually cause fewer sales because salespeople don't truly understand how they can help the customer overcome a problem or achieve a goal. But in reality, you and your product are the MENTOR and your customer is the HERO. In classic story archetypes, the mentor is the person who helps the hero get "unstuck". They give them a magical gift or a special tool that helps the hero forge ahead on their journey. (Think about how Obi-Wan gave Luke a lightsaber.) This is where an empathy walk becomes your secret weapon. Airbnb transformed their entire strategy after doing an empathy walk. They mapped out their customers' average day step-by-step and asked at each point: "Where does our customer get stuck? How can our product help them get unstuck?" This simple exercise revealed something crucial they'd missed...they needed a mobile-first strategy. You can apply this same principle to your sales conversations: 1. Map your customer's journey before your next meeting 2. Identify the exact moments where they struggle 3. Show how your product (the magical gift or special tool) helps them overcome these specific obstacles When you truly understand where your customer gets stuck, you can position your product as the perfect tool to help them succeed. And when you help heroes succeed, they remain loyal to you forever. #SalesTraining #EmpathyInSales #SalesStrategy

The fastest way to sound like every other rep and lose connection with the buyer? Describe your prospect's problem in your words instead of theirs. You say "data silos." They say "I can't find anything, it's all over the place." You say "lack of visibility." They say "I have no idea what my team is actually doing all day." You say "inefficient workflows." They say "I'm drowning and I'm doing everything twice." Same problem. Completely different language. And the second you use your words instead of theirs...you sound like every other vendor who doesn't get it. In order to truly connect, you have to change the way you talk about the problem. You don't describe the problem. You describe THEIR problem, in THEIR words. And you know where you find those words? They're on your calls. They're on CS calls. You just have to actually listen for them. When I sit down to review a call, I'm not listening to the rep. I'm listening to the prospect. Here's exactly how to mine it: - Pull 30 recent discovery calls. - Ignore what your rep said. Listen only to the prospect. - Write down the exact words they use for the pain — verbatim, not cleaned up. - Highlight the emotional words: "drowning," "frustrated," "no clue," "all over the place." - Build a swipe file of their language, sorted by problem. - Feed those exact words back into your discovery, your demo, your follow-up. A prospect once told me, "Every Monday I open the CRM and I want to throw my laptop." I never said "reporting inefficiencies" again. I said, "So... no more Monday laptop-throwing, right?" They laughed. Then they bought. This week: listen to 10 of your own calls. Not to grade the rep. To steal the customer's words. Write down 10 phrases exactly as they said them. Then go use them. Sell in their language, they feel understood. Sell in yours, they feel sold to. BONUS TIP: I've set up research agents that comb reddit, google, LI, etc to listen for how prospects speak about the problem and day to day and it updates weekly on a spreadsheet. Capturing the voice of the customer in real time!