Consultative selling: how to close high-value deals without appearing like a salesperson.
Written by:
Andres Bilbao
Published on:
When we started Rappi, I personally did the sales to restaurants. I learned something that changed my way of looking at complex sales forever.
The restaurant owners didn’t want me to sell to them. They wanted me to help them solve a problem.
That is the essence of consultative selling.
What distinguishes consultative selling from traditional sales
In high-value corporate sales, the buyer is not stupid. They know you want to sell to them. If you try to manipulate them with closing techniques, you will lose them.
Consultative selling reverses the process: first, you understand the problem better than the client, then you propose a solution.
The high ticket sales framework
For high-value sales ($10K+), the process is different:
1. Deep discovery
Before talking about your product, spend 70% of the conversation understanding:
What is the real problem?
How much does that problem cost them?
What have they tried before?
Why didn’t it work?
2. Specific value proposition
Don’t present a generic pitch. Build a proposal that directly addresses the problem you discovered. The traditional sales program teaches you to have a perfect pitch. Consultative selling teaches you not to have a pitch.
3. Managing stakeholders
In complex sales, you never sell to one person. You sell to a committee. Identify the champion (who wants you), the blocker (who resists you), and the decision maker (who signs).
Corporate sales vs. transactional sales
Traditional negotiation training assumes short sales cycles. In corporate sales, a deal can take 6 months.
This requires:
Constant lead nurturing
Documentation of every interaction
Strategic patience
The most common mistake
The most common mistake I see in founders doing high ticket sales: talking too much about their product and very little about the client's problem.
The client doesn’t buy your product. They buy the solution to their problem.
Where to learn real consultative selling
Most consultative selling courses are theoretical. At 30X, we have a program where closers who handle deals of $50K+ do live role-plays and analyze real deals.
It’s the difference between studying medicine in books and doing residency in a hospital.