5 Top Tips For Successful Consultative Selling

Consultative selling is a sales approach where you act as an advisor rather than a product pusher. Instead of walking into a meeting with a pitch ready to go, you ask questions, listen properly, and build your recommendation around what the buyer actually needs — not what you’ve already decided you want to sell them.

Simple enough in theory. Harder to do in practice than most salespeople want to admit.

I’ve spent 24 years training sales teams across every sector you can think of, and the most common thing I see is salespeople who understand consultative selling in principle but revert to pitching the moment they’re in the room. Old habits. The pull of wanting to show what you know. The anxiety of silence. It all conspires against the approach.

Which is why I want to go beyond the definition and give you something practical — the specific things that separate salespeople who do this well from the ones who think they do.

Consultative Sales vs. Solution Sales — What’s the Actual Difference?

Honestly, this trips people up more than anything else. I’ve had sales directors sit across from me and use “consultative” and “solution selling” interchangeably in the same breath  and they’re not the same thing, not even close. Worth clearing up before we go any further.

Solution selling has a structure to it. You qualify someone, you find a pain point, and you match your product to it. The product — or at least the category of product — was decided before you walked in. What you’re doing is building a case for something you’ve already landed on. That’s fine, by the way. It’s not a dirty word. It works in plenty of contexts.

But consultative is different in a way that actually changes the dynamic of the whole conversation. You go in genuinely not knowing what you’re going to recommend. You’re not performing curiosity — you’re actually curious. You ask questions that help you understand the full picture, you sit with it a bit, and then — and only then — you start thinking about what might help.

I’ve recommended competitors’ products. I’m not joking. Early in my career, I had a conversation with a prospect and halfway through realised that what they actually needed wasn’t something we offered at the time. I told them. Lost the sale, obviously. But they came back 18 months later when their needs changed and spent considerably more than they would have done originally. That’s the long game.

The other thing, and this is underrated, is that buyers can tell. They might not be able to put their finger on why a conversation felt off, but they know when someone’s just waiting for their turn to pitch. It changes how much they share. Which then limits what you can actually do for them.

More on where this fits with other approaches in our piece on different types of selling,  worth a read if you want the fuller picture.

Top 5 Tips from Sales Experts

Before I get into the tips, let me tell you about a client we worked with, a technology reseller, Midlands-based, around 30 people on the field sales team. This was maybe four or five years back. Good team, not a bunch of novices.

Their pipeline looked fine on paper. But close rates had been quietly slipping for the best part of 18 months. Not a cliff edge, just a slow bleed. They’d convinced themselves it was the market, then the pricing, then something about the product mix. All reasonable explanations. All wrong.

When we actually got in there and sat with the team, on calls, in meetings, it was obvious within a couple of days. Every single interaction started the same way. Product overview. Demo. Brochure. The first ten minutes of every meeting was the salesperson talking about themselves and what they sold. Meanwhile the buyer had already read all of it on the website before they turned up.

We changed the approach. Took a few months to really stick — it always does, habits are stubborn — but six months in, average deal size was up 22% and close rate had moved from 28% to 41%. Same team, same product, same market conditions. Different conversation.

Here’s what shifted.

Tip 1: Think Like a GP, Not a Salesperson

When you’re feeling rough and you go to the doctor, they don’t walk in and immediately start writing out a prescription. They ask what’s wrong. They ask how long it’s been going on. They ask follow-up questions to the answers you give. They might send you for tests before they’ll commit to anything. The prescription comes last.

That’s exactly backwards from how most salespeople operate.

Most salespeople lead with the prescription. They’ve decided what they’re selling before they’ve understood what the problem is. And I get why — you know your product, you’re proud of it, you want to show it off. But the moment you start talking product before you’ve done the diagnosis, you’ve lost control of the conversation.

In 2026 this matters more than it used to. Buyers have done the research before they even agree to meet you. They’ve watched your demo video. They’ve read three comparison articles. They know roughly what you do. What they haven’t had is someone actually ask what’s going on in their world, what’s keeping them up at night, what they’ve already tried.

Ask first. Always. Even if you think you know what they need after five minutes. Ask anyway.

Tip 2: Ask About Cost, Not Just Pain

Most discovery questions are fine. “What challenges are you facing?” “What’s not working?” They’ll get you somewhere. But they tend to produce surface-level answers, because they’re surface-level questions.

The shift I always push for is from “what’s the problem” to “what’s the problem actually costing you.” Those are very different questions and they produce very different conversations.

Things like:

“If this is still the situation in 12 months, what does that mean for your team?”

“When it breaks down, what’s the knock-on — for your customers, for revenue, for you personally?”

“Has anyone tried to tackle this before? What happened?”

That last one is particularly useful. The answer almost always tells you something about internal politics, past failures, or sensitivities that will shape how you need to position anything you recommend.

One thing I’d flag: this only works if it’s genuine. If you’re running through a list of impact questions because someone told you to, buyers can smell it. The curiosity has to be real. We spend a lot of time on this in our consultative sales training — specifically on how to make these conversations feel like conversations rather than questionnaires.

Tip 3: Stop Talking So Much

Every time I say this to a sales team I get the same reaction. A bit of shuffling. “We do listen, Sean.”

So I ask them to record their next three calls and come back to me.

They always come back a bit quieter.

In a proper consultative selling conversation, the buyer should be talking for at least 60% of the time. Not as a target you’re gaming, just as a rough indicator of whether you’re actually finding things out or just filling the air. If you’re doing more than 40% of the talking, you’re probably pitching.

With the technology reseller — before training, the average salesperson was talking 68% of the time. Not unusual. After six months it was 38%. And the thing that happened almost straight away was that buyers started volunteering things that had never come up before. Real budget numbers. The internal champion who’d been blocked by someone above them. The timeline they’d been vague about. Because for maybe the first time, they felt like the other person in the room was actually listening.

Silence makes salespeople nervous. A pause feels like something to fill. But often it means the buyer is thinking, and the worst thing you can do is interrupt that.

Get comfortable with a bit of quiet. It’s doing more work than you think.

Tip 4: Become the Person They Call — Not Just the Person They Buy From

There’s a version of a sales relationship that’s essentially transactional. They need a thing, you have the thing, money changes hands. You’re useful in roughly the same way a vending machine is useful. Interchangeable. Replaceable the moment someone offers the same thing for less.

And then there’s the version where they call you before they’ve even decided whether they’re buying anything. Where they run things by you informally. Where they forward you something they’ve seen in the industry and ask what you think. That’s a different relationship entirely, and it doesn’t happen because you sent a nice brochure.

It happens because you’ve been consistently, genuinely useful. You’ve shared things they didn’t already know. You’ve remembered what they told you and followed up on it. You’ve occasionally said “that’s probably not the right move for you right now” even when it cost you a sale.

That last one is hard. But it’s the thing that earns the relationship.

Have a look at our sales techniques resources for more practical ways to build this kind of credibility over time.

Tip 5: “Just Checking In” Is Not a Follow-Up Strategy

I reckon “just checking in to see if you’ve had a chance to look at the proposal” has killed more deals than any objection I’ve ever heard. It’s the laziest sentence in sales and everyone still sends it.

What it communicates, whether you mean it to or not, is: “I want to know if I’m getting the money yet.” That’s it. There’s nothing in it for the buyer. So they don’t reply. And then the deal dies in a inbox.

Good follow-up brings something. It doesn’t have to be complicated — a short note about something that came up in your conversation that you’ve been thinking about. An article that’s relevant to something they mentioned. A question that builds on what they told you, because you actually retained it.

When the Midlands reseller made this switch — personalised, specific follow-ups rather than “just checking in” — response rates went up over 60% in the first quarter. That’s not a minor improvement. Deals that had been sitting cold started moving again.

The follow-up is part of the consultative approach, not an afterthought. Every message is an opportunity to demonstrate that you’re paying attention. Most salespeople waste it.

Closing Those Sales — A Quick Summary

None of this is rocket science. Consultative selling isn’t some complex methodology that takes years to master. The principles are straightforward.

What’s hard is doing them consistently when you’re under pressure to hit a number, when the silence in a meeting feels unbearable, when you’ve got a product you believe in and you desperately want to tell someone about it.

That’s the actual challenge. And that’s why most salespeople revert.

To pull it together:

• Lead with their problem, not your product.
• Know the difference between consultative and solution selling — and use the right one.
• Diagnose properly before you recommend anything.
• Ask what the problem is costing, not just what the problem is.
• Talk less. Significantly less.
• Build relationships that matter beyond the invoice.
• Follow up with something useful, not a nudge for an answer.

Get this right and something changes in how buyers treat you. They stop seeing you as a salesperson and start seeing you as someone worth talking to. That’s worth more than any closing technique I’ve ever come across.

If you want to develop these skills properly across your team, take a look at our consultative selling training, our selling skills training programmes, or have a look at the upcoming schedule to find something that fits.

Happy Selling!

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Sales Training