Understanding B2C consultative sales for SMBs

Consultative selling is neither new nor neglected, but it doesn’t necessarily get the attention it deserves in discussions of growth strategies for businesses in B2C services. Here’s why we think that should change.

Successfully growing your small to medium business often relies on your ability to engage in consultative sales. This powerful approach to selling prioritizes relationship building through a two-way dialogue about the client's unique needs and the tailored solutions that might help meet them. It's especially important to smaller businesses offering B2C services, where the conversation is rarely about the merits of an off-the-shelf offering. 

Engaging in consultative sales is crucial for growing your small to medium business. This approach builds relationships through a two-way dialogue about client needs and tailored solutions. This blog post explores B2C consultative sales for SMBs in services industries.

When developing OnceHub’s AI capabilities, our goal was to empower small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) selling services to excel. We were struck by the lack of online material about B2C consultative sales for small businesses, which starkly contrasts the abundance of information on B2B solution selling and e-commerce.

In this blog post, we delve deep into B2C consultative sales, particularly as it relates to SMBs in service industries like financial advisory, insurance, legal, real estate, coaching, tutoring, wellness, and fitness services.

What is B2C consultative sales?

Let’s start with the concept itself. Coined in 1970, “consultative selling” or “consultative sales” describes a distinctly customer-centric approach to selling centered on understanding and addressing the specific needs and challenges of every prospect or returning client, no matter how different or similar they may be. 

Unlike transactional selling, which aims for a short sales cycle based on the briefest possible interaction, any consultative sales engagement seeks to establish a robust and lasting relationship through close personal attention and a sustained focus on the individual customer experience. The conversation, being so important to achieving this outcome, can't be unduly rushed.

Instead, the seller takes on the mantle of an expert advisor (we’ve also seen them compared to a well-traveled guide or a good doctor), asking insightful questions to uncover the prospect’s pain points and establish their goals for the future, sharing their own experiences and opinions, and, ultimately, delivering tailored solutions to meet their client's unique challenges.

Consultative selling focuses on understanding and addressing each client's unique needs, establishing lasting relationships through personal attention and expert advice. This approach leads to repeat business, referrals, and positive word-of-mouth for SMBs.

Executed well, this approach comes with many rewards for small- to medium-sized businesses. Besides the obvious benefit of repeat business, loyal and happy clients are more likely to provide referrals and positive word-of-mouth, which are crucial for SMBs with limited marketing budgets.

Core aspects of a winning B2C consultative sales strategy

If we dig a little deeper into B2C consultative sales, we start to discern four core aspects to help sales professionals build stronger client relationships and achieve better sales outcomes:

Trust and rapport: building the client relationship

Trust is crucial in any business, but it is absolutely central to B2C consultative sales. Establishing a solid foundation of trust is essential for SMBs in service industries. Prospective clients are not merely assessing a product on the shelf; they are evaluating your skill, background, experience, values, and, most importantly, your commitment to solving their problems. Clients who pay for your time want to feel confident that the experience will be beneficial.

Preceding the typical sales pitch, the seller must establish credibility as a service provider and authority on the issues under discussion. They must also demonstrate how genuinely they care about the client's well-being and success, which involves displaying genuine interest, insight, empathy, and consistent follow-through. 

Needs discovery: uncovering the client’s true concerns

In B2C consultative sales, understanding the client's challenges requires a more intimate approach compared to the less personal and more rigid mapping typical of B2B sales aligned with an ABM strategy. Whether through interviews, surveys, direct observation, or a combination of these methods, B2C needs discovery involves careful questioning informed by prior experience and active listening to uncover both expressed and unexpressed needs.

Tailored solutions: offering the client personalized recommendations

After gaining a deeper understanding of the client's needs, devising a tailored solution is the next step. In doing so, it is essential to highlight how the service or product addresses each pain point and supports the client's goals, ideally with examples and supporting data.

This is where consultative selling differentiates itself from one-size-fits-all approaches. Your options are only limited by your knowledge, skill, and appetite for the job. 

Value communication: articulating the value so it resonates with the client

It’s not enough to describe a process, share a schedule, or run through a list of line items. In B2C services, clients want to understand how a proposal will address their specific needs and improve their situation going forward. It’s crucial for the seller to relate those benefits in their language, focusing on outcomes and return on investment. 

It shouldn’t be too hard, as Wendy Connick, author of the popular primer Sales 101, points out:

“The consultative approach, when properly executed, earns the salesperson a great deal of information about the prospect’s wants and needs – which makes it easy for you to use that information to pick out the benefits that will make your prospect sit up and take notice.” Wendy Connick, What is consultative selling.  

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Benefits of B2C consultative sales for SMBs

For a small business, the benefits of fostering deeper relationships and enhancing customer satisfaction through consultative selling are substantial. Engaging in a bidirectional dialogue helps sellers improve their offerings, understand how to stand out, and refine their sales process. This approach also leverages an improved customer experience for long-term customer loyalty and retention gains.

Consultative selling enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty by addressing unique client needs. SMBs benefit from improved offerings, market differentiation, increased retention, higher lifetime value, and positive word-of-mouth, leading to greater long-term profitability.

Better understanding of customer needs

Small B2C businesses are good at anticipating client needs, but, unless there’s an actual crystal ball gleaming in the back of the tent, they aren’t actually clairvoyant. They’ve developed their intimate understanding of their customers over the course of countless consultative sales and service engagements. 

Each new interaction is another opportunity for them to learn from prospects and returning clients how their needs and preferences may change in line with social trends or new technology. That knowledge can be parlayed into profit in two main ways. 

Enhanced service and product development

According to Salesforce’s researchers, 65% of people expect businesses to adapt their offerings to their preferences and needs as they evolve. But almost as many (61%) say companies “treat them as a number.”  What are customer expectations, and how have they changed?

B2C consultative sales interactions provide valuable insights into individual customer preferences, challenges, and trends in the broader market. These insights are essential for decision-making before delivery, adjusting the customer journey, and creating or redesigning products and services, ultimately leading to increased customer satisfaction.

Improved sales effectiveness

RAIN Group says the consultative selling approach helps uncover significant additional sales opportunities and can lead to more substantial deals. RAIN is a global sales training and consulting firm oriented to B2B sales, but we believe the kinds of conversations inherent to B2C consultative sales can unlock similar opportunities.

The knowledge gained in these sessions can also improve the effectiveness of sales and marketing efforts by better defining and identifying high-quality leads. SMBs are better equipped to tailor their marketing and sales pitches to be more relevant and compelling to their audiences, increasing lead conversions. 

Increased customer loyalty and retention

Consultative selling helps businesses meet client needs more effectively, and the resulting positive experiences can help boost retention rates. It can also help when those past experiences aren't quite as optimal. That's because studies show people are surprisingly forgiving of businesses where they feel understood. A few years ago, CEB Corporate Leadership Council (later acquired by Gartner) found that 53% of customer loyalty in the B2B arena was attributable to the sales experience. Just 19% stemmed from product and service delivery! 

If so, this dynamic can only help SMBs practicing consultative selling, who are well positioned to forge stronger, more enduring relationships by actively demonstrating their interest and building rapport during the sales process and by continuously engaging existing clients to ensure that their evolving needs are met. 

In doing so, they can reap benefits from more return business to positive word of mouth.

Higher customer lifetime value

Enhanced customer satisfaction can lead to higher customer lifetime value. Satisfied customers tend to spend more over time and are less likely to switch to competitors. A study by the Temkin Group has found that loyal customers are over five times more likely to buy again, more than seven times more likely to forgive mistakes, and nearly nine times more likely to try new products or services.

By focusing on personalized solutions and maintaining strong relationships, SMBs can increase the overall value each customer brings over time. 

Positive word of mouth

It goes without saying that clients who feel valued and are satisfied with the services provided to them are more likely to recommend business to others. The internet entrepreneur and venture capitalist Tony Hsieh once said of his time as CEO of Zappos, a shoe and clothing company: 

"Our philosophy has been that most of the money we might ordinarily have spent on advertising should be invested in customer service so that our customers will do the marketing for us through word of mouth."

It's little wonder he took that very successful approach. Nielsen has found that 89% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family over any advertising. BrightLocal reports that a large majority of consumers say customer reviews on Google, Facebook, Yelp, and other platforms directly influence their perceptions of local businesses.

Overcoming challenges in B2C consultative sales for SMBs

Despite the benefits, implementing a consultative sales approach can pose challenges, particularly for SMBs with limited resources.

Key challenges in Implementing Consultative Sales

Staff constraints: Small businesses often have fewer employees, which means each team member has to manage multiple roles. Implementing a consultative sales approach, which requires in-depth customer engagement and follow-ups, can be time-consuming and may stretch the capabilities of a small sales team. 

Limited budgets: Training staff in consultative sales techniques and investing in necessary tools and technologies can be expensive. SMBs might struggle to allocate a budget for these activities while managing other operational costs. This can impact how successfully they scale their operations.

Time pressure: Customers often expect quick responses and immediate solutions in a fast-paced consumer market. The consultative sales approach, which takes time to build relationships and understand needs, can be perceived as too slow by some consumers. That's especially true if they make their first inquiries through a website contact form or email.

Consistency in service: Maintaining a consistently high level of consultative service across all customer interactions can be difficult. Variability in service quality can negatively impact customer satisfaction and brand reputation.

Tracking effectiveness: Traditional sales metrics may not fully capture the value of relationship-building activities, making it difficult to justify any investment in time or technology. Making informed decisions about continuing or scaling the approach can be challenging without precise data.

Strategies for success

Addressing these challenges requires a strategic approach, leveraging technology, optimizing processes, and investing in continuous staff development to successfully implement a consultative sales approach in a B2C services context.

Training and development: Invest in regular training for staff to enhance their consultative selling skills.

Technology integration: Use technology to automate routine tasks and provide staff with the tools they need to deliver personalized service when it matters most.

The human touch is essential in B2C services, but AI-powered chatbots can scale up consultative sales efforts, enhancing the experience for both buyers and sellers. These technologies offer personalized engagement, efficiency, and valuable insights, driving better outcomes for everyone involved. Learn more…

Thriving in a competitive market

Implementing a consultative sales approach can set SMBs apart in a crowded market. By building robust and personalized client relationships, businesses can enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty, leading to increased referrals and positive word-of-mouth. Leveraging technology and continuous staff development further ensures a seamless and effective sales process. These strategies collectively empower SMBs to thrive, achieving long-term success and profitability. Additionally, understanding customer needs and adapting offerings accordingly helps businesses stay relevant and competitive. This comprehensive approach not only drives sales but also fosters a robust brand reputation and sustained growth in the market.

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