Making an Impact With a New Model of Sales Consulting

Sales teams are always working toward efficiency and growth. Whether they’re trying to improve the sales cycle, expand customer growth, or increase sales conversion, sales teams are always heads-down in development. However, the roadmap to get there is different from team to team, and when there’s a lag in growth, companies turn to sales experts to reignite the process.

Those experts are sales consultants. Sales consultants solve problems and can change the trajectory of a business. Yet, sales consulting as a service is on the cusp of incredible change. 

As successful as it may once have been, the traditional approach to consulting leaves companies without tangible impact, lasting results, and qualitative direction. The lack of domain expertise and hands-on activation has created a chasm between the consultant and client expectations.

As this chasm deepens, a new breed of sales consulting is progressing through B2B. One that provides as much theoretical understanding of initiatives and change as they do the practical implementation. What is sales consulting in this new form? How does it differ from the traditional model? Let’s look at how the new model is transforming sales consulting.

How does Traditional Sales Consulting Compare to the New, Proactive Model?

The traditional sales consulting system is generally a distanced operation with little or no follow-through. What we mean by that is the average consultant will come in, assess the problem, provide recommendations for fixing the problem, but won’t typically stick around to help implement the solution or make sure it was done correctly. 

This type of consulting isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and we value the ability to audit a business and say, “The reason you’re losing clients is because you have no SOP around customer success or retention.” The ability to look at a network of internal operations and pinpoint the breaking points is a necessary skill in sales consulting. However, if that knowledge isn’t fortified with practical knowledge and action, that’s where traditional sales consulting falls behind.

There are three things that are changing in the sales consulting world to meet the demand for this more proactive and practical model.

1. How consulting firms hire by giving precedence to tactical experience
2. Successful consultants implement tactical solutions and care about the lasting impact
3. Sales consulting is taking more of a Marketing outsourced approach

Changing How Sales Consulting Firms Hire by Giving Precedence to Tactical Expertise

Think about how traditional consultant firms staff their organization. They look through resumes to find an MBA from an accredited school and maybe a CPSP certification. They look for intelligent people who are skilled in figuring out problems. Once they find the right fit, they onboard them with project management training and consultative workflows, and then boom – they can work through any problem, industry agnostic.

While that gives them a license to issue consultant recommendations, it doesn’t provide clients with a pathway to real solutions.

The new model of sales consulting augments theoretical knowledge by ensuring that consultants have real-life sales and management experience and not just an MBA or certification. After auditing the client’s sales environment and discovering the bottlenecks, these types of consultants design a thorough solution that employs tactical follow-through.

In both hiring and training, this new model of sales consulting leverages an outlook centered on domain-specific applied experience.

Related Content: Do I Need Sales Consulting or Sales Training? It Depends.

Think about it like this: if you wanted to become a better golfer or a more dynamic football player, you wouldn’t want a coach whose only frame of reference was taken from books and Youtube videos. Sure, they can offer some analysis and a couple of tips on where you can improve, but they can’t teach you the practical application of their advice. To have success and real-life improvement, you need someone who’s played the game. They’ve not only studied the plays, but they’ve also run them. They’ve read the books on proper form, and they’ve executed it from tee to green. They work with you the entire way through to ensure you hit your goals.

Theoretical input versus practical execution shows the stark differences between traditional and tactical sales consulting. While the traditional consultant is invested in how well they can create a solution, the tactical, proactive consultant is invested in real results.

Sales Consultants Need Tactical Knowledge to Create a Powerful Impact

From the client’s perspective, both shades of sales consulting have the same objective: help the company sell more. Simple enough. On the other hand, for the consultants, the expected results are significantly different.

Traditional consultants typically take a one-sided approach to projects. Their results hinge on a successful business audit, finding the disparities in the company’s sales structure, and then offering a strategic plan to work through it. They don’t typically incorporate what the client company wants to see, their expectations for improvement, and how they want to reach these goals. 

On the other hand, practical sales consultants base their expected results around the client’s goals, and they measure them by whether those goals are achieved or not. They focus on metric-based impact, which involves a deep understanding of the client’s domain and experience solving similar problems. For example, suppose the client is focused on increasing the average deal size month-over-month. In that case, they need a consultant with roots in their industry and experience in contract optimization. 

Maybe the result is centered around sales cycle acceleration; process consultants can dissect the different parts of the cycle, find the kinks, and create a new process to shorten the sales cycle. Or, it could be about sales conversion and getting more net new leads by finding what’s stopping conversion and institutionalizing SOPs. There’s an ongoing stockpile of reasons, but a practical consultant’s ultimate goal hinges on metric-driven results. 

Related Content: How do Management Consulting Firms Accelerate Growth?

The Future of Sales Consulting is Following B2B Marketing

We’ve been saying, “new model,” but this practical and proactive consultative approach isn’t that new. B2B Marketing teams outsource a lot of their campaigns – content marketing, event marketing, email marketing, etc. – in a similar way. However familiar Marketing is with it, Sales has been slow to adopt that type of consultative service. That’s why traditional sales consulting consists of minimal output from the consultant and significant effort from the client. This new model, which insists on the expertise mentioned above, follows Marketing’s outsource approach.

There’s now a supply and demand for hiring specialized Sales experts that can submerge themselves in a Sales organization, solve their problems, see the solution through, and leave with the confidence that they’ve made a lasting impact.

Making a Difference With Impact-Driven Consulting

What is sales consulting without practical input and an impactful output? 

Impactful sales consulting is not just about prescribing solutions. It requires a partner who can relieve clients from having to do the heavy lifting by embedding themselves within the organization and seeing solutions through to the end.

At Skaled, our experienced experts ensure that whatever impediment is in the way – be it around sales process, sales ops, sales enablement, or Linkedin strategy – is dissolved by overseeing high-level strategy and tactical follow-through in every engagement.