If your sales team faces challenges in consistently reaching revenue goals or closing deals, hiring a B2B sales consultant could be a viable solution.
This blog highlights what a sales consultant does, if you need one, and the cost of hiring.
A sales consultant can take several forms. Sometimes, it’s an individual you’ve hired to provide their years of expertise to improve your results. Other times, an entire team comes in alongside you to provide insight to change your processes.
And now, in the digital age, a sales consultant can sometimes be a digital platform that provides you with analytical insights and automations for optimizing your sales cycles.
As the name implies, a B2B sales consultant offers your team keen insights and best practices for selling to other businesses.
If you’re looking to hire a B2B sales consultant, it’s likely to solve a problem with how your team sells or to improve lead generation and closing rates.
Here are some of the problems a B2B sales consultant can solve:
Your sales representatives can close more deals when speaking with qualified sales leads. While a sale can result from a cold lead barely familiar with your brand, you will have a much higher close rate if the potential customer your sales rep is talking to is educated on your products and services and trusts your brand.
In fact, having better quality leads actually improves employee retention and generates more revenue for your business. That’s because reps closing deals are happy reps who enjoy working for you.
A B2B sales consultant improves lead quality by auditing your lead-to-quote pipeline and offering applicable solutions to widen your sales funnel.
To do this, they will likely need to have conversations with your company’s marketing and service teams.
In modern sales, your team can’t be siloed from other departments. Feedback and alignment from marketing and service help your team win with better leads, more closed deals, and happier overall customers.
This leads to a second way a B2B sales consultant can improve your business.
Every sales rep has a specialized approach to selling and communicating. In many ways, the freedom a sales rep has to do things in a way that works for them is one of their key strengths.
However, this strength can become a weakness when it compromises the overall messaging and experience you give leads and customers at a company-wide level.
It's crucial to ensure seamless communication throughout your sales process. You wouldn't want your sales reps discussing your products and services using language and promises that differ from what leads were initially informed by marketing. Such consistency is vital to aligning customer expectations, avoiding disconnect, and ensuring a smooth transition for the service team once the deal is closed.
A B2B sales consultant works with your entire company across sales, marketing, and service to unify your messaging in a way that accurately and consistently communicates value.
For a sales rep, closing a deal is one of the most satisfying feelings they can have at work. But not every product is suitable for every customer, and the services that sell the easiest aren’t always the ones with the highest profit margin.
In sales, it's easy for reps to have a specific product or service they enjoy selling over others – which isn’t necessarily bad. But at the heart of every long-term B2B relationship is trust. To establish trust, your sales reps should prioritize offering products and services that meet customer needs rather than opting for the easiest sell or those that make them the most money.
To determine what product to sell and when to sell it, a B2B sales consultant analyzes your market and your company positioning relative to that market, pointing out areas of growth and improvement your sales reps might be blind to.
Your customers only have a finite budget, so selling them the right product at the right time is crucial to long-term business relationships and revenue generation.
If you’re ready to increase company revenue and optimize your lead-to-sale pipeline, Open Path’s sales consultants are here to help. We specialize in digital B2B solutions that increase quality leads, reduce friction between company departments, and get the most out of your tech stack budget.
To get started, simply schedule a time to talk with us. Your first consulting call is free. We look forward to meeting you and your sales team.
Luke Donahue: February 5, 2024
In the old days of sales in the manufacturing industry, it was all about having a representative commissioned to a territory to find new leads and...
Nancy Kirchoff: February 5, 2024
Generating complex quotes and proposals is challenging for many sales teams. This manual and time-consuming process leads to delays and the risk of...
Chris Thornton: February 5, 2024
Let's face it. Your sales team is tired. They're tired of high-level decision makers being inaccessible. They're tired of being handed poor leads...
