Discover how technology can help teams shift into and scale a consultative sales approach in 2025 and beyond.
With more competition and changing buyer expectations, selling no longer means just pitching products and services. With more choices and buyers being able to do thorough research prior to reaching out, the old way of selling is dead.
The data backs us up here: 86% of business buyers are more likely to buy if companies understand their goals yet 59% say most sales reps don’t take the time to understand them.
This gap is your opportunity.
Consultative selling helps you flip the script. You’ll put the customer’s challenges and goals front and center, turning your team into trusted advisors, not just another vendor.
If you’re looking to adopt a consultative approach to sales or looking for ways to level up your existing approach, we’ve got you covered.
What is consultative selling?
Consultative selling is a sales approach that focuses on understanding prospect’s problems and recommending products or services to solve them. Instead of pushing products, companies using this approach are focused on ensuring that they can actually solve their problems and educating them on exactly how.
The core elements that make consultative selling distinct from traditional selling include:
- Active listening and asking open-ended questions
- Positioning yourself as a trusted advisor
- Prioritizing the buyer’s success over making a quick sale
- Collaborative problem-solving
By making this shift, teams build stronger and longer-term customer relationships, reduce churn, and optimize for sustainable revenue growth.
Consultative sales vs. solutions sales
Similar to consultative sales, solution selling is a sales methodology focused on selling a complete solution to a customer’s problem rather than just a standalone product or service.
Think of consultative sales as the first step and solution sales as the goal. Consultative sales may still start with understanding and solving singular problem but through the process you may uncover other issues that your company can solve whether today or in the future with new product releases.
And that’s another benefit of this approach: by listening to prospect’s real problems you can create an iterative product development process based on actual issues rather than assumed problems.
Why consultative selling matters more than ever
While product-led growth and traditional selling has dominated the sales scene over the last ten years, with more options than ever before, customers are looking for more.
- Buyer expectations are higher: The buying journey is more self-directed with B2B buyers doing more research on their own. When they do reach out, decision-makers expect sellers to know their company, industry, and challenges deeply.
- Scaling personalization was difficult: Consultative selling, which relies on in-depth prospect research, was a resource-intensive and time-consuming manual process. Reps struggle to maintain deep personalization across large pipelines.
Buyers have access to more information than ever, which means they expect sellers to come to the table with insights, not product pitches. Yet reps are feeling the pressure to do more with less — sales quotas are higher but they still only have so much time to personalize their outreach, engagement, and follow-ups.
This is where technology, especially AI sales tools have unlocked the ability to scale this sales style while matching today’s sales velocity.
How to Succeed with Consultative Selling in 2025
The three main components of consultative selling are research, listening, and personalization.
But how do you actually put these concepts into action?
1. Do the Research
Most teams engaging in consultative selling are doing some form of account-based marketing as they know their products solve a certain set of problems for a certain type of customer. But just having a target account list isn’t enough.
Teams need to know about the potential buying committee, how they like to communicate, and their existing tech stack. This is where AI-powered data enrichment tools like LeadiQ,Clay, or Crystal, can come in handy, providing more in-depth information than just basic contact data.
2. Ask questions and practice active listening
When a prospect does reach out (or responds to your cold email), now is NOT the time to pitch your product. Using a consultative approach, the first meeting should be more about asking questions and understanding pain points.
But don’t just come with a list of generic questions like “what problem are you facing today?” or “what are you looking for in a [insert your type of product or service]”. The questions need to be specific and targeted, drawn from both research and active listening throughout the conversation.
Some consultative selling style questions might be:
- It seems like the product team is growing fast at [company] with # of open roles on your site — is that what led you to reaching out?
- I believe you’re using Salesforce and Gong for sales outreach. But are you struggling with [specific gap your product solves]?
- Congratulations on the recent funding announcement — I bet your team is now really feeling the pressure to [insert problem you help solve]?
- Why has this become a problem your team is looking to solve right now? It seems like [company] is [growing or declining] so is this the underlying reason?
See how these questions demonstrate that you’ve done your research? Now shift to active listening – meaning you’re doing more than just listening to what they’re saying but identifying their emotions behind what they’re saying and why they’re saying something.
3. Identify Problems
Once you’ve allowed the prospect space to express their concerns and ultimate goals, rather than going right into pitching your product, distinctly label the problem the buyer is facing.
This might sound something like:
- Thank you for sharing. It sounds like you’re looking for a tool that [repeat how they phrased their problems] that integrates with your existing tech stack. Does that sound right?
- We hear these same problems from our customers — [repeat their problems]. Many of them also made the switch from [competitor] to us because we not only can solve those issues but offer more support as you get started and oftentimes come in less expensive.
It’s all about striking a balance: nobody wants a sales rep to think they know their business better than they do. But they do want to feel like you’re really hearing their problems and focused more on building a long term relationship than closing a quick deal.
4. Identify solutions
The urge to start hard selling is likely strong by now! But you have to resist this temptation.
After identifying their problems and having them repeat them back to you, offer potential solutions that do not directly connect with your product or service.
So rather than saying “our product solves these exact problems”, a consultative selling response might sound like:
- Sounds like you’re looking for a tool that enables your team to [insert product features]. Am I on the right track here?
- I’m sure you’ve done some product research before reaching out to us. What makes you think we might be a good fit?
- There are a few tools / solutions that could help you. While I believe we may be one of them, how are you thinking of solving them besides us?
See how you’re not just identifying solutions but offering them a chance to show their expertise and research? Prospects are more researched than ever before, so rather than going directly to how you can solve their problems with certain features, you’re focused on ensuring you’re collaborating with them on identifying the best solutions.
5. Educate the buyer
Now is the time to sell: but with facts and figures, centering the buyer’s problem, requirement, and ideal outcome. Don’t yap about your product but ensure you’re connecting their exact problems to exact features in your problem.
There is also a fine balance to strike here: you want to educate the buyer while also assuming they’re a pretty smart cookie and have done their research and explored their options.
- Have you tried [insert solution that is more manual / complex]?
- You could likely solve [issue] by [insert more manual way of solving the problem], but we understand companies come to us as we make [solution] easier in a lot of ways.
- I believe [existing solution / competitor] does have some features that help with [problem]. Have you explored this or are things like pricing and scalability making you nervous to continue investing in [existing solution / competitor]?
Once you get their answers (using active listening!), you can respond with some clear examples of how your customers have used your solution to solve similar problems.
6. Overcoming Challenges
While consultative selling often reduces buyer questions and concerns, even the way you handle objections should differ with this sales approach. Buying committees are getting bigger and decision-makers are tightening their budgets so getting everyone involved in the sales process and on the same page are paramount to closing the deal.
Some ways to overcome objections and challenges using a consultative selling approach include:
- Sending personalized video follow-ups: Rather than typing out a long email covering all their questions, a personalized video message can actually show rather than tell with product demonstrations.
- Get leadership involved: With bigger deals, sometimes it can help to bring in the big dogs. Have your leadership create a video that demonstrates they understand the prospect’s problems and are committed to helping them solve each one. This is easier than ever with AI Avatar videos, where you can craft a script and have the AI record the video without your boss having to manually record a video!
- Offer consultation services: While your product might solve their problems, actually getting their team set up, onboarded, and trained in the tool can be a ton of work. By having ways to make this easier, whether a 1:1 consultation or having robust training programs available, you’re lessening the burden on the buyer!
By this point, the sales team should have built the rapport with the buyer to have them realize you aren’t in it for a quick buck!
Mapping buying committees with data insights
In enterprise and mid-market deals, consultative selling requires understanding not just a single buyer’s needs, but the dynamics of an entire buying committee. With the average B2B buying committee now involving an average of 11 members (all with unique perspectives, problems, and personalities!), consultative selling can help you build trust with users and decision makers all at the same time.
And it’s easier than ever with advanced tools and techniques to identify and map decision-makers, influencers, blockers, and champions including:
- CRM engagement scoring: Detect emerging champions and disengaged stakeholders
- Video engagement analytics: See which individuals interact most with educational or solution-focused content
- Social and intent data: Spot trigger events (new hires, funding rounds, regulatory changes) that shift priorities
Some real-world examples might involve:
- Start with an AI-assisted company research tool to map org charts and identify potential stakeholders like Clay, LeadiQ, or Apollo
- Send personalized video messaging to multiple people within the account at once with customized messaging using a video sales script generator and AI Avatar generated videos
- Monitor cross-stakeholder engagement patterns like open and view rates of sales enablement material to adapt the conversation in real time
Every sales interaction should be about creating a value-based narrative that addresses each stakeholder’s unique lens — technical, financial, operational — while weaving a thread of trust and honesty throughout the sales process.
Consultative selling across the customer lifecycle
Consultative selling doesn’t end once the deal is done. It must extend beyond the dotted line by ensuring the new customer is successfully onboarded and feels confident in their decision.
- Pre-sale: Position reps as industry educators via targeted thought-leadership videos and data-backed market insights.
- Post-sale: Continue consultative engagement to identify upsell opportunities, mitigate churn risks, and co-create success plans.
Think of it like dating: once you ask them to be serious, if you stop putting in the effort, they’re more likely to break up with you.
Think of this framework when engaging in consultative selling across the customer lifecycle:
- Discover – deeply understand the account and individuals.
- Advise – provide value-focused, tailored recommendations.
- Co-create – work with the customer to build the solution.
- Sustain – reinforce value and expand opportunities post-sale.
This positions consultative selling as a long-term revenue growth engine, not just a deal-closing methodology that manipulates customers!
Scaling consultative selling with AI-powered video personalization
While consultative selling thrives on human connection, it’s often difficult to sustain at scale — especially in complex B2B environments where reps juggle dozens of deals.
This is where AI-assisted video can help!
Whether your first cold outreach email or the decision maker has ghosted, personalized videos can capture attention in ways that plain text outreach often can’t, helping you stand out in a crowded inbox.
Don’t just take our word for it: over one-third of sales pros who use hyper-personalized video report that it shortened their sales cycle and nearly half report that it has increased close rates.
If you’re not using video in your sales process today, it might be because you think it’s a time-consuming, manual process that requires creating a script, recording, and editing the video.
Need some inspiration? Check out our free sales video templates or our AI Resource Hub for ideas on how your team can implement AI-powered video today.
Plus, our in-depth video analytics allow sales teams to see exactly who’s watching, for how long, and on which topics, helping to inform smarter follow-up and ensuring every touchpoint builds on the last.
The future of consultative selling is human-first, tech-enabled
While technology can help teams scale research, listening, and personalization, consultative selling will always rely on human qualities like empathy, curiosity, and trust.
So whether you’re thinking about making the shift or doubling down on this approach to sales, make sure you don’t lose the human touch. Think about how technology can empower your team, not replace them!