I became a consultative seller by accident
In 2007 I left corporate life to start my own consulting business.
I thought I knew how to sell. I’d spent years in B2B commercial roles, working my way up through increasingly complex environments. I understood products. I could hold a conversation. I was reasonably good at handling objections and moving deals forward.
What I discovered in the first few months of running my own business is that none of it was going to be enough.
The problem that changed everything
I didn’t have a product.
Everything I did for a client was built specifically for their situation. No standard solution. No off-the-shelf package. No deck I could pull up and walk through. No price list to share.
If I’d walked into a prospective client’s meeting and tried to sell the way I’d been trained to sell (leading with what we did, explaining the benefits, handling objections) I’d have had nothing to lead with. The first question, “so what exactly do you do?”, would have exposed me immediately.
The safety net I didn’t know I’d been relying on, having something concrete to present, had gone.
So out of necessity, I learned a different way.
What necessity taught me
Before I could describe what working together might look like, I had to understand the client’s situation in real detail.
Not a surface-level summary. A genuine, precise understanding of what they were trying to achieve, what was getting in the way, what they’d already tried, what success would actually look like in their specific context, and what it was costing them to stay where they were.
Only once I had that picture clearly enough in my head could I start to describe, carefully and specifically, what an engagement might address.
It was slower than what I was used to. It required more patience. It felt uncomfortable at first, because I wasn’t leading from the strength of a product or a solution. I was leading from curiosity, and curiosity takes longer to pay off than a well-practised pitch.
But the quality of what came out was different to anything I’d produced in corporate sales.
Engagements were more substantial. Clients were more invested. The work was more specific and more useful. And relationships lasted longer, because they were built on something more meaningful than a good presentation.
What I’d been doing wrong without knowing it
Here’s the uncomfortable part of this story.
I didn’t become consultative because I was ahead of my time or particularly insightful. I became consultative because I had no other option. The constraint of starting from scratch with nothing to sell forced me into an approach I should have been using for years.
Looking back at my corporate career with what I know now, I can see exactly where I was operating transactionally in environments that deserved more. Meetings where I led with the solution before I’d properly understood the situation. Proposals I sent before the client had articulated, in their own terms, why change was worth it. Relationships that stayed at the surface because I was focused on advancing the deal rather than genuinely understanding the business.
I was reasonably effective. I just wasn’t as effective as I could have been.
The constraints of 2007 showed me what I should have been doing all along.
Why the customer makes this non-negotiable now
What made the approach necessary for me in 2007 has become necessary for everyone in B2B commercial roles today, for a different reason.
The buyer has changed.
Twenty years ago, the salesperson held the information. They knew the product, the competitive landscape, the pricing. Customers relied on them to explain it. That model gave salespeople a reason to lead with what they knew.
That model is gone.
By the time a senior buyer agrees to a meeting today, they’ve already done the research. They know your competitors. They’ve read the case studies. They have a reasonable sense of the pricing. They don’t need you to inform them.
What they do need, and what most commercial professionals aren’t trained to provide, is someone who can help them think through their situation more clearly than they can on their own.
How to prioritise when everything feels urgent. What the real cost of inaction is. How to build an internal case for change in an organisation where budgets are contested and decisions involve people with competing agendas.
That’s not an information problem. It’s a thinking problem. And it requires a different kind of presence in the room.
What this means in practice
The shift I’m describing isn’t about abandoning your product knowledge or pretending you don’t have a solution. It’s about the sequence.
Understanding the situation thoroughly before describing the solution. Helping the customer see what their problem is costing them before explaining how you’d address it. Building the case for change in their language, not yours.
That sequence is harder than it sounds, especially when you’re under pressure to hit a number, when the meeting slot is short, when the customer asks you to cut to the chase.
But the commercial professionals I’ve worked with who’ve genuinely made this shift operate in a different tier. Larger relationships. More meaningful work. Higher earnings. More trust.
It doesn’t require an MBA or twenty years of experience. It requires being honest about whether your current approach is actually consultative, or whether it’s a consultative label on a transactional habit.
I didn’t know the answer to that question until I had no choice but to find out. Read more about moving from transactional to consultative sales
Most people are somewhere in between.
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