Consultative Sales and Business Development Training

Welcome and Programme Overview

Introduction to the session, objectives, and housekeeping.

The Consultative Shift

Why product-led pitching underperforms when the buyer has already researched the category. Selling to a problem rather than from a brochure. The modern B2B buying journey, the number of people typically involved in a considered purchase, and the implication that your champion has to sell internally on your behalf. Mapping the buying group: economic buyer, user, technical evaluator, procurement, and the blocker nobody introduced you to.

Break

Discovery: The Questions That Change the Deal

The highest-return skill in the programme. Question sequencing from situation to problem to implication to payoff, in the pattern popularised as SPIN. Getting past the stated requirement to the business consequence behind it. Quantifying the cost of the current situation using the buyer's own numbers. Listening ratio, comfortable silence, and the follow-up question most people fail to ask. Role-played discovery calls on participants' real opportunities with observer feedback.

Qualification and Deciding What Not To Chase

Qualifying with a structure rather than optimism: metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, identified pain, champion and competition, and the lighter budget, authority, need and timing checks. Disqualifying early and the discipline of walking away from a deal that will consume a quarter and close nowhere. Reading the difference between interest and intent.

Lunch

Articulating Value and Writing the Proposal

Translating capability into the buyer's outcome and their language. Building a business case the champion can present without you in the room. Proposal structure that leads with their situation and desired outcome rather than your company profile, scopes clearly, prices transparently and makes the next step obvious. Differentiating when the technical offering is genuinely similar to a competitor's. Tender and RFP responses, and how to influence a specification before it is published.

Objections and Stalls

Treating an objection as a request for information rather than a rejection. A structure for handling price, timing, incumbent supplier, internal capability and risk objections. Distinguishing a real objection from a polite exit, and a stall from a genuine sequencing problem. Reviving a stalled opportunity without becoming a nuisance. Role-played against the objections participants actually hear.

Break

Negotiation, Closing and Pipeline Discipline

Negotiating without discounting reflexively: understanding what else has value to the buyer, trading rather than conceding, and protecting margin by changing scope instead of price. Procurement's role and tactics in the final stage. Closing as the natural end of a well-run process. Pipeline hygiene: honest stage definitions, realistic weighting, forecast accuracy, and the account planning that turns a single sale into a relationship.

Live Opportunity Clinic

Participants take one real open opportunity, apply the day's structure, identify the missing information and the next specific action, and get peer challenge on it.

Wrap-Up and Q&A

Key takeaways, next steps, and close.