Sales consultants are experienced experts in sales. They provide support for businesses that want to rejuvenate and optimize sales functions.
The potential benefits of this optimization can have transformative effects on business growth. However, if you’re not ready to invest in outside services, there are alternatives to sales consulting.
In this article, you’ll learn what sales consulting is, what challenges it can solve and exactly how it works so you can decide if hiring an expert is what your business needs to succeed. We’ll also give you alternatives that might better suit your situation.
What is sales consulting?
Sales consulting is an advisory service that helps businesses improve their sales processes to increase sales and generate more revenue. A business might hire a sales consultant to identify weaknesses, help them implement improvements and achieve sales goals.
Consultants can also be solo experts or sales consulting companies (like global firms Kornferry or McKinsey) with multiple experts to serve businesses needing support.
Some sales consulting firms, like Bain & Company, will also serve other functions, such as marketing.
When it comes to sales, different types of consulting can help businesses achieve a range of outcomes, including:
Sales strategy consulting. Develops and implements better long-term sales strategies.
Sales process consulting. Analyzes and optimizes existing sales processes and workflows.
Sales technology consulting. Advises on and supports the integration of new sales technologies.
Sales training consulting. Provides training programs to enhance sales teams’ knowledge or skills.
Sales performance consulting. Evaluates and develops key performance indicators (KPIs) to improve performance measurement.
Sales consultants will adapt their approach to suit various industries or may specialize in different business types.
For example, B2B sales consulting (business-to-business sales consulting) will likely focus on refining the sales cycle and building strong customer relationships. B2C (business-to-consumer) consulting might instead focus on understanding consumer behavior and crafting smoother conversion pathways.
Versatility like this makes sales consulting a popular solution. It’s currently a $5 billion industry projected to reach a total market size of over $7 billion by 2030.
The more popular sales consulting becomes, the more likely your competitors will benefit from it. Therefore, finding ways to tackle weaknesses or challenges in your sales process is critical to stay ahead.
Why do businesses need sales consultants?
Every business faces challenges. Sometimes, you need a little help to solve them. Sales consulting allows businesses to draw on external problem-solving expertise to learn solutions to big and everyday problems.
The sales consulting industry is growing because modern life has brought several challenges to closing deals. Here are several broad challenges that have led businesses to require sales consultants.
Challenge 1: changing customer expectations
Customers increasingly expect the businesses they interact with to take a personalized approach. They’re quick to move on if they’re unsatisfied.
A study by McKinsey discovered how important personalization is to customers:
71% of the respondents expected personalization from brands
76% said they get frustrated when they don’t receive it
78% claimed they were more likely to make repeat purchases from brands that engage with them on a personalized basis
Using personalization techniques in sales is essential to winning customers over, nurturing them toward conversion, and developing customer loyalty. However, it’s not a simple change for many businesses.
Sales consultants help businesses realize the benefits of personalization through sales process recommendations and initiatives like:
Tailoring messaging to suit each customer
Celebrating customer milestones
Offering targeted pricing deals or promotions
Following up post-purchase
Providing an engaging onboarding process
Using technology to achieve personalization at scale
Sales consultants provide businesses with the expert support they need to manage the complexity of large-scale personalization, meet customer demands and increase sales.
Challenge 2: increasingly complex buying journeys
The modern customer journey is complex, involving many touch points across online and offline channels.
Businesses require sophisticated strategies to nurture leads throughout the journey, minimizing the risk of losing them.
In B2B markets, this is particularly true. Gartner found B2B buyers often face complex purchasing decisions that involve five to eleven decision-makers on average.
Data shows these buyers are 1.8 times more likely to report a high-quality deal when they engage with digital resources or tools alongside a sales representative.
They’re also 2.8 times more likely to make a deal when the information they get from the supplier’s website and sales representatives is consistent.
Sales consultants can develop more effective cross-channel lead nurturing processes to meet buyer demands better, improve customer experiences and overcome objections. They may offer recommendations on areas like:
Identifying key talking points to cover in content and sales approaches
Using diverse content formats to support self-service research
Creating lead magnets that businesses can use to show purchase intent
Establishing a link between sales and marketing to share insights
Equipping sales with tools to understand customers’ digital behaviors
Rolling out these tactics helps businesses maximize their digital assets and the impact of their sales reps on conversion rates.
Challenge 3: more competition than ever before
Crayon’s 2024 Competitive Intelligence report revealed that 57% of leaders think their market is much more competitive than in recent years. Their data also showed that 65% of sales opportunities in the average company’s pipeline are competitive.
Sales consulting can help businesses develop better strategies to win these contested deals.
Sales teams need to know how to outmatch competitors and demonstrate their products’ benefits. To do this, they need value-focused and well-organized sales strategies.
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Businesses can draw on the expertise of sales consulting companies to improve their competitive intelligence (CI) capabilities and reinvigorate their sales tactics.
Support might include developing strategies for:
Communicating key differentiation factors
Collating CI in sales battle cards
Making it easier to keep CI data updated
Using dedicated CI software to streamline the function
Integrating AI in the CI process to get better insights
Creating stronger links between sales and product teams to share insights
A more sophisticated understanding of competitors and better resources to refer to when tackling objections help sales teams convert leads more efficiently.
Challenge 4: access to a wealth of information and options
Lots of markets are competitive environments with an abundance of choices. Customers often empower themselves to make purchasing decisions through independent research.
It’s up to businesses to provide the information their customers need and ensure their sales professionals demonstrate particular expertise to add value.
An Accenture study found that 73% of customers feel overwhelmed by the available buying options. As a result, around 74% of people abandon purchases.
Sales consulting can help businesses stand out from competitors by implementing strategies that facilitate customers’ research and buying processes.
Strategies might include:
Developing research methods to discover key customer insights and pain points
Creating content to attract customers who are conducting research at the top of the funnel
Designing content funnels that nurture leads toward purchases
Equipping salespeople with tactics to add value to the bottom of the funnel
Implementing them can fill sales pipelines with more leads and ensure sales teams can add value to the bottom of the funnel.
How does sales consulting work?
All sales consulting firms work differently, and no two sales consulting processes are identical. However, there are some general steps involved in most consulting projects.
Here are the key components of a typical sales consulting process.
Step | Description |
Step 1: needs assessment | Sales consulting begins with a discovery phase. Consultants take the time to understand your business goals, sales challenges and current processes. In this stage, they gather all the necessary information through interviews, observation and data analysis. |
Step 2: strategy development | Based on their findings, sales consultants will develop a bespoke sales strategy. It will address weaknesses in your current process and align with your objectives. Usually, sales consultants conduct this stage in collaboration with internal sales leaders. |
Step 3: implementation and integration | Consultants work alongside your sales team in this stage to integrate the new strategy. Employees will receive relevant training on new processes and tools, set up new technology integrations and update SOPs. |
Step 4: measurement | Sales consultants help you establish appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs) for your new sales strategies and ensure you track the right metrics through analytics platforms. They can also work with you to analyze data and refine the strategy. |
Step 5: ongoing support | Many sales consultants offer ongoing coaching and support following the adoption of their strategy. Support like this helps your sales team get familiar with new processes, approaches and technologies quickly and effectively. |
5 ways sales consulting can help your business
Most sales consultants work toward similar fundamental goals, such as increasing leads generated, conversion rate and revenue. However, they can take different approaches to achieve these goals.
To illustrate what sales consulting can do for you and help you decide if it’s worth investing in, here are five ways sales consulting can help businesses.
1. Developing new sales strategies
Sales consultants bring a fresh perspective that inspires new sales techniques and strategies. They can identify gaps in your current approach and propose better methods to nurture and convert leads.
Suggestions include introducing more accurate lead scoring to identify best-fit leads or helping your sales team focus their energy more efficiently.
It can also involve more complex actions, such as creating a powerful competitive intelligence function, which will improve your sales team’s ability to sell your business’s unique value proposition and help you overcome the competition.
More effective sales strategies delivered by consultants can improve your average lead quality, use time better and increase your conversion rate.
2. Optimizing your existing sales processes
Sales consultants understand what makes sales functions work effectively. They can analyze your current sales processes to identify weaknesses and find ways to strengthen them.
You can find opportunities across the sales function, including:
Team organization
SOPs
Communication methods
Use of technology
Approach to lead nurturing
Sales consultants’ unbiased external perspective makes their insights particularly valuable. Your internal sales team may find it more difficult to identify weaknesses in the existing system because they’re so used to it.
Optimizing processes following the insights from sales consulting increases efficiency. It allows your sales team to operate with increased scope at reduced cost and can influence their success in KPIs like conversion rate.
3. Integrating new sales technologies
Various sales technologies can drive better performance, from sophisticated customer relationship management (CRM) platforms to sales automation solutions. Sales consultants can advise you on implementing these technologies effectively to improve process efficiency and overall performance throughout your sales function.
Different technologies offer unique benefits such as:
Better customer research tools allow you to get deeper insights into customer pain points and preferences
A more effective CRM makes it easier to manage customer data and tailor sales approaches to suit key accounts
Automation tools reduce the burden on your sales team to carry out monotonous tasks, giving them more time to spend on nurturing leads with a personal touch
The right sales tools for your business will depend on your unique needs. An effective sales consultant can help you make an informed decision about the right option.
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Sales consultants can also help you use technology to create better integrations between sales and other departments so that they can seamlessly share critical insights. Marketing, customer service and finance can all benefit from these insights.
4. Delivering sales training or coaching to the team
Training from sales consultants equips your team with new techniques and improved confidence. It can help them nurture leads more effectively and generate conversions at a higher rate, paying for itself over the long term.
Sales training is tailored to your needs, addressing your team’s weak points or skill gaps.
Consultants determine where you most need support through interviews and observation. Based on their findings, they design a customized training program and deliver it through methods like workshops and shadowing.
Sales coaching can cover basic principles like persuasive communication. It can also involve more complex techniques, like how sales management teams can create and use battle cards to overcome deep-set objections.
After-sales consulting training, your team will be better equipped to tackle their most common sales process challenges. They’ll also feel more valued, boosting retention and contributing to long-term success.
5. Establishing better-fit sales KPIs
Sales consultants can help you define KPIs that make it easier to measure success in the most important areas of sales performance – essential to driving meaningful improvements in the future.
Aligning your KPIs with your sales objectives will give you more precise insights into your sales approach. Focusing on the right sales metrics will strengthen your ability to reach your goals.
For example, perhaps you track deals closed, but that doesn’t paint a clear picture of where things go awry. You know you need more detailed metrics, but you don’t know if it’s worth focusing on short-term activities like demos made or initial calls booked to get results fast.
Sales consultants bring vast experience in sales performance measurement. They can recommend better KPIs to suit your sales goals and help you implement tracking solutions that allow you to measure performance accurately.
This change can impact overall business success by ensuring your sales team works toward the right sales KPIs to influence revenue.
What to do if sales consulting isn’t the right move
Sales consulting may not be the right solution for your business or not the right move right now.
It can be challenging to get adoption and buy-in from others, and even if you do, it can lead to more meetings and process overhauls.
You can use dedicated sales tools as an alternative (or a supplement) to sales consulting services to optimize sales processes, provide AI-powered insights and simplify lead generation and scoring.
Tools like these offer simple and intuitive ways to streamline sales processes, strengthen relationship-building capabilities and boost conversion rates.
Take Pipedrive, for example. You can get key insights unique to your business from your dashboard. See exactly where deals stall in your pipeline, your win rate, completed activities and more.
Pipedrive’s Insights dashboard can help you get the most from your customer and sales data. Like a consultant will analyze your data and bring you the best next steps, so can your CRM.
You can even create tailored dashboards to identify high-performing strategies, track sales KPIs and forecast revenue. The dashboards ensure you have a complete overview of important data and can get the right insights to adapt your strategy effectively.
Pipedrive also harnesses the power of AI to provide you with up-to-date tips on your sales flow. The AI Sales Assistant, for example, continuously analyzes your deals and communications to provide you with top advice, such as productivity tips and inactivity reminders.
The sales CRM can also streamline your operations, allowing your team to work more efficiently and focus on higher-value tasks.
The Pipedrive Sales Automation system allows you to automate repetitive administrative tasks that take up time in every sales process, such as sending follow-up emails, scheduling calls and transferring leads between reps at new deal stages.
It also includes the Smart Contact Data feature, which pulls valuable information about your leads from the web and social media in one click. This allows sales teams to pre-qualify contacts and prepare their sales approach.
If your team needs help with prospecting, lead management software makes pipeline management more efficient. It allows you to build highly customizable dashboards that make it easier to conduct prospecting, build relationships with leads and track deals from first contact to conversion.
Other lead management tools, such as live chatbots and customizable web forms, offer opportunities to create new conversion pathways and feed leads directly into your CRM.
Final thoughts
In increasingly challenging markets, the expert insights delivered through successful sales consulting can be instrumental in achieving revenue growth.
Sales consultants offer an objective perspective that can help you identify and rectify weaknesses in your sales operations. Addressing these weaknesses can help you hit – or even exceed – your sales targets.
Alongside better use of sales technology, consulting can help boost your sales function’s impact and drive more business success over the long term.
