Hi,

A sell is a transaction between two parties where the buyer receives tangible or intangible goods, services, or assets in exchange for money.

The various types of selling would be :-

• Transactional selling
• Solution selling
• Consultative selling
• Provocative selling

Transactional selling

This is the gold standard or the benchmark of how many think of sales: “Transactional selling is a common method of sales in which a sales representative seeks out prospects, develops a relationship and then tries to close a sale.”

Transactional selling works in part because it’s psychologically comforting to everyone involved. You know you need leads, you know you need to work leads, you know you need to close. This is how we’ve thought of sales forever.

The benefit in transactional is that the focus is short-term. It’s largely about the single sale and the product. Customer needs may be discussed, but that’s often lip-service.

Solution selling

This is the next big jump from transactional. Now, instead of focusing on the product only, you focus on the customer’s needs (the common sales buzzword here is “pain points”) and you try to work through their needs to match them with products and services.

Characteristics of Solution Selling: The prospect is aware of his problem or need, but he is not quite sure about how to solve it. He is looking for a solution to his problem. Solution Selling is often performed in multi-touch face to face environment.

Consultative selling

This is similar to solution selling. The focus is on customer relationships and dialogue with the customer around needs.

This approach is a little harder to execute because it requires a very skilled salesforce. You need people that intuitively know how to open and engage throughout a customer lifecycle conversation-wise. You need good listeners and talkers, in other words.

An end goal of consultative selling is often, well, a consulting situation. Someone from your org with expertise might be part of the deal. You need to know how to weave expertise — and its inherent value in business contexts — into the discussions too. You need to know how to ask the right questions.

Provocative selling

“Shock and awe” in some ways, or make customers aware of problems they didn’t even know existed. As HBR notes in that link right there, it works well in economic downturns — because those with check-writing ability don’t want to spend, but if you convince them that not spending is actually a major miss, they will spend. There’s a degree of “eliminate any possibility except your solution” here too.

Hope this helps.