Manufacturing sales typically fall into two categories. Transactional business involves customers who know what they want and just need a price. Consultative business involves customers who need help solving a problem and are willing to invest in the partnership to find the right solution.
Most manufacturers understand this distinction. What many miss is that consultative opportunities are often hiding inside their transactional volume—and they're not being identified.
The numbers hold across enough manufacturing companies to confirm this pattern: when you're engaged early in a customer's design process, your win rate can approach 80%.
When you're responding to a completed specification where the design is done, and you're just providing pricing, your win rate drops to single digits.
The difference is whether you're a partner in solving the problem or a commodity supplier being compared on price.
Early engagement means you can influence the design. You can suggest alternatives. You can identify ways your capabilities provide advantages. You become part of the solution rather than a source of quotes.
Late engagement means someone else already influenced the design. The specification is locked. The only variable left is price. Unless you're the lowest price—and accepting commodity pricing rarely leads to sustainable business—you lose.
Your sales team processes hundreds or thousands of inquiries per year. They're busy handling immediate customer needs, responding to urgent requests, chasing hot opportunities. In that volume, signals that an inquiry might have consultative potential get lost.
A customer calls about a standard part. That's transactional, right? Maybe. Or maybe they're working on a new application where some guidance would help them succeed—and create an opportunity for ongoing business. But if the salesperson is under time pressure, they process the transaction and move on.
The result is that consultative opportunities slip through as transactional requests, and you never capture the value you could have provided.
What separates a transaction from a consultative opportunity? Usually it's context that gets missed or not asked about. New applications are a signal. When a customer is using your product in a way they haven't before, there's often an opportunity to advise. New industries for that customer are a signal. If they're entering unfamiliar territory, they need guidance. New people contacting you are a signal. A design engineer who hasn't worked with your products before may need more support than they're asking for.
Some companies are experimenting with AI-powered systems that flag inquiries with consultative potential. The technology looks at patterns in the request, the customer's history, market signals, and other factors to identify which transactions might be worth more exploration.
But even without sophisticated technology, simply training your team to ask better questions can surface opportunities. What's the application? Why now? What alternatives are you considering? What would success look like? These questions take an extra minute but can reveal whether there's a larger opportunity worth pursuing.
Not every inquiry deserves consultative treatment. Some customers genuinely just need a price. Some transactions are exactly what they appear to be. Treating every request as a consultative opportunity would overwhelm your team and frustrate customers who just want to buy something.
The skill is reading signals correctly. A repeat customer ordering the same part they always order probably doesn't need consultation. A new customer with a complex application and technical questions probably does. Training your team to recognize the difference and respond appropriately is a competitive advantage.
Some manufacturers solve this problem by separating roles. Transactional requests go to inside sales or customer service. Consultative opportunities go to field sales or application engineers. The logic is that specialists can focus on what they do best.
The challenge is the handoff. How do you ensure that an inquiry that starts in the transactional queue gets escalated when it becomes clear there's consultative potential? How do you avoid customers falling through cracks between teams?
There's no universal answer. The right structure depends on your business, your volume, and your customers. But whatever structure you choose, you need a system for identifying and capturing consultative opportunities that arrive looking like transactions.
You process thousands of quotes per year. Somewhere in that volume are relationships worth millions—if you can find them.
The manufacturers who figure out how to systematically identify and pursue those opportunities will outperform competitors who treat all inquiries the same.