The bad news is, since very few distributors (if any) have changed their pricing models to keep up with their new model of selling, distributors may soon head down a road they hadn’t expected to travel.

In his article “Consultative selling and the road to poverty,” Scott Benfield makes a convincing argument that the consultative sales approach — in which salespeople give away their valuable product, process and applications knowledge in an effort to make a product sale — has done more harm than good.

Benfield believes that by bundling unique services into commodity products, distributors have essentially “commoditized” their service offerings. Customers identify the distributor with the commodity, not the service.

“The sales-driven nature of most distributors must change from selling products (or consulting for them) to marketing unique services,” Benfield says.

When I talk with distributors about the industry changing from being product-centric to becoming more service focused, I rarely find anyone who disagrees. If I ask them if they charge for their services, however, most admit it’s something they’ve thought about but haven’t gotten around to doing.

Some are unsure which services to unbundle; some are afraid that customers won’t be willing to pay for services they have traditionally received for free. Others worry about what will happen if they put a price on a service that the competition continues to give away.