Exploring the Benefits of Consultative Selling in the Age of AI

Five Lessons Every Factoring Broker Should Learn From Today’s B2B Sales Leaders

Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing sales. A factoring consultant can now use AI to research a prospect before making a call, analyze an industry, draft a personalized email, develop a presentation, create follow-up correspondence, brainstorm qualifying questions, and produce educational content in minutes. But there is an important catch.

AI can make a good salesperson considerably more productive. It cannot turn someone who doesn’t understand how to sell into a trusted financial consultant.

That is one of the most important conclusions from new 2026 research by The Brooks Group, a B2B sales training and research organization. The company’s new report, 5 Strategies for Consultative Selling in the Age of AI, is based on a survey of 270 B2B sales leaders across multiple industries at organizations with more than $50 million in revenue. The researchers found widespread adoption of AI, but also continuing weaknesses in fundamental selling skills.

For factoring brokers and commercial finance consultants, the findings are particularly relevant. We are not really selling a product. We are diagnosing a financial problem and helping a business owner find an appropriate solution. And that makes factoring almost a textbook application of consultative selling.

Here are five lessons from the research—and what they mean to factoring consultants.

Strategy #1: Don’t Expect Technology to Make You a Great Salesperson

One of the most interesting findings from The Brooks Group is just how quickly AI has entered professional sales. The company’s research found 71% of sales leaders were already using AI sales tools. That’s not surprising. AI can be enormously useful to a factoring consultant.

Suppose you’ve just received a lead for a $12 million staffing company. Before calling the prospect, AI can help you research the staffing industry, understand common payroll problems, identify industry terminology and develop questions for your initial conversation. It can help you prepare.

What it cannot do is sit across from the business owner and recognize the significance of this statement:

“We’re growing like crazy, but every Friday I’m worried about making payroll.”

An experienced factoring consultant immediately hears the opportunity.

Employees must be paid weekly.
Customers may be paying in 30, 45 or 60 days.
Rapid growth is therefore consuming working capital.

The factoring consultant begins asking questions.

How much do you invoice monthly?
Who are your customers?
What are your payment terms?
How long are customers actually taking to pay?
How large is payroll?
Do you currently have a bank line?
How rapidly are sales growing?

That’s consultative selling in a nutshell. And AI can help prepare those questions.

But, the factoring consultant still needs to know which questions to ask—and why the answers matter.

Strategy #2: Develop Consistent Selling Skills

The Brooks Group also uncovered an interesting contradiction. Some 93% of the organizations surveyed expected to meet or exceed their 2025 revenue targets, yet 56% of respondents said fewer than 60% of their individual sellers were on track to hit their targets. In other words, many organizations were succeeding because a relatively small group of excellent salespeople was carrying the load.

There is a lesson here for independent factoring brokers.

Success shouldn’t depend upon occasionally getting lucky and finding a huge transaction. Develop a repeatable process. A professional factoring consultant should know what happens when a lead arrives.

Research → Initial Contact → Qualification → Discovery → Financing Analysis → Factor Selection → Submission → Follow-Up → Closing → Relationship Management

Don’t reinvent your own customized new sales process every time the telephone rings. Develop good habits and repeat them.

This is also why maintaining a CRM is so important.

A broker shouldn’t wonder:

“When did I last speak with ABC Staffing?”

The CRM should tell him.

He shouldn’t wonder:

“What was their monthly invoice volume?”

It should be in the record. Consistency turns occasional sales activity into a professional consulting practice.

Strategy #3: Make Your Sales Process Customer-Centric

This may be the most important lesson of all. The Brooks Group found that most surveyed sales organizations have a defined sales process. Yet sales leaders still identified qualifying opportunities and consultative/value-based selling as their two leading training priorities. That suggests simply having a sales process isn’t enough. It has to be the right process.

For factoring consultants, that means moving away from:

“Let me tell you about factoring.”

and toward:

“Tell me about your business.”

That is a tremendous difference.

The inexperienced broker begins describing advances, reserves, factoring fees and notification. The consultant begins asking questions.

“What brought us together today?”

“How much do you currently have outstanding in receivables?”

“How long are your customers taking to pay?”

“What happens when your largest customer pays late?”

“Is slow cash flow preventing you from accepting additional business?”

Eventually, the prospect may effectively diagnose his own problem:

“We’ve got $400,000 tied up in invoices and need the money to take another $250,000 order.”

Now the consultant can discuss a solution. Perhaps that solution is factoring. Perhaps it is purchase-order financing combined with factoring. Maybe it is an asset-based line. Occasionally, it might be an SBA loan.

The professional consultant isn’t trying to force every prospect into factoring. He’s trying to solve the financing problem. That’s customer-centric selling.

Strategy #4: Do Your Homework Before the Call

This finding should receive special attention from factoring brokers. The Brooks Group identified pre-call planning and preparation as one of the top three sales skill gaps for 2026, along with qualifying opportunities and differentiating against competitors. And this is one area where AI can provide an extraordinary advantage.

Imagine receiving an inquiry from:

Smith Precision Components, Inc.

Twenty years ago, the broker might have known little about the company before picking up the telephone. Today, there is little excuse for going into that conversation completely unprepared. Spend ten minutes researching.

What does the company manufacture?
How large is it?
Who are its customers?
How long has it been operating?
Is it expanding?
Has it recently received a major contract?
Does it sell to government agencies?
What financial pressures are common within its industry?
Who are the decision-makers?

Then use AI to help organize what you’ve learned. You might ask AI:

“What are the five most common working-capital problems experienced by a rapidly growing precision manufacturer selling to Fortune 500 customers on Net-60 terms?”

Now you’re preparing for a business conversation, not a factoring pitch. When you finally call, instead of saying:

“I’d like to tell you about our factoring program…”

you might say:

“I noticed you’ve been expanding your aerospace business. Are your larger customers requiring 45- or 60-day payment terms?”

That’s an entirely different level of conversation.

Strategy #5: Train the Skills Customers Actually Value

The Brooks Group found a disconnect between the sales skills organizations say they need and the skills they actually prioritize in training. For example, pre-call planning ranked as the #3 reported challenge but only #5 among training priorities. The researchers’ conclusion is straightforward: training should be aligned with actual seller skill gaps rather than generic programs.

For a factoring consultant, what skills really matter? Certainly, product knowledge matters. You need to understand factoring completely. You need to understand advance rates, reserves, recourse, non-recourse, notification, verification, concentration and credit. But that’s only half the education.

You also need to learn:

How to ask good questions.
How to listen.
How to qualify a prospect.
How to recognize the real cash-flow problem.
How to establish trust.
How to communicate value.
How to handle objections.
How to follow up professionally.
How to build relationships.
How to recognize when factoring isn’t the right solution.

Those are human skills. And they become more valuable, not less valuable, in the age of AI.

AI Can Make Pre-Call Planning Remarkably Powerful

This may ultimately be the greatest immediate benefit of AI for independent factoring consultants. Consider the traditional broker’s preparation for a cold call:

Company name. Telephone number. Contact name.

Now consider an AI-assisted broker. Before making the call, he can potentially know:

Industry
Company history
Approximate company size
Products and services
Key executives
Recent news
Likely customers
Typical industry payment terms
Common working-capital problems
Likely financing requirements
Other questions worth asking

That can turn an ordinary prospecting call into a much more intelligent business conversation. But there’s an important rule:

Use AI to prepare for the conversation—not to replace the conversation.

Don’t Let AI Write Your Personality Out of the Sale

There is another danger. AI makes it incredibly easy to generate perfect-looking emails. And that’s precisely the problem. Prospects are increasingly receiving messages that sound as though they were written by the same machine. They are Long. Polished. Generic. Impersonal.

A factoring consultant should use AI as an assistant while retaining his own voice. If you met a commercial banker at a Chamber Business Expo yesterday, you don’t need a 700-word AI-generated follow-up letter.

You need:

“Bill, it was great meeting you yesterday at the Chamber Expo. I enjoyed our conversation about the bank’s growing manufacturing portfolio. As I mentioned, if you ever have a good commercial customer who simply doesn’t fit the bank’s lending parameters, give me a call. I’d be happy to see if factoring or another alternative financing program could help.”

That’s personal. That’s relationship selling. AI can help polish it.

But the relationship belongs to you.

The Trusted Advisor Still Wins

The Brooks Group summarizes the central lesson of its research particularly well: AI should complement rather than replace the human elements responsible for exceptional selling. Its research also warns that if sellers can’t think critically about a customer’s business, ask effective questions, establish rapport or recognize buyer signals, AI may simply make those deficiencies more apparent.

That observation could have been written specifically for factoring consultants. Your prospect can use AI too.

He can ask:

“What is factoring?”

He can compare factoring with a bank loan. He can research typical rates. He can find factors online. He doesn’t necessarily need you for basic information anymore. So what does he need you for?

Judgment.

He needs someone who understands his problem. Someone who knows which financing structure makes sense. Someone who recognizes potential problems before submitting the transaction. Someone who knows which factors specialize in his industry. Someone who can explain his options. Someone he trusts.

That is why consultative selling may actually become more important as artificial intelligence becomes more powerful.

Stop Selling Factoring. Start Solving Problems.

Perhaps the most important lesson for brokers can be summarized in one sentence:

Don’t sell factoring. Solve cash-flow problems.

Use AI aggressively.
Use it to research industries.
Use it to prepare for calls.
Use it to develop questions.
Use it to create educational content.
Use it to analyze marketing opportunities.
Use it to improve follow-up.
Use it to become more productive.

But when you finally sit across the table—or speak on the telephone—with a business owner worried about making Friday’s payroll, put the technology aside.