Roofing, siding, windows
Free inspection booked
01/5
The category
What is a consultative sale?
A consultative sale is a purchase the buyer researches alone before they ever make contact — where the decision is blocked by specific questions the website does not answer, and where one customer is worth thousands rather than tens.
A roof replacement, a dental implant, a collision repair, a legal matter, a $12,000 hot tub. The buyer reads for days or weeks, forms an opinion nobody corrects, and either books or quietly disappears. Almost all of that happens before anyone at the business knows they exist.
01/5
The test
Three things have to be true.
If all three describe your business, SentientWeb is built for you. If any one of them does not, it is probably not worth your money — and we would rather say so here than on a sales call.
- 1
The buyer researches before they contact you
Nobody buys a roof on impulse. They read, compare, and form a view long before the phone rings — and most of that happens on your website, silently.
- 2
Specific unanswered questions block the purchase
Fit, sizing, timing, installation, financing, warranty, "will this work for my situation." These are answerable questions. They just never get asked, because asking means filling in a form and waiting.
- 3
One customer is worth $5,000 or more
Below that, the arithmetic does not work — for you or for us. Above it, a single recovered enquiry usually pays for a month of service.
01/5
Why the leak exists
The question nobody asks is the one that loses the sale.
In a consultative sale the buyer is uncertain by definition — that is what makes it consultative. But the website offers only two options: read what is already there, or fill in a form and wait for a callback. Neither resolves uncertainty at the moment it appears, so the buyer resolves it themselves, usually against you.
- They assume the price is higher than it is, and leave.
- They assume you do not cover their area, their model, or their situation.
- They assume the wait is longer than it is.
- They compare you to someone who answered, and pick them.
None of this appears in your analytics. You see a visit and a bounce. You never learn what the assumption was.
02/5
Where it shows up
The same sale, in different clothes.
These industries look unrelated and behave identically. The buyer researches alone, the questions are specific, and the customer is worth real money.
Med spas, cosmetic dentistry
Consultation booked
Collision, PPF, premium repair
Estimate visit booked
Law firms
Case review booked
Brokerages and agents
Viewing or valuation booked
Premium furniture, jewellery, spas
Design consult, or a purchase made alone
Some of these close over the phone, some close in a showroom, and a few close online without anyone speaking to a human. The buying behaviour is the same in all of them, which is why one system serves all of them.
02/5
Who this is not for
Two kinds of business we are wrong for.
Both are perfectly good businesses. We are simply not the right purchase.
Low-consideration, high-volume selling
If someone buys a $40 item in ninety seconds without comparing anything, there is no unanswered question to catch and no margin to justify catching it. Ordinary live-chat support serves you better and costs far less.
Business software sold to a committee
When the blocker is procurement, a security review, or a budget cycle, the problem is organisational rather than informational. A website cannot resolve a purchasing process — no matter how well it answers questions. Drift, Qualified, Intercom and Docket are built for that motion and we are not — Docket, for instance, publishes a $36,000/year floor and sells against enterprise security review, which is the right shape for that buyer and the wrong shape for this one.
See what an AI agent finds on your site today.
We run a free audit against your own pages and show you what a buyer — or their assistant — actually gets when they arrive with a question.