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Product Training is Not Enough!

Guest post by: Joe Ippolito

Article Overview: Many small business owners invest time and energy to ensure that their sales people are well versed in fully understanding the products the sell. Some even take the time to train their teams on how to differentiate their offerings to gain a competitive advantage. This is all good.

Product Training is Not Enough!

After all we must know what we have to sell. The problem is that many don't invest the same amount of time helping their sales people maximize this product knowledge through sales and business development skills as it applies to their prospects. If you truly want to differentiate yourself from the competition, not sell on price, and maximize your top and bottom lines, you must do both.

Look at it from your prospect's perspective. How significantly different are your products or services from your competition? In today's marketplace, true competitive advantage is hard to maintain. What is unique today is not unique for long. In addition, very often we are selling against buyer complacency, not the competition. This has to do with a prospect's willingness to change versus keeping the status quo and doing nothing, even if you do offer better features and benefits. No matter how great we may think our product or service is, often it is still not good enough to cause our prospect to disrupt an existing relationship. How many of you have a better purchase choice, but do not take advantage of it because of complacency. Your prospect does the same thing.

What can differentiate you, your product and services in the mind of the prospect? Developing a strong sales and business development process. This involves understanding how your specific prospect likes to buy, setting the stage for agreement and developing strategic questions that incorporate the features and benefits of what you are selling and connects them to the problems they solve for your prospects. So instead of taking a "one size fits all" approach, you have targeted your features and benefits to the problems, needs, issues and concerns of that individual prospect. When the prospect understands how this can benefit them directly, they take action!

When a sales person's efforts do not incorporate this critical piece, and they rely on a heavy dose of feature and benefit selling, they set themselves up for longer selling cycles, delayed decisions, shopping, and price negotiations.

They waste time on writing unqualified proposals and handling stalls and objections that prospect give just to get rid of them! They have set themselves and your company up for failure and don't even know it!

A strong product knowledge approach might make you a good vendor. If you combine this with a strong sales and business development process, you will become a trusted advisor and win more business by truly separating yourself from the competition.

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Article Tags: amount of time, bottom lines, br, business development skills, competitive advantage, complacency, critical piece, heavy dose, marketplace, perspective, product knowledge, prospects, relationship, sales person, strong sales, top and bottom, willingness



Related Forum Posts
7 words or less for Structogram - Some "7 words or less" (more or less) for Structogram for your comments: Training to get your message across(6) Secrets to get your message across (6) Training so people will listen to you (7) Helping you get your message across (6) Training to learn to get your message across (8) Communications training for yourself and your team (7)
Budget. - I believe the biggest barrier is related to budget. Training tends to be a normal practice for a big company. But I have to consider it seriously as an entrepreneur.
Re: What Do You Outsource Mostly? - When building a New Product, I do find it helpful to outsource marketing (articles - blogging - major social network site etc) Otherwise, you may feel bogged down when you should be focused on the overall BIG PICTURE.
Show the Benefits - Offer a free test drive of the Product or Service with a Money Back Guarantee - Take the Risk out. This will help them make the decision but you have to work with them to realize it by explicitly state the benefits they are receiving.
Offer Credit instead - I'm not sure if ChrisH was referring to this but i'll state it more expicitly .. Charge upfront and offer a refund of double the value back in "Credit" towards your Product or Service you have for sale at the end of the event.


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