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Sales People Need More Than Product Knowledge

Guest post by: Joe Ippolito

Article Overview: Companies invest time and energy to ensure that their sales force is well versed in product knowledge, and this is important. However, many don't invest the same amount of time helping their team maximize this product knowledge through sales training and sales process skills. As a sales leader, if you truly desire the best performance, you need both.

Sales People Need More Than Product Knowledge

Companies invest time and energy to ensure that their sales force is well versed in product knowledge, and this is important. However, many don't invest the same amount of time helping their team maximize this product knowledge through sales training and sales process skills. As a sales leader, if you truly desire the best performance, you need both.

Think about it from the perspective of your prospect. How significantly different are your products or services from your competition's? Even if they are different, how long will it be before your competition catches up? In today's marketplace, what is unique today is not unique for long. In addition, we are combating buyer complacency -- their willingness to keep the status quo and do nothing. No matter how great we think our product or service is, often it is still not good enough to cause our prospect to take action, or disrupt the existing relationship. This causes the salesperson to work on the "wrong end of the problem" and not effectively uncover a prospect's specific criteria for doing business.

A salesperson's efforts when focusing on the "wrong end of the problem" usually consists of a heavy dose of feature and benefit selling, pressure and wasted proposals. They set themselves up to receive a variety of stalls and objections, and given a sense of false hope. In fact, since the prospect typically doesn't understand as much about your product or service as you do, these "feature and benefit dumps" will often lead to longer selling cycles, delayed decisions, shopping around, and price negotiations. How has your sales force been trained to handle these?

Will product knowledge alone help your team be more effective in prospecting for new business and referral generation? Will product knowledge alone help your team understand how to ask the probing and meaningful questions of prospects, so that the prospect can "discover" on their own that they need your service? Will product knowledge alone help develop trusted relationship, uncover budget parameters and decision making criteria? Probably not. A strong product knowledge approach will make you a good vendor. Combine this with strong sales skills, and you will become a trusted adviser and truly separate yourself from the competition.

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Article Tags: Beverly, MA 01915, Management Training, North Shore, Sales Training



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