Yes, you’d be surprised the amount of money some companies spend on sales training. However, most of this money is spent on developing sales skills. When it comes to salesperson knowledge, people know too little about their particular industry, their Customer needs, and their company’s products and services to be able to sell the full suite of solutions. Without this knowledge they can’t:
- Ask the right questions to uncover the complete set of Customer needs
- Match the right products and services to those needs
- Position the value of their company as superior to other options available to the Customer.
The result: Lost sales and missed cross-selling opportunities.
How to Train on Product Knowledge
The problem is most sales training focuses on building sales skills. You know, features, advantages and benefits. Sales people who have been trained with this mantra tend to start in straight away with their spiel without any idea of what the Customer’s needs might be. While sales skills are essential, they are only one side of a very important coin; capability. The other side of the coin is sales knowledge. You need to build sales knowledge so your team can speak fluently about:
- The Customer needs you solve
- Your products and services as solutions to those needs
- The current regulations in the industry
- The marketplace
- Your company and your value proposition
- The competition and how you win.
And more:
Building the expertise of your team can have a huge effect on your team’s overall sales performance, ability to cross sell and grow Customer accounts, and the success of new product and service launches.
How can you build this type of product knowledge in your sales reps? Start by following these three steps:
1. Embrace the concept of sales fluency
If your people cannot speak fluently about your product and service offerings and ask the right questions to uncover specific needs that your solutions will fulfil, then they are leaving money on the table and losing you sales. The first step to building product knowledge is to acquire the need for it.
2. Build and manage a top notch mobile learning base.
From the day a salesperson walks into your company to the day they retire, they are fed a constant flow of information. This should be presented through the lens of your product or service – outlining the features, not through the lens of the Customer – outlining the Customer needs it solves and how to uncover these
You’ve got to give your sales people the information they need to be able to sell.
3. Train to sales knowledge fluency
Give your sales reps a steady flow of knowledge about your company and your product or service through Modlettes. The most successful on-line service for keeping sales reps informed in the six areas mentioned earlier.
Take the opportunity of a 30-day free trial by www.modlettes.com