There are many salespeople trying to sell their products quickly, crush their quotas, and yet they have minimal product knowledge. This is KILLING their efforts! If you want to become a number one seller, you don’t have to be a product expert but you MUST have a solid working understanding of the products that you sell.
If you are lacking in this area I can guarantee that your confidence is not as high as it should be when you give your “pitch” or your presentation to your customers. Or when you try and answer questions about your products but you don’t have the answers. A top-notch seller has confidence and that comes from his or her comfort with their products by having an adept understanding of how they work and how they can benefit their customers.
When salespeople truly know how good their products are, they become unstoppable. They know that their prospects and customers should not go another day without them because they would be hurting themselves. When I understood this, closing deals became a lot easier. I knew in my mind 110% that I had the best product for my customer and they sensed it from my strong belief that was shown during our presentations and client calls.
On the flip side of the coin, here is what happens when salespeople don’t have this higher level of knowledge and confidence in their products: deals linger, sales cycles become painfully long, customers stop returning phone calls, deals get lost, more competition is brought in, and the chances of closing the sale dwindle. This, in my professional opinion, happens almost all the time. Fingers get pointed, salespeople come up with all sorts of excuses and “reasons” why the customer hasn’t bought, and the list goes on.
In sum, a true top-notch seller will take the time to learn how their products work, how they can truly benefit their customers and will have a deeper more advanced level of product knowledge. All of this leads to more confidence in selling, a better understanding of unique differentiators over the competition, and the ability for the salesperson to become a trusted advisor that know what they are talking about!
I leave you with this last thought to help emphasize the importance of this- I would block off time every other morning to read the help menus and how-to guides in my software that I was selling at the time. I also spent a few hours each week in my software learning features and functionality that I had no clue about. My goal was not to be a technical product guru (we had plenty of sales engineers), but to gain a better understanding of what I sold. To learn some things that most others would not know that would help me in customer presentations. The more I learned and discovered how things worked, the more comfortable I became in presentations and in working the bigger mega-size deals. Most of my fellow peers didn’t even have the software loaded on their machines or even knew how to log in!
One year later after doing this, I became the #1 seller globally selling double the number of software systems than the sales rep who came in second place. Know your product! Take the time each week to learn. Do what most of your peers won’t so that you can have tomorrow what they can’t.
-Happy Selling
Patrick