There’s an old cliché that a good salesperson could sell sawdust to a lumber mill. And while there might be some truth in that, having a pretty darn good product certainly doesn’t hurt your odds at closing the deal.
Here at Acquirent, we specialize in outsourced sales, so we’ve certainly seen the whole gamut of products. In our experience, whatever the product is, a good salesperson knows it like the back of their hands. Whether you’re selling software or soap, knowing the ins-and-out of your product is instrumental in closing the sale.
According to Jon Elhardt, ACQ sales manager who manages teams that sell everything from Financial Data Analytics to Automotive Fleet Management Solutions, “knowing everything about your product and how you stack up against your competition will not only give you the edge during presentations but also the confidence to push forward.”
Sure, you’ll obviously know certain specifications and your features of your product. That’s the bare minimum. What will make you stand out is if you can develop enough product knowledge to marry it to the knowledge you have of your client. How exactly is your product going to make the client’s life easier or better? To be able to answer this, you need to not just know the facts and numbers for your product, but to truly understand it, to know what it would be like to utilize the product every day.
“Product knowledge is important because it gives us confidence in what we are marketing. If we are confident our clients will have confidence in us. That is key, because no one will buy from someone that they don’t have confidence in or don’t trust. Our clients’ confidence leads to our clients’ trust,” says Nate Blackburn, sales manager at ACQ.
There’s no better way to gain this knowledge than by using your product! If that’s not feasible for the specific product you’re selling, there’s still plenty of ways you can gain a deeper understanding of what you’re selling. Learn about competing products, so you’ll know what makes yours unique and different, and hopefully more beneficial for the client. Be in communication with your product team, to stay in the loop about any updates and changes and to have any questions answered. Remember, if you aren’t 100% sure about something, it’s much better to figure it out now than to wait until a client brings it up.
Learning about your product will overall give you a more satisfying sales experience—if you’re going to sell something, you should believe in it!
Editor’s Note: the photos used in this post are from the behind the scenes tour of Northshore University Health System, the Center for Simulation and Innovation, where doctors are trained on new products being introduced to the hospital.
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