You Must Know Everything You Possibly Can About Your Products and Service

The more product knowledge that salesperson has, the more likely it is that he or she will be able to make a sale. It’s not easy to make sales if you don’t understand how the product or service can benefit the prospect. Since no prospect has an identical need, your knowledge must be vast so that you can versatile depending on who you’re talking to.

Understanding front-to-back what your product does will ensure that you can present benefit after benefit to your prospect. And when you do, you will be precise and accurate. Prospects are much more likely to buy from someone who is passionate about their product or service as opposed to someone who just go through the motions and robotically reads some jargon off of a script.

There are fourteen main forms of product knowledge that you need to make sure you understand about whatever it may be that you’re selling. Let’s go over all of them.

Fifteen Forms of Product Knowledge

1) Customer Needs. To know the product, you must know your customer. Do as much research as you can to understand exactly who your prospects are and what their main buying motives are.

2) Brand. Nothing identifies a product better than a brand. If your brand has any prestige, history, or uniqueness, use it to your advantage.

3) Customer Experience. How will the buyer benefit by using your product or service. Firmly grasping this is vital to being a good salesperson.

4) Competition. You must have extensive knowledge about what your competitors offer so that you can gain tiger upper hand when you speak to prospects.

5) Industry. All business industries are changing rapidly. Stay up-to-date with changes and innovations in your products industry.

6) Use. Your sales call won’t go very far if you don’t fully understand how the prospect would even use your product.

7) Complementing Products. You must understand other products, whether sold by your company or a competitor, that can be utilized along with the main product that you’re selling.

8) Configuration. Knowing how to use the product isn’t good enough. You also need to know how it’s set up.

9) Troubleshooting. It’s good to be aware of any potential problems a customer may have with the product and how he or she would go about fixing those problems.

10) Specifications. You should be familiar with all related terminology concerning your product or service.

11) Customization. How can your product be adjusted or manipulated in some capacity so that the buyer has a unique experience?

12) Integration. Is your product compatible with other products, whether sold in your company or at other companies/industries?

13) Policy and Procedure. You must know vital information such as the warranty policy.

14) Mission Statement. Understand what the brand or company is looking to achieve, especially regarding the customer experience.

15) Pricing. You’ve got to know this like the back of your hand. It won’t look good to your prospect if you’re stumbling when it comes to informing the person about the cost.

What Having Product Knowledge Will Quickly Do for You

Improve Your Communication Abilities

Once you have tremendous understand of the product that you’re selling, you can utilize many different methods and techniques to sell to customers with varying needs and buying motives. This means your communication skills will improve due to having the ability to sell to many different types of people. While trying to make a sale, always ask yourself, “Am I just talking or am I actually communicating?” Talking is largely a waste of time in sales, but communicating is the key to making sales. Never sell features of your product, always sell benefits.

Increase Your Level of Enthusiasm

If you’re not enthusiastic and excited about the product you’re selling, then a customer sin’t going to be excited or enthused either. You must truly believe in the value that your product offers. Customers will see right through you if you’re just going through the motions and if you don’t find your product very interesting. Believe in your product  and the prospect will believe in it too. There’s no way around this.

Boost Your Confidence

Enthusiasm isn’t good enough when it comes to making sales. You must also have a tremendous aura of confidence or the prospect will be less likely to buy in to what you’re saying, let alone, buy your product. Confidence should come naturally to you if you have great product knowledge. You’re not going to be afraid of being asked something you don’t know the answer to. You’re going to go into your sales calls with way more confidence than you had before since you know the product or service form front-to-back.

Handle Both Questions and Objections

When you have tons of product knowledge, there’s not an objection that exists that you shouldn’t be able to handle. An objection is virtually the same thing as a question. But now that you know the product better, you now automatically know how to counter objections better.

There are plenty of resources for you learn more your products and services. Be sure that you take advantage of all of them.

How to Learn More About Your Product

-Demo/use the product yourself, if you can, and see what it does for you

-Read all the product literature you can, whether that’s online or in brochure or catalogues

-Don’t just read the main website featuring the product. Check out different online forums to see what buyers have to say.

-Gather as much feedback from customers as you can.

-Check out industry or trade publications

-Research your company’s sales records

-Talk to your sales team and even consider role playing with them

-Talk to your marketing team about the product or service

-Go visit the manufacturer or at least contact the manufacturer

-Have your company implement a sales training program

-Check out what your competitors are doing

-Consider hiring a sales consultant that can help teach your team the importance of product knowledge

-Find testimonials and read them

Do all of these things as often as you can and you will quickly put yourself in a much better position to make sales. Your confidence to make those sales will grow, with the more product knowledge that you obtain.

Keep These Two Factors in Mind During Your Sales Calls

No product is perfect. Be honest that yours is not.

When absolutely necessary, acknowledge to your prospect that your product isn’t perfect and has some shortcoming, like all products do. This will build trust by establishing that you are honest and incapable of lying to the prospect.

Don’t sell features, sell benefits.

Features are great. But what’s the purpose of having tons of cool features if hardly any of them actually benefit your prospect? This is why you need to be sure that you ask attentive questions and actively listen to what your prospect says. This way, you will realize what benefits matter most to the person and you can sell based on that criteria; however, don’t go overboard and try to sell too many benefits at once. Be selective and only focus on the two or three that you feel the prospect desires the most. The customer must feel that you have his or her best interest in mind and that you’re not trying to show off all you know about the product. If you are, you’re wasting your time and the prospect’s time.

In Conclusion

Prospects are much more likely to buy when the trust the salesperson. Few things establish more trust than not only just having product knowledge, but actually applying it to the specific prospect so you can sell benefits that will improve that person’s life or business. Keep working hard to understand the products that you sell so that you can be on the right track to increasing your sales numbers.