Quick Tips

Even a brilliantly engineered product with a strong marketing plan won’t meet its revenue objectives unless your sales force truly understands how that product meets their customer’s needs better than the competition’s.  In a recent Product Strategy Network Roundtable, three experienced practitioners—Michael McGuire, VP Product Management of Management Science Associates; Wendy Armstrong, Product Marketing Manager for McKesson Automation; and Harry Ostaffe, Director of Marketing and Business Development for Powercast, shared how they successfully prepare their sales force to sell their products.

• Sales people are like every other market.  In any marketplace there are people who are early adopters, mainstream, and laggards for something new.  When planning the rollout of your programs, think of your sales force as a market, and recognize that it includes early adopters, mainstream buyers and laggards as well.
• Role play.  Experiential learning is the most effective. Without knowing the product, they won’t be able to answer questions reliably. Have sales reps role-play and go through a certification process for the new product. Give them materials, coach them, give them things to learn, and then test them.  Have them run through a demo, work the product, walk through the interface and touch the screens.  Help put them in the customers’ shoes and get them more comfortable with the product. 
• Test them.  Sales needs organizational support for its credibility as people who know their product very well.  So, for example, during training, have the sales people come back an hour after they’ve heard the presentation and give the sales pitch they just learned. Then grade them on it.
• Just say no.  There are two characteristics a good sales team needs: confidence, which comes from deep knowledge of the product and the problems it solves, and the ability to say No.  Training them to say No is an organizational issue that has to come from the top down.
• Your objections, please.  Each sales force needs objection-handling techniques.  You need to craft strong objection-handling strategies and coach the sales team in using them. 
• Create a help desk for Sales.  Sales people often feel disconnected because they’re out on the road and not in the home office.  In bigger companies, a marketing helpdesk, with people on staff to answer any type of marketing question, can handle calls from field sales people and help them feel more connected.
• Host webinars.  Have Marketing host a monthly webinar that Sales is required to attend or to play back at a later date, within a certain a time frame.  Then test them on the contents.
• Consider Social Media.  Some companies have created product forums – online discussion sites where Sales people can post questions and have product managers review them and reply.  Later, you can add more advanced tools like blogging, wikis, Twitter and Facebook.
• Go face-to-face with Sales.  Interaction with and among the sales team is one of the most effective tools for distributing information and educating sales people.  It’s one thing to talk at them, send them information, and say ‘go read this and make sure you understand all the specs.’  But it’s much more effective when they can talk with other sales people and with product managers and ask their questions out loud.
• Work on relationships.  Don’t assume that a good sales person is automatically able to build good customer relationships.  Depending on the customer’s environment and organization, building good relationships requires a major investment of time and effort.
• Products aren’t solutions.  A sales force that needs to sell solutions thinks differently than one that needs to sell standard products.  You need to help sales people through that transition.  You either have to have different people, or change the skills, knowledge, processes, and support systems of your current sales force.
  

Look for More Quick Tips in this Series

Part I: Enabling Sales to Succeed: Educating the Sales Force
Part II: Enabling Sales to Succeed: Supply Effective Sales Tools

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