Multitudes of products are launched by organizations every day, particularly in high tech and electronics industry. As a result, products have a shorter life. Consider the predicament of a sales guy. Just as he gets comfortable with product features and benefits of one product, another is launched and he now needs to get familiar with the newly released version. He can’t afford to display his ignorance as not being able to answer questions about his company’s products would be construed as incompetence and will affect his chances of impressing a prospective customer in decision-making.

Secondly, products have become complex in nature with various versions making it necessary for the sales person to recall a lot of information. Is it practical to remember the features and USPs of all the products including those of different versions? Too add to this, in addition to his own company’s products, a sales person needs to know about his competitors’ products as well; if he intends to provide better customer value. It is not easy to remember all the features of the product, its comparative features with competing products, value benefits to customers and so on.

Just take the example of Lenovo’s recent press release in which they have announced new products for the year 2012. There are about 16 products under 8 different categories. Each category has a name and under each category there are different model numbers. This could be very beneficial to customers as they are offered a wide choice, but it means that much more information needs to be processed by a sales person. Imagine how much his life gets complicated. It looks like every month one additional model is getting launched along with the existing models. He will have the pressure to approach new market segments and compete with new competition. As the range of products increase, so does his sales targets. We never hear of reduced sales targets for sales persons. Targets always keep increasing quarter by quarter, year by year.

Therefore, one of the biggest challenges faced by sales training managers is to provide product training where too much information needs to be assimilated in very short time. How do you think this can be done? What the different ways that we can address this situation? It would be interesting to hear your experiences and view on this subject.

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Product training is one of the most important objectives of sales training. It is important because it equips the sales staff with adequate product knowledge that enables them to handle customer queries objectively and convincingly. A company can have a great product to offer, but if the sales people are not trained to market the same to prospects it may not obtain the intended market penetration. In order to make product trainings more successful, one needs to keep in mind few critical aspects. Let’s review some of them here.

Product training is important but product selling is essential: Product knowledge is very important for sales people as they use this information to help prospective customers make favorable decisions. Training managers need keep this aspect in mind. The problem comes when product trainings are focused about the product and not about how to sell the products. Sales people find it easy to understand the functioning of a product. The difficult part is to be able to sell it. This is the area where the training needs to focus on.

Customer value is the key to selling: Product training often focuses on product features and benefits and does not really bother about the value the product provides to customers. It is not adequate to provide the sales person with all the facts and figures that indicate how the product fares in terms of customer value. Information may be obvious but training should put the same across in a logical manner so as to be convincing to a potential customer. Training sales people about customer value addition of the products in a logical way ensures that there is uniformity in the way sales people represent the company and product in the market and this would greatly increase credibility of the product as well as the company.

Product information needs to be taught in the context of industry and market: It does not really help a sales person if he is given just the product information in isolation. Sales personnel need to get a perspective about the industry in which they are operating. There are times when market scenario and economical fluctuations might influence buyers in their decision making. Sales people need to be adaptive to such situations and should be equipped to modify their selling techniques accordingly. This needs to be reflected in product training sessions.

Develop job aids wherever possible: It is not adequate if product training is confined to just annual sales meets or workshops. It is not possible for a sales person to absorb so much information at a single go and recollect it when needed. Therefore, product training should be available just-in-time when the sales person needs it. Job aids in the form of PDF files or short videos should be made available to the sales person in a format that is easy to access. Multiple delivery formats such as podcasts, webcasts, videos and so on would be very effective information resource for sales personnel.

Product sales training would be better appreciated by sales people when it is tuned to address their needs rather than merely disseminating information about products. Do you agree with me? If you have any other ideas please share the same with me.

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Identifying the best training options for your sales staff that not only fosters learning and development but ultimately helps boost the organization’s sales is not an easy task. Sales people are result-oriented action lovers. Hence, you need to think of activity-based training programs that involve a lot of learner participation. Thankfully, there are excellent resources available in the market today that provide you with a multitude of options. All you need to do is research your training options and choose the one that best suits your requirement. Let’s take a look at some of them here.

On site sales training: Sale training typically is initiated by the chief sales officer of the organization. Some organizations such as Xerox have developed their own comprehensive training modules for their sales personnel. However, not all organizations would have the ability or resources to offer such comprehensive training program internally. Therefore, organizations could hire external training providers to conduct onsite sales training. Such training workshops spread are across a day or two and comprise several sessions through the day covering various aspects of the selling process. The effectiveness of such programs largely depends on the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the service provider.

Off-site training programs: Many organizations opt for offsite training programs that are planned to be part-business and part-pleasure trip for the employees. Pleasure or sight-seeing activities are interwoven with the training programs. Sometimes team based games such as paint-ball are organized which are directed towards strategy building among the team members. Such trips are often part of the rewards program when sales people meet or exceed their targets.

Online sales training: There are many organizations that provide online sales training. Training can be delivered in many formats such as through CDs, Web-based training, Computer aided training using the company intranet and so on. They are a viable option for imparting quick product or process knowledge training, especially to a large sales force spread across a wide geographical area. They also are cost-effective and flexible as sales people can easily access it from the locations of their choice. Webinars, sales-casts, job-aids and many more resources could be useful components of such a training program, which can be customized to suit individual organizations.

All the above options are effective, however; the choice of the training program depends on the individual organizations and the needs of their sales staff. Additional questions we need to ask are – can sales training be confined only to just a couple of days in a year? There are bound to be new recruitments every few months. Would they have to wait for the next training cycle before being introduced to the finer points of the sale process and procedures unique to the organization? It would be beneficial if the sales team has easy access to a training program that is available to them on-demand all through the year. After all, learning is a continuous process!

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It is impractical for sales people to retain all the information about products they learn during traditional product training classes. How can training content be made more relevant, purposeful and just-in-time for sales people? How can technology be leveraged effectively to provide such a service for organizations? Come join CommLab India as it explores a new comprehensive way of presenting product training for sales people.

For further information, please click here

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The success of your business depends on the efficiency and loyalty of your channel partners towards your organization and the products you offer. They could be retailers, wholesalers or agents. Training becomes an important medium to engage and involve the channel partners in your business and seek a long term commitment from them. What is the type of training that best suits channel partners? Keeping in mind the fact that training goals should mirror the business goals of your organization, training programs for channel partners should include the following:

Product Training: Your channel partners should be well-versed with your product range and the benefits they offer to end-customers. Therefore, the training program should devote considerable time in highlighting the USP of your products vis-a-vis competition. If your organization has launched a new product, it is important for you to educate your channel partners about the same. Unless they understand the features and utilities of the new product, they will not be able to advocate the same to the end-consumers. New product training provides an opportunity to create excitement and generate interest. By showcasing the new product, you will help in its promotion which will ultimately help in boosting its sales.

Sales Strategies and Sales Process: Your channel partner will be interested in promoting your product only if it helps him to reach his business goals. It is therefore in your interest to help your channel partners, guide and plan their sales strategy and help them implement the sales process. Channel partners are often provided with varied discount and incentive schemes for different products. You might also provide them with some co-marketing support such as providing display boards, advertising and so on. It is not enough to provide good incentives to the channel partners; you need to educate them about the same to ensure their loyalty towards your brand.

Selling Skills: It is normally the onus of the organization to train the dealer’s sales staff to sell your products. It is important to equip the sales staff with critical skills that are essential to promote your product. This ensures that the people who interact with your end customers are competent, proficient and true spokespersons for your product.

Virtual Training or Online Training: If your product is a market leader, you could set up online training centers and get customers or channel partners to receive training and provide certification for your products. Microsoft offers such training programs for channel partners and provides a certification as “Microsoft Certified Partner” for its channel partners. Thus, if your products enjoy market leadership, you can actually make training your channel partners a revenue-generating activity by charging for them.

A well-thought out training program will not only help you to foster productive relationship with your channel partners but also helps in increasing the revenues you generate through them.

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Providing product training to customers enables them to get the most from their investment, especially when it comes to basic troubleshooting skills. Wikipedia defines troubleshooting as involving a form of problem solving, often applied to failed products or processes. It is a logical, systematic search for the source of a problem so that it can be solved, and so the product or process can be made operational again.

If customers are given product trainings that also trains customers on basic troubleshooting, they will be able to troubleshoot on their own when faced with a particular problem.

• a) Irrespective of the nature of the product, due to its constant usage, at some point of time it may have a breakdown. Be it a machinery breakdown or a software problem, it will hinder work activity. Product trainings can be handy in such situations for the customer. With adequate knowledge, the customer will be in a position to assess the gravity of the problem and judge if he can rectify it on his own without expert intervention.
• b) Effective product training preempts possible problems that may occur if equipment is not handled properly. This information will help minimize mishandling and ensure a longer product lifetime.
• c) Product trainings help to give overall knowledge of the product wherein the customers are informed about the user manual and the accessories provided with a particular product. Without proper training, this information is often overlooked and optimum usage of the product is not achieved.
• d) Providing basic product training will help the customer to troubleshoot quickly, saving him money and time. The customer saves time by repairing the product himself quickly without waiting for the service engineer. He also can save money that he would have incurred as service charges had the company personnel attended to the problem.

Product training also gives the customer the required confidence while using the product as he receives comprehensive information about all its features and functionality. This also helps him maximize the potential of the product for his benefit.

Product training containing information on troubleshooting can help customers diagnose a problem and assess the gravity of the issue. This in turn can help them judge if they can troubleshoot on their own or call upon an expert to resolve the issue. What do you think? Do share your views on the same.

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Product knowledge is fundamental to the seller who is selling it and the buyer who is purchasing the same. In between the seller and the buyer there are other stakeholders who are equally required to have sound product knowledge. They could be the dealers, resellers or the vendors. Let’s examine in detail who benefits from product trainings and why imparting product training is so important.

Product training is not a one-off event. In many cases, product information is required not only by end-users of the product and employees of the company launching the product, but also by extended partners such as customers, vendors and suppliers. You will find that it is required for different audiences at different stages of the process. You might begin with employees, and then move on to the sales and distribution channels, and on to the consumer, or end-user. Of course, it goes without saying that the service personnel who have to repair or service the product should posses a comprehensive knowledge of the product. As you can see, for any new product to be launched successfully, many diverse audiences must be reached and educated through highly effective product trainings.

One of the most important factors for organizations to succeed in today’s competitive landscape is through a successful speedy launch of its new products and services. The time-to-market of new products and services is critical to both survive and succeed. Added to this challenge is the increasingly compressed product life cycle of most products today. Users expect the training to be rolled out at the same time as the product itself. No longer does the market tolerate any delays. It is therefore a challenge to distribute product knowledge across various markets within a short span of time to all the stakeholders. Lack of product training will limit the knowledge of the sales personnel and they will not be able to make adequate sales – the same is true with other stakeholders such as dealers or vendors. Needless to add, poorly designed product training will fail to equip the customers with the skills required to make optimal use of your product, further leading to low adoption rates and subsequent switching of their brand loyalty in the longer run.

Almost every organization that has a product to sell recognizes the need for product training. Despite having user manuals and technical documents and data sheets on the product made available to end-users of the product, there is a felt need for well developed, comprehensive product training solutions. Distributing product knowledge through classroom training is not a practical solution for a globally dispersed workforce. Hence, organizations need to think of innovative solutions such as web-based trainings or eLearning solutions to impart product trainings for their diverse stakeholders.

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Product trainings are important for every employee who has any form of interaction with customers. It could be sales personnel, customer service personnel or service staff. Knowledge of the products helps them not just to win over the customers but to retain them as well. Hence companies need to invest their time and money to conduct periodic product trainings.

It is not without reason that successful organizations have invested heavily into eLearning-based product training.

eLearning is the most economical way to distribute standard and consistent product training to the entire sales force enterprise wide. For example, when a new product is launched globally and the huge sales force needs to be trained about its features, it involves a lot of logistical planning to organize physical training programs. However, eLearning for product training doesn’t involve these kind of logistical problems. It can be organized to ensure global, multicultural reach with a consistent message to all the relevant employees.

eLearning can be designed to suit the target audiences. Ideally, product training for service personnel and sales personnel should be different. There may be some overlap with respect to the content but the approach towards training essentially needs to be different. eLearning provides the flexibility to position the product accurately depending on the target learners. This is not to say that such a differentiation is not possible in traditional instructional-led training but it becomes easier to create different modules in an eLearning course. There would be common learning objects which would be the same but eLearning provides the flexibility to reuse the learning objects to suit different target audiences.

There are times when organizations launch a new product and need to disseminate information about the product to its employees in multi-locations simultaneously. eLearning courseware comes handy in such a scenario. Moreover, product features can be presented in a manner that is easy to recall using GUI tools, videos or animations.

The best part of eLearning is that it can also be used as a powerful way to prepare a learner for hands on sessions. You can in fact use eLearning as a prerequisite to the hands on session. When participants come into the physical hand-on training session, they come with some basic knowledge which can be further developed during the face-to-face interaction with experts. Thus, the time of the experts can be qualitatively used to address more complex issues.

In short, an integrated product training together with product knowledge and selling skills can be blended into an eLearning training program. What makes eLearning more effective is that it can be tailored to suit the needs of the organization and its various geographical locations where it is present.

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Importance of product training for sales people has never been doubted. The product features, product USPs, its installation and operation, basic trouble shooting and some information about competitor’s products are all ideally part of the product training program. However, how do we make product trainings for sales people more relevant to the sales team and ensure that it covers what is most important to them?

Thanks to the internet, customers are armed with a wealth of information with respect to products, their features and how they are with respect to the competition. Therefore, sales people today have to shift their role from being an information provider to being a customer advisor. Typically, product training should help sales people to sell a solution and not just features of the product.

Here is how we at CommLab approach product trainings for sales. We do cover product features and product USPs, but we try not to teach a product in isolation, but provide a context for the learning. In addition to what is typically covered through product trainings, we also ensure that we address the following when creating an online training for a sales person:

Making him an industry expert not just product expert: A salesman should have a comprehensive knowledge about the industry in which he is working. This helps him to advise customers on industry trends and the relevance of their products. A customer is likely to be convinced to buy from an informed sales person.

Making him tech savvy along with being business savvy: Earlier there was a salesman who would handle all the business related issues with respect to a product and there was a sales engineer who was essentially the product expert with knowledge of installation and trouble shooting. Today it has become important for sales man to have basic technical knowledge and a sales engineer to have sound business acumen. The line between the two is blurring and the roles are increasingly being combined to one. Hence product trainings need to address both the technical as well as business aspects with respect to a product.

Positioning the product to show how customers will benefit from the product: Enlist problems that the product would solve for a customer. The sales team can use this knowledge to showcase the specific features of the product that addresses the current problems faced by the customers. Product training for sales people should thus focus on how to translate product features as solutions to the customers.

To summarize, we can say that in order to make product trainings more relevant to sales people, they should be trained to sell solutions to customers rather than training them to just sell products.

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Sales personnel are the revenue generators for any organization. If the sales force is not equipped with adequate tools to showcase the company’s products or services, it would drastically affect the revenue-generating capacity of an organization. Each organization has specific requirements and they need to train their sales people adequately with respect to their specific needs. So, what is the type of training that an organization needs to plan for their sales personnel?

A typical training program for an organization needs to cover the following:

Product Knowledge: Knowledge of a product or service that the organization is offering. A sales person could be seasoned professional with many years of sales experience. However, if he has newly joined an organization, or if the organization has newly launched a product, he needs to learn and understand the features and benefits of the product before approaching a prospective customer. Organizations need to have a mechanism in place to make sure that sales team is kept up to date with product information. Therefore, this forms the main features of a sales training.

Sales Process: Typically, a sales process has the following five stages:

• Establishing a relationship with the customer
• Analyzing the needs of the customer
• Making a recommendation to satisfy those needs
• Completing the sales process by taking a commitment
• Ensuring prompt delivery of the service and follow-up with the customer for any feedback

These stages remain more or less the same for any product or service. However, organizations need to tailor these stages for their specific requirements and sensitize the sales force about their importance. The sales team needs to thoroughly understand the sales process in order to effectively execute it.

Sales Strategies: Each organization will have its own strategy to sell a product or a service depending on its core mission. Sales personnel need to be guided with role plays or examples as to how to employ these strategies to promote their products or services. For example, an organization’s strategy could be focusing on dealers or distributors rather than individual customers. Yet another strategy could be using direct marketing or through outbound marketing. Sales team need to understand the strategies of the organizations and the systems that are in place. They will need to require appropriate training so that the sales force is in sync with the organizational strategy.

Follow up Process: The sales process does not end with obtaining the order. Every organization will have its own process and procedures that need to be adopted to complete a sale. Some of them could be very important regulatory requirements – especially when providing services such as insurance. Apart from this there will be many internal documents that need to be completed or filled as a part of the sales process. These procedures have been adopted for securing the interests of the organization as well as the customer. Hence the sales personnel need to be duly trained in these processes.

Organizations normally focus on product training and soft skills training for the sales personnel. However, having a training program which covers all the above aspects would be truly comprehensive and empowering for a sales person.

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