Many managers and salespeople hold the opinion that salespeople need to have a thorough technical understanding of an offering in order to sell it effectively. To develop this understanding, companies invest substantial amounts of time and money in exhaustive training to educate salespeople on product features, performance characteristics, industry information, pricing guidelines, promotional activities, available collateral material, etc. Unfortunately, when salespeople leave these training sessions, they usually have no idea how to actually identify or qualify opportunities for the offering they were just “trained to sell”! This leaves the salespeople frustrated, as they feel the time spent in training was wasted. Management is equally frustrated with their sales team’s inability to gain traction with new offerings, as well as their inability to learn to sell their company’s entire portfolio of offerings.
This mutual frustration is often the result of a lack of recognition of one important fact: when a salesperson identifies a qualified opportunity, there is usually no shortage of knowledgeable resources that can assist the salesperson with converting the opportunity into a sale. These resources may include technical or other specialists from within the salesperson’s own company, or similar resources that are employed by suppliers, channel partners, etc. If a salesperson has access to internal and/or external support resources, why should they invest time learning technical details? Instead, why don’t they laser-focus their learning on gaining knowledge and skills that will help them identify and qualify opportunities? These include the following:
- Product/Solution/Service Overview: What does the offering do? (in plain English)
- Differentiation: What are some key differences between this particular offering and competitive offerings?
- Business Problems: What business problems does the offering solve?
- Qualifying Questions: What questions should a salesperson ask to determine whether a prospect or customer has the business problems that the offering can solve, and to quantify the impact of the business problems?
- Available Support Resources: What resources are available to help the salespeople manage other steps of the sales cycle, such as detailed qualification, technical qualification, configuration, quote/proposal, service delivery, etc.?
If a company has a large portfolio of offerings, they can help their salespeople “get dangerous quickly” with their entire portfolio by providing this type of summary information for each offering in a standardized format. Standardized formats enable salespeople to rapidly familiarize themselves with new offerings. Plus, “get dangerous quickly” documents make handy “cheat sheets” for salespeople to take with them on sales calls.
A sample “get dangerous quickly” document is provided in Sample “Get Dangerous Quickly” Document.