Companies spend vast amounts of time, effort and money to provide their salespeople product training. It isn't unusual for organizations to have product training budgets ten to twenty times their sales training budgets. As the name implies, product training tends to be product-centric vs. customer centric. Unfortunately, making that transition in most organizations is left up to individual salespeople.

If I were a buyer, one of my biggest fears would be the potential of being the first prospect a new salesperson called on after completing typical vendor centric product training. Unless the seller possessed a great deal of intuitive sales ability, isn't it likely that initial "sales" call would be painful? It points out that conventional product training doesn't prepare salespeople to make calls on prospects and customers. Some organizations or managers even suggest sellers start calling on unqualified companies to "cut their teeth" before calling on viable prospects.

The Separate Silos Of Product And Sales
Training The objective of conventional product training is to pound as much factual data as possible into the brains of salespeople. It steers sellers toward making "spray and pray" calls with little regard for a buyer's interests or needs. Besides violating a fundamental best practice of selling, leading with product increases the chances that premature pricing discussions or buyer objections will arise.

With the advent of websites many buyers are better informed and further along in the buying process before talking with a salesperson. It is very possible they think they know what they want and a seller doing a "spray and pray" sales call will be out of alignment with a buyer.

Ask yourself: What are we hoping to accomplish with product training for salespeople? My answer would be to help salespeople make better calls and their companies can achieve revenue targets. This result is not achieved often enough for organizations that treat sales and product training as distinct and unrelated silos. I'd like to offer some observations and then suggest a customer centric approach to attempt to improve the process.

First Hand Experience
Upon graduating as an engineer, IBM hired me as a sales trainee to sell computer systems to small to mid size organizations that were using manual accounting systems. Territories were comprised of several different verticals (manufacturing, distribution, state and local government, etc.). Product training was a combination of classroom and field activities that took over a year to complete. During that time, I learned how computers, storage devices and software worked and got a sense for how businesses were run. The final two weeks of formal training was Sales School (how to sell).

After persistently hounding my manager, he put me on quota and assigned a territory. In preparing to make calls, I faced the daunting challenge of distilling my year-long accumulation of product knowledge into a coherent message for all the vertical industries and titles within my territory. One of my major verticals was manufacturing. Consider for a moment the number of different titles a seller must call on to sell ERP software: VP Manufacturing, CFO, CEO, VP Engineering, Production Manager, VP Procurement, Inventory Control Manager, etc. Think how different those calls should be in discussing potential goals and problems for each title.

It should surprise nobody that my initial sales calls were awful. I mistakenly thought my mission was to "sell" computers. My manager concurred. I'm sure many buyers were scared off by my attempts to educate them on the inner workings of computers (i.e. putting all their business records on a disk drive). Regardless of how each call went well, I left a full set of brochures, hoping somehow the buyer might read them and become even more interested.

Six months into the process, I had an epiphany: I wasn't selling computers. I was selling the usage of computers to provide business owners reports enabling them to improve their bottom lines. My role was to help them understand how they could achieve specific goals or solve specific problems by using my product. This conclusion enabled me to understand that the hardware and software were merely means to an end. Calls were far more productive when they began with discussions of the buyer's issues and how they handled billing, receivables, payables, inventory control, etc. I also discovered that a buyer's willingness to learn about products varies inversely with the level at which you call. The higher you call, the less product centric calls should be.

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