Successful salespeople know the importance of meeting customer needs, addressing concerns and highlighting key business benefits. This requires thorough knowledge of your organization’s products and services. Many sales training programs teach the interpersonal skills common to most sales environments, but they don’t provide timely, effective training on what the team is selling or its value to customers.

If you’ve found yourself wondering how to improve your customer relationships and expand your book of business, take a moment to assess the relationship between your sales and product/services training. The two should work together as a cohesive experience that helps salespeople feel confident and prepared to communicate value in every sales conversation.

Ask yourself these three questions:

1. Is My Team Prepared to Personalize the Customer Journey?

Customers want to feel heard and seen as individuals with unique needs and goals. Sometimes, they already know what those needs or goals are. Other times, it’s up to the salesperson to uncover that information through deeper conversation.

Your sales training likely already covers skill development related to communication, active listening, empathy and persuasion. However, by deepening their knowledge of your organization’s products and services, your sales team will have valuable context to take this conversation to the next level:

• Know which questions to ask and why: Asking the right questions at the right time helps narrow down what the customer’s needs and goals are, even if the customer doesn’t state them directly. It’s about finding out what’s important to them or what they’re worried about in the next week, month or even year when it comes to their business.
• Articulate how your team can help: Providing valuable product insights can set your team apart as credible experts who know what they’re talking about. The more confident and prepared your sales team is to communicate the value and connect it to the customer’s need, the more customers will feel like your product or service is worth the investment and may even be worth a long-term beneficial partnership.

Training on interpersonal or critical thinking skills is often perceived by learners as irrelevant or academic without the relevancy and context of real-world customer scenarios. According to Michael Noble, vice president of advisory services at AllenComm, “The most important element of your sales training should be high-fidelity practice. We can accomplish this in a variety of ways — simulations, social learning, AI-enabled rehearsal, etc. Practice will reinforce their skills and develop their expertise in your company’s products or services. If you want to accelerate sales performance, then you need strategies to accelerate sales practice.”

2. How Effective is My Team in Connecting Our Offerings to Each Customer’s Need?

Salespeople need to understand not only specifications and scope but also how your offerings specifically can—or can’t—help address customer needs and goals. Any products or services they recommend must include persuasive reasoning for why and how the product will make a difference, while also combatting any concerns on price-to-value or hesitations to change.

Here are a few ways sales teams can connect products and services to customer needs:

• Explore what can work: Think about what the customer is looking for or can benefit from most. Then, create a list of products that can fulfill those needs realistically, with a few reasons for why and how. If multiple products can address the same need, compare them at a deeper level and tie in specific information you’ve learned about your customer through conversation or research. If possible, repeat back to the customer what you’ve heard: “You mentioned you were concerned about [this topic]. Here’s what we can do.”
• Eliminate what won’t work: Identify products that won’t work earlier in the customer journey rather than later. Consider the customer’s technical infrastructure or preferred ways of working, and cross out any products that aren’t compatible. This helps streamline the negotiation process and also reduces some of the headache during the contracting stage by ensuring your team isn’t accidentally offering a solution the customer can’t actually use. Customers are less likely to be frustrated during the end stages of the deal and are more likely to feel reassured that they’ve partnered with an expert.
• Envision the results: The more data, research or reasoning you can provide that illustrates the way things can be when the customer uses your product, the more likely they are to buy into the investment and partnership. Help the customer paint a picture of why each product contributes to their overall goals. Where possible, consider new ways in which the products can proactively improve the customer’s workflow to even help prevent potential problems down the line. Be prepared to demonstrate or answer questions about why your products are better and more cost-effective than competitor offerings.

As an example of this approach, one of AllenComm’s clients — a nationwide motorcycle retailer — created a sales training program that would help sales representatives recommend motorcycles and specific test-drive routes based on the features most important to specific buyer personas. It included a simple app for selecting the right bike and the corresponding test drive that would highlight those product features. It was a decision support tool that helped to structure sales recommendations while they develop the expertise they need to do this on their own in the future.

3. How Supported is My Team in Closing the Deal?

Even someone with exceptional sales skills may struggle to close the deal. Sometimes, this may be because the customer has lost some of their budget, or they simply changed their mind. Other times, it could be because the salesperson couldn’t answer questions about a new product they hadn’t had the time or resources to learn about.

Equip your teams with the tools they’ll need to build confidence and succeed by regularly revisiting how your sales training and product-knowledge training work together to provide:

• Basic product knowledge: Covers what each product is, how it’s used, what it’s compatible with and what the general pricing terms are. Help your sales team prepare to answer any question a customer may ask about your products.
• Up-to-date information: All product information should be kept updated and accurate. Create a plan for maintaining training and resources to help the team understand these updates or new product rollouts before they launch.
• Alignment of core sales skills and products: How a product meets customer needs usually, how it may be used to meet needs creatively, what kind of customer objections are common for the product and how to use core sales skills to uncover or overcome these objections in a way that’s customer-centric and empathetic.
• Hands-on practice opportunities: Potential roleplay opportunities where salespeople can practice pitching a product to a hypothetical customer, then receive feedback on how well they used core sales skills and if they did (or didn’t) accurately represent the product’s capabilities within the customer’s needs.
• Supporting resources: Easily accessible guides, product catalogs or other resources that can be referenced on the job or during key customer interactions.

Sales teams who achieve mastery over both the art of the sale and also the products and services their organization offers have a higher success rate at closing deals and building trusted relationships with customers who can later become returning partners. However, this success often starts at the foundation with cohesive, personalized and strategically aligned sales and product-knowledge training designed to meet your sales teams at their point of need.

After you’ve completed your own assessment of your organization’s training, use the information you’ve uncovered to create a plan of action to unite your sales enablement approach and support your sales team in achieving business goals from quarter to quarter. Consider choosing one step you can take today that will set the process in motion starting tomorrow.