How can you help a technical sales representative understand their customer's needs better?

To me this is crucial, so I maintain regular communication with the development teams responsible for the SaaS product. Stay updated on upcoming features, enhancements, and any technical changes. This direct engagement will provide insights into the product's evolution.

You definitely need to be able to speak about your product from a variety of perspectives - financial implications, business case uses, etc. But it's also very valuable (if possible) to have someone on your team from engineering speak peer-to-peer with the customer's counterparts. Your ego might not like it, but an opinion from your engineer might hold more credibility with the customer than yours.

Knowledge about your product is very important as that helps you explain its benefits to the customer as per their requirements, because as they say, Customer does not buy your product s/he buys a solution for their problem. In case to be better able to explain the benefits of your product in relation to the solution it gives for the customer's problem you need to have in-depth knowledge about your product.

Make the Customer speak as much as possible about their problems and the main pain points to be covered by the Software Solution. Understand the customer.Of course first and foremost know your own Product thoroughly. It becomes much more easier to understand and Convince the Customer.

In my experience one of the best ways is to talk to multiple stake holders from the customer's end - this is crucial because the technical needs of Business and IT would be different and depending on the critically a decision can be taken. Also in one of the organizations i worked for they used to recruit only Engineers or tech background for Sales , this helps in technical sales . You could also have the initial meeting with the client to understand and then get a pre sales involved who can explain the technicalities to the customer. Knowing your product inside out is no a brainer be it for technical or non technical sales - because thats what will help you get the deal !

Many sales people forget about this very important step. The more the customer talks about his problems, it makes it easier for you to be able to find ways to solve their problems using your product. Sale is like starting of a friendship or a relationship the more you let the other person tell you about themselves the better it is and the way to go about doing that is to ask them questions which will let them talk about things in detail. This lets you understand their current requirement or their current situation in a better way and then you can design the solution accordingly.

Try to listen from the customer as much as you can and ask more open ended questions regarding the problem and he will give you more details that will help you to close the deal and address his concerns.

Listening is critical when it comes to understanding your customer - whether you are technical, functional or purely 'sales' - its hard sometimes to not interrupt when they are trying to explain something and you feel that you already have the answer but it pays to listen. A customer will sometimes explain what problems (symptoms) they are experiencing but not necessarily the root cause nor the actual business impact. The trick it to keep on asking 'why' until you pinpoint the root cause/s, and make sure you understand the impact on business (revenue, risk, brand, etc.) Then, referring back to knowing the value/benefit of your product (point 1) is where you need to connect the dots to solve the root cause that impacts their business.

Have you ever had someone asks you a question and while you are answering the question you realize that the person is not listening to you and is either thinking of the next question or is present their only physically. Active listening in very important in sales as in other areas of life, one needs to listen not to ready themselves for a comeback but to understand the situation or the problem in a better way. The better you understand the problem, better you will be in explaining it to others (like pre sales team) and you will be able to give better solutions to the problem.

We spend a lot of time in researching the market, competition and customers. We often have a sales script in our mind before we meet our customer. With so much information overload in our mind, we are eager to speak what we have prepared. After all, we did our research and worked hard to gain knowledge, right? Wrong! It is not possible to provide a solution if we don’t even know the problem. The only way to understand a customer’s problem is through active listening. Once we identify the problem, we can use all our knowledge and experience to address the pain point by selling relevant solutions.

The price of a product or a solution does not depend on the cost of making it but on the problem it solves. Does a product which costs 5L Rupees expensive or cheap? If a particular problem at a customer is causing them to loose let say 10L Rupees a month, then the solution that is priced 5L Rupees month would seem cheap. So showing value to the customer is very important in case of software sales. It does not matter what features the product has what matters is what problems it is solving and how big a headache of the customer is getting taken care of.

Silence is VERY powerful. Many of us salespeople ?? to talk. When we think of listening, most think of attentively listening to the answers of their questions… Then they rush right back into more talking?? Instead, sales people should ask their researched, open ended relevant question BUT, once theyve gotten the whole answer and feel the urge to continue the convo, STAY SILENT. ??Count to 10 in your head. Silence always makes customers divulge more.