Building Blocks, Close Up! - Sales Training: Spotlight on Product Training

There is no doubt that sales professionals need to understand their products and services. This is a given. Product training is necessary.

What troubles me about product training, despite how much has been written on this topic, is that so many companies are still not maximizing the potential of their product training efforts to get beyond product knowledge to the real crux of how to sell solutions effectively.

~ Mike Kunkle

I could go back much further or cite other more recent sources, but I've always liked this example, in one of their previous CSO Insights’ Sales Performance Optimization Studies,?when Jim Dickie and Barry Trailer wrote:

“…while product training will always be needed, Level 4 [the best-performing] companies realize that prospects typically conduct significant online research before meeting with a salesperson, and, as a result, are no longer reliant on the salesperson for information. So, the primary focus of these companies’ training initiatives is on improving the selling skills of their salespeople, so that they can have meaningful business dialogues with prospects.”

Spot on, right?

I’ll offer other related resources at the end of this post, as always, but the rest of this post will be dedicated to one method that has produced great results for me. I call it?Scenario-Based Solution Training.

Disclaimer:??Rarely does one set of advice apply universally, so as always, read this with your situation and nuances in mind.?Some product or services and their related features and benefits are very complex.?Others are very simple. Apply any advice, including mine, with reason and good judgment based on the context and nuance in your situation.

Scenario-Based Solution Training

How to Think About?Your Products and Services

My first advice??It’s how you think about your offerings.?Here’s the tiering and terms that I like.?You may use or prefer other terms and I rarely?feel the need to debate semantics.?Most importantly, follow the concepts and the logic bread-crumb trail, and call things whatever you want.

Language and Lexicon:

• You have a?product or service?(which I’ll call “product” for simplicity).
• Your product has?features?which are factual characteristics.
• The way a?feature works or what it does is the?advantage. (A feature?may?provide?competitive advantages?over other similar products, or there may be parity).
• A?feature and its advantage (and competitive advantage, when existent) provide a?benefit?to customers?by addressing?an issue for them — usually by resolving a challenge or avoiding a negative impact (avoiding something bad) or enabling an opportunity to achieve a positive impact (getting?something good). Until now, these terms are about general Benefits are contextual.
• A?benefit produces a business?outcome?— a?result.
• The outcome translates into business?value?— impacting the metrics that matter for the business and the way that the buyers/decision-makers are measured. Value may include things other?than financial or operational metrics, such as the achievement of mission or vision, or the improvement of a process or experience, but is very compelling?when dollarized, especially for senior leaders or financial-minded buyers — this is the ROI.
• Multiple features/advantages/benefits (FAB) combine into your company’s?capabilities.
• The competitive advantages, when they exist, become your?differentiators.
• The way you combine these capabilities to address business issues for your clients become your?solutions.

Take a breath now. Go back and re-read that flow. Let that sink in.?It may be overkill for some simple situations, but again, the important thing here is?the thought process and logic path, starting at the top and flowing down until you can tie?impacts to outcomes that provide business value.

I’m hoping that you already see that this goes far beyond “product knowledge” or typical “product training,” and foreshadows where I’m heading with Scenario-Based Solution Training.

One addition:??I’m talking about products here, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t reinforce that people are often a?true competitive advantage.?The way in which you work with your customers, implement a solution, deliver customer support, or engage your sales engineers, may all provide real advantages to your customers.?Buying experience, sales experience, and customer experience are real things. And of course, there’s?you.?Relationships and trust still matter a great deal.?Just don’t expect them to always overpower compelling financial or performance value.?If you believe these advantages hold true for you, you should try to quantify them in the above framework.

How to Deliver Better Product Training (aka, Scenario-Based Solution Training)

1. How Your Products Work

As you can probably guess by now, I think that having basic product knowledge is simply the ticket for entry.?It’s a prerequisite.?While product complexity varies, for the most part, this is basic knowledge acquisition (or for the less geeky, aka "learning" or "education").

You can use elearning, videos, reading, virtual instructor-led training (vILT), learning games, or mix-and-match blended solutions to lay this foundation.?Using assessments to confirm understanding and sustain the knowledge gained over time is also a smart idea. For the instructional design geeks in the house, this employs both spaced repetition and retrieval learning. Since selecting the right training approach this isn’t the real purpose for this post, I’ve listed additional resources in?Resources.

The first step here is to?help your sales reps understand your products and how they work.?Unfortunately, this is often the first?and?last step in many product training programs, but you won’t allow that to happen.?In this stage, teach the generic,?factual things about your products:

• Features
• Advantages
• Competitive advantages

2. What Your Products Do for Customers

After the foundation of facts, it’s time to switch gears and focus externally.?Since Benefits are always specific to a customer and contextual, I leave those until?this stage:

• Benefits
• Outcomes
• Value

Many of you will remember FAB, or Features/Advantages/Benefits, which has been around so long that when I first heard it, I had brown hair. Unfortunately, much training never gets beyond FAB, and the benefits translation is often weak. This taxonomy above goes further, and we're not even done.

At this stage, the training requires examples (and again for the instructional design geeks, some?non-examples?– or when the products?don’t?fit a customer situation). Teaching Benefits, Outcomes and Value ties to domain expertise as well as business and financial acumen, so those competencies are a prerequisite.?Your reps either need to bring knowledge and skills to the table for those acumens, or they need to be a prerequisite in your curriculum. (Yes, I'm suggesting we purposefully accelerate domain expertise by teaching it, as well as financial and business acumen.)

3. How to Develop Solutions

This is where the scenarios come in. Now we’re going to focus on:

• Capabilities
• Differentiators
• Solutions

To save me from re-writing it here, it’d be helpful to check out?this post on insight selling, or at least?these two (better and updated) graphics, on where most focus, versus what the best do.

WHERE MOST FOCUS...

WHAT YOU SHOULD DO...

This is the place to pull in your market knowledge of the challenges and opportunities your buyers face, buyer personas, and the things discussed in this post/chart.?It’s also the place to pull in deeper specifics about the buyer/customer scenarios.

In this portion of the training, you should create various real-world buyer/customer scenarios and use case studies.?When reps dig into them, they should uncover ways to address their issues with your solutions.?Advice? Sure:

• The first few should be easy and cut-and-dried.?If you haven't bench pressed before, you don't started with 350 lbs. / 159 kg. (Or at least not unless your last name is Banner and you're large and green.)
• Cases should get progressively less clear and more challenging, simulating whatever complexity your customers and reps face in the real-world.?
• In many cases, you can use real situations that your sales team has faced.?Get your SMEs involved. There’s some great potential here to engage top reps (in person or video) and your customers (via video), in your training, as well as Win/Loss analysis and Voice of the Customer data.?In some cases, you may need to develop real-worldly but simulated scenarios, to help your reps connect the dots you want to highlight or reinforce, based on what you’re training at the time.

There’s some great potential to engage your top reps (in person or video) and your customers (via video), in your training, as well as learnings from Win/Loss analysis and Voice of the Customer data.?

Harkening back to the above quote from CSO Insights, this is more sales training than product training. Virtual meeting technology and sales enablement tools have finally advanced enough to do this work virtually, diving into case studies, having deep discussions/debating options, participating in breakouts rooms or group activities, and individual assignments followed by group discussion, troubleshooting, and simulations.?

Whether you’re doing an in-person bootcamp, virtual training, or if it's part of your?sales onboarding, there’s a wonderful opportunity to incorporate?your training on sales messaging, as well.?No matter which option you choose (ILT or virtual), remember that event-based training doesn’t work for product training or sales training, so support your efforts with an effective?Sales Training System (ungated PDF download).

Buyer-Centric Messaging Matrix

I’ve called it different things over the years, but I have used a Buyer-Centric Messaging Matrix for years that pulls together many of these elements and others, after the basic product mechanics (how it works) are understood. This is how you truly prepare your sales force to sell solutions in a way that matters to buyers. (Right-click the image and select Open image in a new tab to view a larger version.) This is why it makes sense to train marketing, especially product marketing, on your methodology, and to share this matrix with them.

Note:?Some of the concepts in the matrix (COIN-OP, Value Drivers, Buyer Types, POSE) are from Modern Sales Foundations (MSF), which I co-authored at?SPARXiQ. MSF is a buyer-centric, consultative sales methodology and training program that is both value-focused and outcome-oriented. You can?learn more here. If you're not using MSF, then you can customize this chart to align with whatever methodology you use. (And yes, you should use a primary methodology. Some of the discussions I read on LinkedIn about mix-and-match or tips-and-tricks are really not helping our profession. See this post for some additional thoughts on the sales methodology topic.)

So that's the concept of Scenario-Based Solution Training. Put your reps in very real simulations, and train their discovery, critical thinking, problem solving, and judgment skills (as well as domain expertise and financial/business acumen, if needed). Make it all very buyer-centric with a focus on outcomes and value, and your sellers will be more relevant (to your buyers) and far more effective!

Resources

On Product Training

• https://www.admarco.net/inbound-marketing-messaging-sales-performance-blog/bid/61436/Product-Training-Doesn-t-Work-Get-Sales-to-DO-Product-Training
• https://www.rainsalestraining.com/blog/product-knowledge-training/
• https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/building-blocks-close-up-sales-training-spotlight-role-mike-kunkle/

On Features/Advantages/Benefits (good, but not sufficient)

• https://www.sellingpower.com/content/article/?a=8554/understanding-feature–advantage–benefit
• https://www.salesreadinessgroup.com/blog/bid/324623/One-of-the-Worsts-Mistakes-Even-Highly-Experienced-Salespeople-Make

On Sales Training Systems

• https://www.mikekunkle.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Sales-Training-System-2022.pdf (ungated PDF download)
• https://sparxiq.com/ebook-sales-training-that-sticks/
• https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/20140914192639-834966-how-to-build-a-blended-sales-training-curriculum

On Selecting the Right Training Method

• https://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/isd/deliversys.html?(Don’s entire site rocks)
• https://thetrainingworld.com/faq/indexmethods.htm
• https://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/1197/synchronous-or-asynchronous-how-to-pick-your-training-delivery-method
• https://web.mit.edu/training/trainers/guide/

Building Blocks Course Update

UPDATE: The course launched on Black Friday, 2022. It's available here.

Having a panel of beta testers has given us the opportunity to iterate the course format during the production process. ( Felix Krueger gets full credit for this. I have been very impressed.) Some of the feedback we received from our beta tester panel was that they wanted to see:?

• More analogies to make abstract concepts clearer. (You know, like when you put on your glasses and suddenly things come into focus.)
• More case studies that provide tangible examples of how recommended approaches came to be or how they were implemented.
• More stakeholder engagement references to help navigate the orchestration of initiatives (and those pesky stakeholders? No, they didn't say that. That's all me. ;-)

What did we do with this feedback? You guessed it, we've incorporated these elements in as many places as possible.

We're now in the process of bringing some of these elements to life while?fine-tuning the graphics in our video edits. Can you guess which analogy we've used in the graphic below? (Wrong answers only, please...)?

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That's it for this week! Did you learn something new reading this newsletter? If you did, or if it just made you think (and maybe chuckle from time to time - bonus points if you snorted), consider sharing it with your favorite enablement colleague, subscribing right here on LinkedIn, and checking out the upcoming?Building Blocks of Sales Enablement Course.

Until next time, stay the course, and?Make an Impact with Enablement!