How to unleash the beast in your salespeople

Companies hire salespeople because they’re charismatic, can talk the talk, and bring the deals across the finish line. But in a heartbeat all of these attributes can count for nothing if that salesperson doesn’t know your products and your business.

See, people typically buy from people that they trust, and it’s difficult to trust people who are ignorant; who promote the products they sell but don’t seem to know them or how they can solve your problems. This makes it feel like they’re only selling to you because they care about the money; not about you. And if they don’t care about you then why should you trust them to recommend what’s right for you?

This drives home the importance of thorough product knowledge training. The problem is—as you’re likely well aware—dispensing that knowledge in a cost effective and efficient manner is easier said than done!

That’s why the team here at Brainscape wrote this LinkedIn article, based on our more detailed academy guide, ‘Unleashing the beast in your salespeople’... to help employers understand the problem and the solution when it comes to effective, efficient product knowledge training.

The problem: expecting employees to absorb bible-length binders of information

From forecasting, prospecting, and negotiating to relationship building and more: there are countless topics worthy of development, many of which often require at least some face-to-face instruction. Unfortunately, however, there’s only so much time and money available for sales training before employees are expected to get out there and do what they were hired to do.

So, guess what typically gets cut from the agenda? Product knowledge training.

To compensate, employers hand their salesforce a bible-length binder and expect them to study it during their downtime. The result? Salespeople waltz into their positions without the right product knowledge training, and the company’s sales funnel suffers.

On the flip side, your company might be spending thousands of dollars (if not more) on sales training but, as this article points out, too many programs completely miss the mark on actually preparing salespeople for the job, whether it’s because employees aren’t using the tools properly or the tools themselves are just inefficient at ingraining knowledge.

What’s the solution?

The ingredients for successful product knowledge training

To properly train your team and prevent the rejection and disappointment of lost deals, you need to provide the necessary sales training in ways that are relevant to your employees and their daily interactions. There are six keys to achieving this:

1. Keep sales training succinct: Bite-sized, laser focused training modules get to the point and take advantage of your staff’s limited time and concentration.
2. Keep it convenient: The more convenient the sales training—and the better it fits into your staff’s schedule—the more likely they’ll be to use it. Mobile solutions are almost always the most efficient and convenient format for product knowledge training.
3. Emphasize benefits over features: Yes, specs are important to some BUT most buyers purchase a story. “This phone offers a 40% memory increase over your current model, allowing you to reduce backup time” vs “the Platypus XPL SIM card carries 37 more teraflops of RAM”.
4. Teach the relevance: Your team needs to know how to speak to every type of prospect and cut straight to the product/service benefits that will most appeal to each.
5. Personalize the training: Importantly, the sales training should provide frequent formative assessments, constantly adjusting to the learner’s needs so that their limited training time is spent targeting their highest areas of learning opportunity (and difficulty).
6. Provide a lightning fast point of reference: Finally, you’re looking for a simple, mobile resource for information and study containing all the relevant data points necessary to answer a prospects’ questions.

The question is, how can you wrap all six of these keys into a single product knowledge training tool or program??

The answer… is Brainscape.

Product knowledge training with Brainscape

Brainscape is a learning app that leverages decades worth of cognitive science research to help people learn knowledge-intensive subjects (like your company’s catalog of products and services) so much more efficiently than with any traditional study method.

It makes sense doesn’t it? If you want to learn efficiently and remember permanently, you should be working WITH your brain’s hardwiring and not AGAINST it.?

And yet, most product knowledge training is delivered in a linear fashion, presenting the information ONCE in a seminar, video, or by reading, with the employee never seeing it again. Is it any wonder then that, according to a study by Sales Performance International, HALF of the content of any product training event is typically lost in five weeks?

The key ingredient that is missing from almost ALL forms of product knowledge training is systematic repetition over time.?

The more someone hears information, the more likely they are to remember it. Then, at a certain point, that information will become so deeply ingrained in their brain, they’ll never forget it. This is why so many people still remember the telephone number from their childhood home.

The secret sauce to Brainscape’s success is its spaced repetition algorithm.?

The app allows employers to break down relevant company, product, and/or service information into bite-sized facts, which are then framed as custom question-and-answer flashcards. (Text, images, sounds, videos, and any other media that works well in a bite-sized study format are all supported.) Employers can then share this content with their teams, securely, and track employee study progress and identify areas for improvement.?

Now, as an employee works through these flashcards, they are required to rate how well they know the answers to each one on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being “not at all” and 5 being “perfectly”. Based on their confidence rating, the app’s algorithm will repeat that card again and again, until the answers are deeply ingrained in their memory.?

By the same token, the flashcards that an employee feels confident in will repeat much less often, so as to save them time on repeating the information they already know really well.

Done this way, Brainscape helps employees drill large amounts of content into their brains exponentially more efficiently than if you just dumped a training manual in their laps. Moreover, the app is engaging and convenient to work with, allowing employees to study anytime, anywhere, and even whip it out at work as a quick and convenient reference tool.?

This is what Brainscape offers and at a fraction of the cost of most employee L&D programs.

A final note on product knowledge training

Sure, personality and judgment need to come into play just as keenly as solid product and industry knowledge. But at the end of the day, product knowledge training is the foundation upon which the most successful sales teams are built. Combined with a solid comprehension of your prospects’ businesses and the unique challenges they face, your sales team will be unstoppable!

As the saying goes, “one cannot explain a thing that they do not first understand themselves.” And when it comes to efficient, effective sales training, Brainscape is the best tool out there.

Hey, if you liked this, you might also like:

• Does your eLearning use good cognitive science?
• What every employer should know about online sales training
• How to develop eLearning that will improve employee engagement
• 3 Reasons why your eLearning ROI is so low—and how to fix it

For more helpful employee training articles, check out Brainscape’s Academy for Employers.