True Sales Professionals Are Product Agnostic

Salespeople should be able to close deals while knowing NOTHING about your product or service.

I believe that it is completely unnecessary for sales professionals to be familiar with a particular industry or type of product/service in order to sell effectively.  In fact, the first thing I think when a sales manager, business owner, CEO, etc. tells me that the sales people they hire needs to have experience or have “a very good understanding” of their industry or product, is that they don’t have a clue about what a trained professional salesperson really looks like. It screams out to me that they don’t follow a sales system, and without a system, their sales methodology is probably to have their people “show up and throw up” – the stereotypical features and benefits spiel.

Yes, the salespeople should know what the typical concerns and pains are for prospects in your industry, but that takes a week, not a career to figure out.  Why do you suppose it is that a new salesperson that doesn’t know a thing typically does better than when he/she goes through “sales training” and becomes knowledgeable about the product/service they sell?

The last thing I want my salespeople to do is prescribe a product or service and assume the prospect’s needs before asking a lot of questions to arrive at a solution the prospect is comfortable with based on their needs and desires. Also, I don’t want my salespeople educating our prospects.  I’ll leave that to my competition.

To test my point, let’s do a little exercise:

• Your salespeople should discover what is important to the prospect about <enter your product here > .
• Your salespeople should ask the client why they didn’t already buy <enter your competitor’s product here>.
• Your sales people should ask what it is that frustrates the prospect about poor quality or service <enter your industry here > .
• Your sales people should ask “why not just do nothing about <a problem your product/service can solve>?” .

If you could safely replace the italicized bracketed words with your own, then it just goes to show you that it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in or product/service you sell.  A real trained sales professional understands the process, and when he/she knows they can fill a gap, closes the deal by bringing in the person with the encyclopedic knowledge about your company’s products/services or the support material to prove it.

Note: the chameleon image is supposed represent a salesperson that can blend in with the surroundings.  I didn’t know what else to use