How well does your team know the products they’re selling?
This is a crucial question. If they aren’t grounded in the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of your company, they won’t be able to answer customers’ questions. They will also struggle to get more people to buy your products and use your services.
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It’s not enough for them to know the company’s mission and vision statements. Of course, that will count if they’ve taken those inspiring words to heart. But can they say why the product exists, or who it’s supposed to serve?
Do they understand customers’ needs and why your products are (supposedly) the best solution?
If these questions have caused your heart to skip a beat, you’ll probably want to find out how much your team members really know about your products.
What Your Employees Should Know
Everyone on your team– especially people who interact with customers –should have in-depth knowledge of these things:
- What Your Product Is: Its composition; active ingredients, features, or aspects; what it’s called; and what class of products or service it belongs to.
- What It Does: The needs it meets (or can meet); the problem(s) it exists to solve; how it solves that problem (or those problems).
- Who It Is For: What the average customer is like (the buyer persona); their demographics and psychographics.
- Their Path to Adopting It: Their journey to buying the product, from their first hearing about it to paying for it, and thereafter.
How this Will Help Your Business
With greater knowledge of your products and services, your workers will be able to achieve the following:
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- Better Customer Engagement
Your team members will be better able to answer inquiries about your product and services. This will leave customers more satisfied on the whole.
- Aid Customer Retention
When your employees provide good answers to customers’ questions, they give customers more value for their time and increase their confidence in your brand. This makes them more likely to
stick with your business.
- Grow Sales
They will be better at convincing people to buy your products, since they know what it is and what its strengths are, versus competing alternatives.
- Boost Employee Confidence
The more your employees know about your products, the more confident they will be about their role in
building and selling them. This can have a positive effect on their productivity and overall wellbeing at work.
How to Provide Product Knowledge Training
- Make It part of the Employee Onboarding Process
When you hire employees, let them know the organization works. Expose them to the product, show them what it’s for, and tell them what the customer is like. They should observe the service delivery process for a while before getting right into it.
Knowledge of the wider industry is crucial. They should know how your company fits into it.
At the end of the program, run an assessment of their knowledge and fluency in the relevant themes. Make sure they know what the company wants to achieve with its product.
- Conduct Refresher Sessions
Change happens. And when it does, you want everyone on your team to know how they play a role in it.
Team members that have been around for longer may know your products better. But they still have to understand the evolution in customer interaction and product design that needs to take place once in a while. They too have to be trained in using newer tools and familiarize themselves with more recent products.
- Provide An Easily Accessible Knowledge Base
You can make relevant resources about your company available to your employees. Company handbooks, digital libraries, product designs, and even brochures can help enhance their knowledge of the products they manage or sell.
Final Words
Product knowledge training could be the big key that unlocks growth for your business. Make it happen, starting today, and see how well it works for your company.
Featured Image Source: eLearning Praxis
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This article was first published on 24th August 2020
ikenna-nwachukwu
Ikenna Nwachukwu holds a bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He loves to look at the world through multiple lenses- economic, political, religious and philosophical- and to write about what he observes in a witty, yet reflective style.
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