Staying Current With Your Products

It’s great having a big product portfolio to sell to clients and prospects. But it can be a real challenge to stay current with enhancements of current products and the introduction of new ones.

As a sales executive or relationship manager, how much information about each product do you need to know? And what’s the best way to keep up?

The level of expertise you need to have depends on your role and the amount of support you have.

Does your company have salespeople who are specialists in a small number of products who work with you, the overall account manager?

Or do you do all the selling, but are supported by technical product experts?

Utilize Playbooks

I’m a big fan of product playbooks and have helped create many of them for clients over the years. The best playbooks in my view cover the essentials you need for your role, in depth, while not being so unwieldy that they never get used.

Ideally, product marketing in your company provides them. But if they don’t, you can create them as a team:

I like playbooks that include the following:

•  A brief description of the product
•  An ideal prospect profile (who to target, key qualifiers)
•  Key client players to involve (especially who feels the pain the most)
•  Pain points and questions to ask to uncover them
•  Key differentiators (and how we compare to the competition)
•  When (what level of qualification) to bring in product specialists and how (the request process)
•  Typical key events in the sales process with team roles defined (who does what)

*When there are a lot of products available to me to sell, anything more detailed than this, I usually ignore (because I have a specialist who knows it).

When should playbooks be updated?

Playbooks should be updated when there are new enhancements or when competition has enhancements that affect our differentiation. Anything that changes key things listed above.

When do you review enhancement announcements or new product playbooks?

I like to schedule time every week during non-peak times to keep up with product enhancements and new product introductions. For me that’s in the afternoon or evening, as this is a non-urgent, lower-priority task. That keeps my mornings reserved for more time-sensitive, higher-priority tasks.

Of course, when an opportunity presents itself the priority changes and more time is spent studying that playbook.

Hope this helps.

Have a great week!

Bob

P.S. If you’d like someone to audit your playbooks or help you develop them, send me an email and we’ll set up a time to talk about it: [email protected].