Also, think what a wonderful means you have to continually reinforce everything you have done, by incorporating sales training into product training.

Thanks for joining the discussion and for the great comment! I hope to see you participating in the future.

Often corporate training/learning and development groups separate the ‘soft skills’ or sales skills group from the product trainers or group of subject matter experts in product management/marketing called upon to deliver product training. In many of these cases, the training design and development process or group does not wrap the product training in the context of the sales situation. Unfortunately the myth that ‘the better the sales people know the product and the more we tell the client about the product, the more we’ll sell’ still prevails. Better product knowledge definitely helps. Part of my sales success has stemmed from superior product knowledge. It can also blur our vision of the forest (the customer’s business goals and initiatives and answering ‘so what?’) through the trees.

Separating product training from context/skills training also flies against anecdotal evidence from the Gallup organization and others suggesting that many top performers have less in-depth product knowledge than their counterparts. As Gallup noted no relationship has been found between training and/or technical training and best performers. In my opinion the most effective way to improve sales performance is to integrate product and sales training.

Thanks for the comments!

Not very often we get both right and quite often we get both wrong.

I have always felt that sales training is the most important part of the development for a good salesman, therefore we always work long hours on both teaching them the ins and outs of our products, our competitors products and how to approach and present the solutions to our customers.

Thanks a lot for a great post here Dave.

So often, simple is so powerful. Excellent – and simple – suggestion!

Todd