Inside Sales Tip: Educate Yourself to Know the Product and Customers Will Succeed

Know the Product and Your Customers Will Always Succeed - Sales TipsOur CEO at XANT, Dave Elkington, has coined the statement, “The success of our company depends on our knowledge of our product.”

This may seem silly that the CEO vocalizes this often, but the importance of this statement runs deeper than one might originally think.

For instance, imagine walking into a car repair store with some sort of car problem. You drive your car in and they lift it up for examination. After about 20 minutes, the attendant comes out and says, “I’m sorry, we aren’t really sure what’s wrong. We don’t really know that much about cars.”

That scenario is exaggerated but is essentially what would happen if members of our company didn’t know the software, system or product. And it’s not just those who sell or support the product, it’s everyone. At XANT, our policy is that every new employee including those working in legal, accounting and HR is required to go through a two-week onboarding process to get trained and certified on our PowerDialer and PowerDialer for Salesforce.com systems. This commitment to becoming educated on the product assists everyone in their duties.

Take Matt Hall, for example. Hall is the in-house lawyer at XANT, and he said knowing the product is essential to his ability to accomplish his job.

“All of our contractual language is reflective of our technology. For example, our inbound product requires that we own the telephone numbers used to collect calls,” Hall said. “Understanding our telephony, database architecture and how information flows through our system helps me explain terms to our customers that might otherwise look unreasonable.”

Through knowing the technology, Hall is not only able to explain the “what” but the “why” which is a big success from our onboarding system. Because for all the positions in our companies, especially sales and support, once we are able to get past the “You should do this because that’s what it says,” and delve into, “You should do this because it’s been tried before and it works,” that is when we are in business.

What other tips do you have for making sure your customers succeed? Let me know in the comment box.

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