"A company should have onboarding training for sales people which covers products and technology as well as case studies for presenting these products."
Eta Consults conducted a survey recently to gage how effective marketing technology companies were at training their sales teams. The results showed that companies need to do a better job of getting their prospect and client facing teams on board with both the product and the go to market strategy being employed by their organizations.
Clearly the first obstacle was getting new people onboard and understanding how the products work. After the initial welcome training, sales directors who answered in the majority (70%) felt that too much emphasis was on deep product integration and not focused on market uses and application. This is interesting as the sales teams are going to facing a wide number of buyers in the field; some interested solely in technology, but others on the variety of ways a tool can be used on the real world.
We then asked our respondents about who did the training. Almost all of the respondents indicated that the training came directly from the product team. While that makes sense because they typically concieve, build and deliver the product, they are often not 100% aligned to associating the selling process to the feature sets included in the finished product.
In future blogs we'll talk about the direct link between features and benefits and the best mouse trap. What our research tells us is that sales people understand the need to relate the product and tool to how it will be viewed as a solution to problem their client has. Short of this, the tool becomes just another product in a crowded marketplace.
There are countless examples of "best mousetraps" being built that are being out sold in the field because the emphasis on how to sell a product is incorporated into the training process before it ever gets rolled out.