For your sales team to effectively sell your products and services, they have to be knowledgeable about your products and services. They don't have to be product engineers, but they should be able to answer the following questions about your product offerings.
1) What type of customer would buy this product, why would he buy it, where would he use it?
These may sound like simple questions, but can your sales team provide concrete and specific answers? If they can't be more specific than "everyone uses this," or "because it works," how can you hope to get any focus on the markets and customers you hope to sell to?
2) What are the competitive strengths and weaknesses of the vendors you compete against for this group of products?
Here, your sales force, and if appropriate, the vendor, should do a no-holds-barred analysis of the good and bad attributes of the competing manufacturers of the products in areas such as price, breadth of line, delivery, origin of manufacture, etc. This will give your company a good chance to educate the sales force on the alternative products your customer is exploring.
3) What are the competitive strengths and weaknesses of the distributors you compete against for this group of products?
If you don't know your local competition's good and bad points for each of the lines that compete with yours, then you are probably losing business that could be yours. You could save yourself a lot of useless effort trying to get some business from a competitor that has such a strong offering in a product line that he will win every time in a head-to-head battle. For this type of competitor you must sell your other strengths, or package a group of services together to get the business.
4) What are the competitive strengths and weaknesses of the vendors that you represent for these product groups?
Unless you are the luckiest distributor in the world, and represent every full-line, lowest-cost, best-product manufacturer, you probably have lines that have a weakness or two. But you have the lines you represent because they have good points. Identify both, and teach your salespeople to sell the strengths and to sell around the weaknesses.
5) What are the questions that need answers for any of the vendor's products to be specified?
If you order an item to do a specific job from any catalog, you have to specify size, color, etc. If your customer orders an item from you, you need to know the equivalent information. And if your salesman (inside or outside) doesn't ask for it, another call is necessary, which is not good for customer relations or the quality process.
So, if you think you want your salesmen to represent all your lines, then you and your supplier need to give all your salespeople the "crib sheet" necessary to ask the proper questions and get the proper item, without bugging the customer again. This seems to be a natural thing to do, but many distributors and manufacturers forget the importance of this.
If you want to offer your customers and suppliers the best service, as it relates to your sales and marketing effort, then you need to be working as hard at improving your company in these areas as you do at keeping the mistakes in the order processing system to zero. Historically, the sales organization is too busy taking orders and selling product, or correcting mistakes, to think much about training. But in this age of technology, education in all areas of the sales and marketing effort has become imperative.
Rusty Duncan is the founder and Chief Markets Analyst for Industrial Market Information Inc. For more information on the product line analysis IMI can provide, please contact IMI or complete an information request form.
