Product Information packaged the way salespeople use it: The 7 "W's"

What information do salespeople need regarding the product? Often times marketing tries to make this determination and they create the information from what they think the salesperson needs. Since marketing is going to create the material, at least initially, it is important it be assembled in salesperson's terms. This what I call the "7 W's": What is it that I'm selling? Who do I sell it to? Why do they want it? What is its value? What does it cost? Who is the competition? and Where have we done this? This simple formula can take mountains of information and reduce it to a usable sales friendly package.

What is it that I'm selling? At least initially, this is a simple description of the product and its capabilities/functionality. This generally does not include a lot about how it does what it does. This is the technical part of the conversation and is necessary in dealing with technical audiences. It is my experience, that when this is necessary, this conversation is best delivered by the sales engineer.

Why do they want it? This is the business challenge that the product/solution addresses. Most marketing materials contain this information but it needs to be modified for sales. It needs to be presented in terms of who specifically in the target company has this challenge and questions provided to help the salesperson probe this person to uncover if it in fact it is a challenge this person faced.

You can see that the next "W", who to sell to? is intertwined. If you look at salespeople, their job is to sell to people. So when training them you have to be certain that the materials are set up to identify these people and help the salespeople explore these peoples challenge.

The next "W", what is the value? also needs to be related to the individual target individual(s) with in the target company. What is the specific value?, not just financial to that person.

If you can determine the value for the targeted individual you can put this in perspective to the cost information of the product solution. So yes they need to know the cost but they need to have it justified by the value.

Salespeople need to know the competition and their position and pricing to anticipate objections and competitive tactics.

Where have we done this is very important information for the salesperson. Prospectives are many times more receptive to the opinions of their counterparts at companies in the same industry. So success stories and customer references become key components of the information required to successfully sell products.

To successfully train on a product/solution be sure you can repackage the materials to answer these 7 questions.

In the next entry I will give an actual example of how we took industry information and aligned it, packaged it and distributed in a way that matches how salespeople think and work.