The best salesperson for a product is the person who created it.

The organization structure in large enterprises helps leverage economies of scale. At the same time inter-department coordination and knowledge transfer becomes a challenge. For many industries like pharmaceuticals, financial products and technology products; the products are created by scientists, engineers or subject matter experts who are veterans in developing them. But how often do we see these experts out in the field, selling it? Never. Because selling requires a special skill set of its own. Are your sales team equipped enough to do it?  Perhaps you can find your sales reps facing these challenges:

1. Low technical understanding of the product. Sales reps do not always understand all the technical aspects of the products. Especially Pharma or Financial products are a bit on the technical side for a sales rep to understand in a short time. The science or the calculations which go into making the products is quite complex but also essential while pitching as it could be your USP.
2. Inability to handle questions. Most reps might fumble when questioned beyond the standard set by the customers. They usually need to “get back” to the customers after the sales conversation with the relevant answers. This makes them inefficient.
3. Ineffective solutioning skills. Reps are easily able to talk about the product features, functionality, returns etc., which is usually taught in the training. However, they are ineffective when it comes to understanding the customers’ problems and offering the product as a solution.

Sales reps, who are under-prepared, do not come across as experts to the customers in the sales conversations. This makes it difficult for customers to trust the reps resulting in lower closure rates. 

What can help the reps come across as experts?

Given that the sales reps need to be the experts in front of the customers, here are a few tools which can help them:

1. Technical and soft-skill training. This is the most popular method of ramping up sales reps to be sales ready. A combination of online/offline and product/sales training is adopted by most organizations. 
2. Coaching by managers. Experienced managers can guide the sales reps to be more effective as they have the necessary technical and soft skills. However, managers’ limited time and the logistical difficulty to shadow reps in the field make this tactic difficult to execute.
3. Sales Enablement platforms. Another way to approach the challenge is to equip the sales reps with Sales Enablement platforms. These platforms help them with the necessary resources to come across as experts in front of the customers. Reps can use Sales Enablement platforms to engage with customers, customize presentations, create solutions on the fly and handle objections. 

sharpsell is a mobile Sales Enablement and Readiness platform which is designed for field sales reps. It combines training, coaching and enablement for reps to get them sales ready and help them close deals faster. Companies using sharpsell have seen increase in sales team engagement, higher sales productivity with higher number of products sold, higher ticket size, increased visibility on prospecting, reduced content creation cost, reduced time to first sale, reduced costs of training, and uncovering insights on product feedback.