Educate, Educate and Educate

Salespeople often times live in a bubble. Where our lives revolve around knowing as much as we can about our products and services and expect everyone to just know them as well. But I hate to break the news to everyone that's not the case. Our prospects and customers' lives do not revolve around our stuff. They have their jobs to do and other products to learn and evaluate. This holds true for partners of ours selling our solutions. They have a lot of solutions to offer and you want to make sure they are talking about yours to their customers. What needs to be done is EDUCATE EDUCATE AND EDUCATE. This is very time consuming and tedious at times. However many of our customers, prospects and partners want to learn and understand our products but more importantly learn HOW to sell them. If they don't know they won't talk about you. The one thing sales people will not do is talk about products they know
nothing of. So case in point with partners, you need to teach them. Customers are also very open to understanding the differences in solutions from competition. This gives them the ability to sell to the people writing the checks on WHY your stuff. Remember that post about your customer is SELING also. To their boss and financial people inside their company. Educate people about you and your products. Explain why you and why your product. Don't assume they know. EDUCATE!!!