The Product Crutch

The Lead - The Product Crutch

Common theme here - I saw a LinkedIn post this week that inspired the topic for this week.

A fellow sales leader in the PM industry posted this week on a sales team that had become product experts, but weren’t getting the results they wanted. As someone who tends to think analytically to a fault, this resonated with me.

*A quick housekeeping note, when I say “product”, I’m also referring to services offered as well.

I’ve written before about how many sales people feel a need to understand all the ins and outs of what they are selling. On the one hand, of course you need to be knowledgeable and confident about what you sell. I’m not disputing that these things are absolutely true.

Here’s the problem though - there are a LOT of sales people who immerse themselves in product knowledge, at the expense of learning how to actually sell. What I mean is, it’s great to know everything about what you sell but you’re missing the point if you aren’t taking the time to understand how to navigate actual situations with prospects.

Based on my own experience, this comes from a place of not wanting to be embarassed. It’s uncomfortable to be asked a question that you don’t know the answer to. We don’t want to look stupid. The best way to avoid the siutation is to know every single thing that could ever be asked, right?

To understand your product, is to understand what it means to your propect. Said another way, knowing your offer doesn’t mean much if you aren’t able to connect it to a problem that your prospect is experiencing.

A good example of this is the way we think about objections. It’s a fairly basic reaction. Someone asks a difficult question, or challenges what we’re offering. The common phrase is “overcoming” objections. By nature, it would seem like we need to be able to say something that disarms our prospects concern.

The reality is that “overcoming” is the wrong posture. Objections are an opportunity to better understand the problem your prospect is facing. A great salesperson hears an objection, and listens for what’s behind it.

A prospect who questions your contract length/terms - have they been burned by a vendor previously?

A prospect who’s super sensitive to price - do they see the value in your service?

A prospect with concerns about onboarding timeline - are they concerned about cashflow? (especially PM specific example)

The point is we have to be able to dig deeper. An objection or question is not an invitation to pitch. If you’re uber focused on your product, that’s the direction you’ll go. Your brain will be hardwired to “tell” someone, something. Is that how you would want to be sold to?

I can hear Todd Ortscheid’s voice here - I think he would say “Ben, if you dodge my questions, I’m hanging up on you”. To be clear, that’s not what I’m advocating for. You need to be able to address product specific questions with clear answers. My point is that you need to understand more than just the product itself. You need to know the problem you’re solving. You need to know the pain the problem causes. You need to know how your product solves the problem. Sometimes you have dig beneath the surface of what someone is actually saying.

Final example - when I worked at ProfitCoach, I would hear PMs talk all the time about how they just needed more doors. Or that they were focused on growing to a certain size. In almost every case, door growth was not what they actually wanted. They wanted entrepreneurial freedom, and believed door growth was the vehicle to get there. Effective selling is creating a clear connection between someone’s needs, and your solution.