Lesson 2 - Learn Your Product

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In this lesson, you’ll dive deep into understanding the product you sell. We’ll explore its key features, benefits, and differentiators, helping you build the knowledge base you need to answer common prospect questions with confidence. Your assignment will guide you to test your knowledge by creating a one-page cheat sheet summarizing your product’s most important aspects and getting feedback from your manager. 

Transcript

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Welcome back to the Daily Quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you're going to learn your product as in you're actually going to use your product. Now, a lot of salespeople will say, you know, I was told that I only need to know my product well enough to pitch the messaging or talk about it at a high level. And that's, that's just wrong. Um, you are absolutely going to be a better salesperson if you know how to use your product, um, as well as possible, the deeper your product knowledge, the better you're going to be able to confidently talk about what your product can do, how it can do it better than your competitors. Um, you'll have real world experience. So you'll be able to say, well, when I use it for this, I do X, Y, Z. Um, and that's going to build trust, credibility. It's going to let customers know that, um, you just know what you're talking about. So, uh, when it comes to your product, uh, there really is no amount of training that is too much. Um, another reply that I typically get is, well, you know, that's kind of the job of my solutions engineer, or we have a product marketing team that's going to know the product and they're going to give us. Everything that we need. Those resources are excellent, and I think that you should absolutely leverage your solutions engineers if you have access to a team like that. Um, that person is always going to have maybe a little bit more technical know how than you do, but that is not an excuse for you to not learn how your product works. Um, it is really disheartening when you're on a call with a customer, you have momentum going, they're interested, they're listening to what you're saying. And then they're, they turn around and they say, you know, can you actually show me like X, Y, Z feature? And you say, ah, you know, actually, uh, let me go get my technical expert and we'll schedule another call and, and we'll get that set up for you. That is super disheartening, right? It kills the momentum of a deal. So you want to be able to say, yeah, absolutely. Let me just pull it up real quick and I'll show you some of the, uh, some of the different features I was talking about. And that's going to keep that excitement, keep that engagement. Um, and ultimately it's going to get them interested in pursuing a further demonstration with a technical expert, with a solutions engineer, um, further down the road. So all that to say, very important to understand your product, confidently handle technical questions. Um, just making sure that I'm, I'm covering all my notes here. Um, cool. So now that we understand kind of why it's important to know how to use your product. Let's talk about how you can learn it. The first thing that you need to do is if there's a demo of your product, you need to watch it beginning to end. Um, if you have a solutions engineering team or an AE mentor manager, that's given a demo in the past and it's recorded, ask them for a copy of that recording, go watch it, take notes on what you liked, what you didn't like. I would encourage you to watch these demos as if you were a customer, really try to put yourself in their shoes. We're going to, uh, we're going to do more of that in a future lesson, but I want you to think about if I were a customer, what would I like about this? Am I seeing what I expected to see? What are the differentiators that I'm seeing? How is this better than the other competitors in the market? What are the things that I'm not seeing? What are the gaps? Um, you need to understand from a customer or prospects lens. What am I actually looking at here? So watch a demo. Number two, you need to take training for your product. If there's training that exists. Go take it, right? Act as if you are a customer. You just installed this solution for the first time. What would you do to learn how to use it? Right? You would probably go to maybe your website has education courses. Maybe there are certifications you can get in your solution. Um, maybe there is help center documentation that you can look at. Act as if you're a new customer and go figure out what training exists. How can I use it? By the way, this will also help you become an expert at what resources you can offer new customers to help them on board once you've made the sale later on in your career. So understand what's out there, take the lessons, really focus in, take your time, take notes. Um, where are the gaps in your knowledge? Go ask your solution engineers if they can show you those things. I promise you they are going to be happy to show you because it's just one less thing they're going to have to jump on a demo for later. So, um, really kind of take your time and, and take those lessons. Number three, if there is a help center, as I mentioned, go take a look at it, look through those articles. Um, but also look and see if your product has a community wish list, um, or a community forum. Uh, because those are also going to be great places where you can go look at features, functionality, ways that people are using your product. And, and see kind of how, uh, where you should focus, what features, what functions should you focus on the most? And then the best thing, the gold standard is, uh, Oh, one that I forgot to mention, YouTube instructional videos, Coursera, Udemy. Um, I think it's called Udemy. I don't actually know how to pronounce it. Udemy. I don't mean Udemy. I don't know. I don't know what it is. Um, Whatever it is, go there. Coursera is another one, but they, a lot of instructors will create courses kind of like the one that I'm making now. Um, and they'll put them out onto the internet so you can learn your product. Uh, check YouTube. If you, if you can't find any of that, um, the gold standard, the North star that you're looking for is if you can actually install and use your product day to day today. So if there is a sandbox environment that you can use, if you can be allocated a license for your product. I would encourage you to install it and start using it for everything that you possibly can. I'm not naive here. I realize that depending on your solution, you might not be able to use the product the way your customers would. Maybe your customer is a high tech security financial services firm and you really have no need for high tech financial services, security solutions with your home office. So it's, we're going to be really hard for you to use that product, right? I know you can't use everything, but if you can, in any way that you can, You should be installing and using your product day to day to understand, um, how your customers, uh, would use it. And then you'll be able to speak from your own experience. Um, cool. Make sure I covered everything here. All right. It's your turn for your assignment, your study guide to walk you through this, review a demo of your product. Take notes. What did you like? What did you not like? Take some product training, read third party reviews of your product. Look for Coursera, Udemy or YouTube instructional videos. Look up your product community and if you can begin using your product in any possible way, uh, that you can, your study guide, I'll walk you through it all. Um, but that is it for today's lesson. Uh, you've got full detailed notes, uh, below, I think below, I don't know how the websites can end up working, but the course notes will be there somewhere if you want more detail, um, and thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.