Sales reps focus too much on product features and not enough on customer problems. Interview your best customers and their sales engineers to learn what challenges they faced before buying, then use that to approach similar prospects. If you can't describe a prospect's current situation before you call, you're not ready.
The biggest mistake I see tech sales reps making hands down is focusing on product knowledge. Doesn't matter if you're just new to a job or if you've been in a role for a while and you're struggling to see the results you know you're capable of. If you're focusing on your product and understanding how your product works versus understanding problems that your product solves, you're not going to connect with prospects. So instead of going to all the product training, start interviewing your current customers or the sales reps or sales engineers who can tell you, who have the stories of what your biggest and best customers were doing before they bought your product. What were the processes like? Why were they problems? I guarantee the chances are very highly probable that the prospects you're reaching out to are following similar processes to what your best customers were doing before they bought. So here's a test to give yourself before you call on a customer. Are you pretty confident you know more or less what they're doing in their current state? If not, that's a big sign that you need to go back to the drawing board and understand what the trends in your industry and market are. Then you'll be able to connect much more meaningfully with those prospects, had impactful conversations. All right, give it a shot. Drop the product knowledge, start focusing on the problem knowledge, and watch your meetings go up, your sales conversion ratios increase significantly, and your bank account go up.
