Product knowledge is an essential sales skill. Understanding your products’ features allows you to present their benefits accurately and persuasively. Customers respond to enthusiastic sales staff who are passionate about their products and eager to share the benefits with them.

How to Build Fluent Product Knowledge and Improve Sales Success

1. Ask the right questions to uncover the complete set of customer needs.
2. Match the right products and services to those needs.
3. Position the value of their company as superior to other options available to the customer.

Businesses need to ensure that their employees have good product knowledge . A high level of product knowledge is a way of increasing the added value to a product or service. This is especially important during the sales process for technical or highly expensive products or services.

We define knowledge products as information that will help members/stakeholders in their decision making efforts. Examples might include: industry reports, statistics and economic updates, benchmarking and best practices information, specialized seminars/webinars.

Here are the four pillars of an effective product training…

• Product Knowledge: Understand what you are selling.
• Industry and Customer Knowledge: Understand what your customers are looking for.
• Competitor Analysis: Understand what your competitors are doing.
• Create winning product value statements.

The following are common types of product knowledge.

• Customer. How the product addresses customer needs.
• Brand. The identity of the product on the market.
• Customer Experience. Knowledge about the end-to-end customer experience offered by a product or service.
• Competition.
• Industry.
• Use.
• Complementary Products.
• Configuration.

Product knowledge allows us to speak with confidence around other experts. Selling to normal prospects can be easy because they may not have the same knowledge as you do. Understanding everything you can about what you’re selling gives you the confidence you need around these people.

Product knowledge is the most important tool for closing sales. It instills faith, trust, and respect in the customer, which creates a positive customer experience.

The C-level competency of market knowledge is about understanding the market context in which a business operates. At basic levels of performance, leaders understand obvious industry trends, the company’s products and its customers.

Knowledge enterprises are defined as enterprises where knowledge and knowledge-based products are offered to the market. The products and services can vary from plans to prototypes or mass-produced products where R&D costs are a large part. Employees of knowledge enterprises usually have an academic education.

Customer knowledge is essentially the science of knowing your customers: who they are, what motivates them, what they want, need, love, or hate. Customer knowledge takes a marketer and makes him into a psychologist.

Knowledge Services is a management approach to the use of information in which knowledge development and knowledge sharing are basic to every transaction and every interaction that occurs. Knowledge Services recognizes that the most critical asset in any group or environment is what its people know.

Customer knowledge is collected from many sources, including contact center interactions, customer posts on social media, surveys and other feedback, self-service requests, ecommerce and brick-and-mortar purchases, loyalty program registration, website cookies, and more.

Consumer knowledge affects all aspects of consumer purchasing behaviour and is thus an important phenomenon for marketers to research and understand. Consumer knowledge also affects all aspects of the marketing strategy developed to satisfy target segments.

CRM is the process of collecting valuable information about customers and use them to plan various marketing strategies. It helps in customer acquisition and retention by focusing on those characteristics which provide added value to customers. CRM is based on communicative marketing and causes customer satisfaction.

Combining customer knowledge with CRM enables organizations to target customers with high life time / strategic value; thus leading to future growth opportunities. Customer intimacy and knowledge of industry-specific processes tailored to meet business needs are essential ingredients of organizational success.

C-R-M stands for customer relationship management. What is CRM? At its simplest definition, a CRM system allows businesses to manage business relationships and the data and information associated with them.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. The goal is simple: Improve business relationships. A CRM system helps companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability.

The CRM process is a strategy for keeping every customer interaction personalized and meaningful that consists of five main steps. A customer relationship management system (CRM system) provides the data and functionalities your team needs to execute this strategy—and ultimately turn leads into customers.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology that allows businesses both large and small to organise, automate, and synchronise every facet of customer interaction. CRM system examples include marketing, sales, customer service, and support.

− Sir Henry Ford

Type	Characteristic
Operational CRM	Based on customer-oriented processes such as selling, marketing, and customer service.
Analytical CRM	Based on the intelligent mining of the customer data and using it tactically for future strategies.

There are three main types of CRM systems: collaborative, analytical, and operational. Here’s how to choose the best one for your business.

Types of CRM:

• Operational CRM. Operational CRM streamlines the business process that includes Sales automation, Marketing automation and Service automation.
• Analytical CRM. Analytical CRM helps top management, marketing, sales and support personnel to determine the better way to serve customers.
• Collaborative CRM.

1. You’re unable to keep up with lead flow. If you’re in the fortunate position of having a flood of new business but are struggling to keep up with it, you might need CRM. An intelligent CRM system will quickly sort and prioritise your leads so that your sales team can respond to them in a timely, efficient manner.

Here are 12 features to look for in CRM software.

• Workflow automation. CRM software can make your life easier by automating your workflow.
• Customization.
• Third-party integration.
• Customer service.
• Employee tracking.
• Social media.
• Lead management.
• Real-time data.

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CRM: An Overview A CRM system helps you keep your customer’s contact details up to date, track every interaction they have with your business, and manage their accounts. It’s designed to help you, improve your customer relationships, and in turn, customer lifetime value.

A CRM does more than just aid sales. But, if it’s working efficiently, it can do a lot for your lead generation efforts. Bad CRM data leads to missed opportunities for new customers, and it could create issues for your sales cycle.