Personalization, credibility, and value – probably the 3 most common buzzwords in the sales world today. Being a market expert gives you the ability to accomplish all 3. As a sales rep, your success depends on your ability to understand your clients market and educate your buyer on the nuances of it.
Why is it important for sales reps to be market experts?
- Build trust
Understanding your customer’s business landscape and market trends, first and foremost, allows you to speak with authority and confidence. You are able to provide insights, answer questions, and help clients make informed decisions. Being a market expert shows your clients that you are dedicated to understanding their business and their industry.
Additionally, using terminology and jargon that the clients are familiar with gives you an additional boost. Or, on the flip side, if you’re selling SEO services and the client asks you to explain the difference between SEO and SEM, you should be able to articulate the difference in a way that the client will understand.
- Create Value
Understanding your market, your client’s market, and keeping tabs on the trends of each allows you to identify potential opportunities. Especially in tech where change and innovation are constant, clients are going to be looking for the next big thing or they are going to ask if a certain market trend is relevant to them and you should be able to explain how this change will affect them.
As industries change, sales reps who are up-to-date, can anticipate how the potential needs of their customers will change. Your ability to create value for customers is dependent on your knowledge of their environment regardless of the changes.
- Personalization
If you haven’t watched a Top to Bottom episode yet, you should. Each week Keenan and Becc start the show with a segment aptly named “Email Teardown”. If nothing else, you should take a peek at a couple of these segments. Sales emails have become incredibly basic and repetitive. Rather than trying to connect with each prospect, we’re sending out hundreds of cold emails hoping for a miracle. Learn your prospect’s industry, the industry’s problems, and then educate your buyer on the trends of their industry.
Building your knowledge base around your customer’s environment is step 1 in personalization. Circling back to building trust, if you know you customer’s environment and you can highlight potential business problems in your cold email or personalize your emails to fit their needs you’re building credibility and trust before you have them on the phone. But you need to be a market expert in order to do that.
This episode of Gap Sell Keenan highlights how market expertise can improve your sales calls.
Key Learning Moments:
2:35 – Be careful asking too many questions at once
9:22 – You can’t promise something and then not deliver
15:00 – Make sure you have all the information before you make a recommendation
16:33 – Be careful with assumptions – ask questions to solidify your assumptions
18:10 – Ask questions rather than making statements – confirm your hypothesis with questions
20:13 – Educating your buyer is the quickest way to build credibility
30:51 – Get to the point quick and use examples to drive your rationale
33:30 – Everyone wants to sell, you need to diagnose
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