When salespeople know just enough

good at selling stuff, but there is actually an inverse relationship between those salespeople who are most qualified, from a product-knowledge standpoint, and stellar sales performance. The premium placed on product knowledge all too often subverts the need to keep it as simple as possible so that the salespeople can focus on really engaging the customers.

Frank Cespedes, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School wrote in his book, Aligning Strategy and Sales, “The first task of training is to build relevant competence.” Relevant is the operative word in that statement and that’s where many weaker sales people fall short. They believe that more information, more details and more product specifications increases the prospect’s likelihood to make a purchase. Not only is that expectation patently false, but such product information overload has virtually no consistent correlation to sales success.

A wing and a prayer is not a good strategy for customer engagement. There is perhaps no quicker way to alienate a prospect then by bluffing your way through his or her questions about a given product. You must know the fundamentals of the products your store carries before you can hope to move on to the stuff that really matters, emotional engagement. That said, practicing your open-ended questions, your ability to overcome objections and your closing techniques is every bit as important.

The second aspect of product knowledge is very personal and very effective. Great salespeople make a habit of falling in love with certain products in their stores and they then use those products as reference points to anchor their conversations with customers. The product in question would typically include a range of styling and price points so that the products can easily be called upon at the appropriate time.  

A word to the wise: Be careful when selecting products for your reference points so that they do not represent too narrow a style or aesthetic orientation. If your own taste is too specific, it may not align with a broad enough base of customers to ensure good business.

Select a range of styles and price points and familiarize yourself with as many details as you need on those specific pieces to be able to competently and confidently talk about them. Although you may actually sell some of these pieces from time to time, the more important learning being satisfied here is that the selected products become valuable tools in your discovery process with your customers. They become, in the best-case scenario, a part of the narrative to uncover customer needs.

Do not beat up your customer with infinite and irrelevant product details, and do not use the pre-selected items to product-dump, an unusually irksome and wholly ineffective way to engage a customer. Use the elected products to demonstrate your passion and your pride in what you do and with whom you do it for. Use them as a genuine way to communicate the quality and value of your product and the customer experience. Use the products as a way to show that you too are a customer and you yourself would love to own the products in question.

That kind of connection is very powerful, as it is as much about what is communicated through your body language and your unspoken words as much as it is about what you say. Leonard Mlodinow wrote in Subliminal, How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, “Language is handy, but we humans have social and emotional connections that transcend words, and are communicated--and understood--without conscious thought.” That kind of emotive transference is more powerful than any product details you might have spoken. It says, “I believe in this product, I would want to own this myself.”

Product information is not a weapon to be sharpened every day so that unsuspecting customers can be slayed at will by your great intellect and unbounding knowledge. Take the time to understand what your store’s products and services are. Embrace every opportunity to fully explore the different product categories and try to uncover interesting details and nuances that you can use as appropriate. Understand the important features and take the time to note how those features might benefit your customers.

Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that the spoils go to those who know the most. They don’t, and it rarely ever has. Great salespeople know their products just well enough to use that information as a catalyst to emotively connect to their customers. That is a fundamentally different approach than being the smartest person in the store who just doesn’t sell that much and who, if we’re being very honest, frequently bores the customers into our competitors’ stores.  

Peter Smith, the author of Hiring Squirrels: 12 Essential Interview Questions to Uncover Great Retail Sales Talent, has spent more than 30 years building sales teams at retail and at wholesale. He is president of Vibhor Gems and he has previously worked with companies such as Tiffany & Co., Montblanc and Hearts On Fire. Email him at peter@vibhorgems.com, dublinsmith@yahoo.com or reach him on LinkedIn.