“They wouldn’t [call] me Batman, so I had to run with Technologist”
Does your company have a person who has overarching knowledge of the evolution of your product catalog, and can advise both legacy customers as well as potential new ones? Avaya has one in Steve Forcum, “I’ve seen all of the different things we can do, and I can speak to pretty much everything Avaya offers”.
While your organization may not have the portfolio on the scale of Avaya or Cisco, it more than likely will still have several generations of products and solutions. Every salesperson will have knowledge of some of these solutions, and may even lean on the handful they feel comfortable with. Every sales engineer has a suite of solutions they deal with and have become very knowledgeable of (often precisely because they aren’t comfortable). How can you set up a way to have your staff aware of all of your solutions, past and present?
Knowledge Sharing
Webinars or routine meetings that allow individuals to network and share their individual experiences can go a long way to building knowledge cohesively. This is a personalized approach and can be built into team building seminars and other activities. This works pretty well, but not everyone is comfortable articulating their own experiences to others.
Documentation
Compiling sales sheets for your products, having a deep website with good descriptions, and even keeping legacy materials in an archive can help explain the products on an as-needed basis. This takes time, of course, and someone who can take the information and build the sheets and data set.
Subject Matter Experts
Having a champion on some particular product set works well, too, especially if anyone with questions knows who the SME is and can reach them, as needed.
And if you are interested in what Steve does as his company’s Technologist, you can watch this video: