Every product has a promise attached to itself. Whether you are selling a chart-topper book or excellent computer software - products are meant to solve a niche problem and satisfy customers. Therefore, knowing about products is a must-have for the marketing department and also for the sales staff. In this article, we take a quick look at product knowledge, its benefits, and how the right training can help your team know not only about the product concerned but also about the market, the ongoing trends, and the competitors.
What is Product Knowledge?
Product knowledge goes beyond understanding your own product. It includes:
- Customer needs and wants
- Industry trends and market suitability
- Brand mission and vision
- Competitor products and advantages
- Company policies and regulations
Developing comprehensive product knowledge helps boost employee confidence, improve customer service, increase sales, and build customer trust.
It refers to deep, detailed, and specific knowledge about the product and the problem it addresses. Though highly beneficial for marketing teams and sales professionals, gathering knowledge about the product in question is also helpful for everyone in a particular company.
Product knowledge goes beyond the product under the spotlight as it also includes information, facts, or anecdotes related to the target customers, the competitors, the contemporary market trends, or the industry at large.
Here are some of the broad categories of product knowledge:
1. Customer:
Your sales representatives should understand the needs and wants of your customer base so that they can offer the best available solution.
2. Industry:
Knowing the market is essential for understanding the product-market suitability. The sales team should be aware of the ongoing buzz in the industry.
3. Brand:
What is the objective of your brand? What are its mission and vision? Knowing about the product also includes having deep information about what the brand believes in and the goals it aims to achieve.
4. Competition:
The sales professionals in your team should understand the competitors' products as well. This knowledge helps to find out the areas where your company can do better in terms of price, convenience or customer experience.
5. Policies:
Not only your sales staff, but everyone in the company should have a basic understanding of the legal stuff. From licenses and agreements to product exchanges and refunds—company policies should be laid down in easy and understandable terms.
How to develop product knowledge training for your business?
With regular product knowledge sessions, you can train your staff and help them stay updated on recent developments and advancements of your product. Such training covers a broad area and goes beyond product specifications and features to include customer information, troubleshooting tips, product policies and regulations, etc. Here are a few things to keep in mind when organising product-related training for your departments:
1. Information handouts and presentations:
Handouts are easily accessible resources you can share with your team to always keep facts and information handy. If you have a softcopy version, you can even update it with the relevant information to reflect the changes made to your product. Presentations are great tools for knowledge sharing as they open opportunities for doubt clearing, constructive criticism, and further clarification.
2. Instructor-led product demonstrations:
You can invite an experienced, expert, and knowledgeable instructor to conduct product-related training. Such workshops can be organized by product engineers, VPs, senior managers, or anyone who has a good understanding of the product.
3. Accessible knowledge base
When you have all your information, resources, and tools in the right place, you cannot possibly go wrong with your training. Create a powerful knowledge base where you can share all your product details and make it accessible to your entire staff. Encourage your employees to check the answers to the frequently asked questions about the product while sharing important content in the form of smaller, digestible chunks.
What are Product Knowledge benefits?
All types of training sessions are aimed at achieving certain pre-determined objectives. If you wish to maximize your training effectiveness, you can prepare specific plans for your particular departments. Here's how product-related sessions can help you:
1. Boost employee confidence:
When your customer care representatives know your product inside out, they can better solve the buyers' queries and tackle uncomfortable situations.
2. Offer better customer service:
A solid understanding of the product helps representatives share accurate information with potential customers and how it can help potential buyers.
3. Increase sales:
Knowing your product leads your sales team to convince more customers about its advantages. As a result, your sales numbers start growing in no time!
4. Analyse competitors:
By knowing the product of your opponents in the market, you can better explain where and how your product is the most appropriate, budget-friendly, and perfect choice for your customers.
5. Build trust with customers:
Gaining and retaining customers' trust is crucial for a lasting business. When customers receive full details of your product and get their queries satisfactorily resolved, they are more likely to remain loyal purchasers of your brand.
How to improve Product Knowledge?
Developing your knowledge about the product has no end. It is a constant work in progress. You can employ the following strategies to secure customers' attention and garner more sales:
| Strategies | How it can help |
|---|---|
| Use the product | No other strategy can beat this. When you engage with the product, you can experience what works and what doesn't. This helps you to predict the challenges your customers might face with your product. |
| Invest in the knowledge base | Whether it is through online courses, insightful presentations, or self-paced learning journeys—your knowledge base should be an interactive portal. To make it even more interesting for your staff, you can integrate gaming experiences into the learning objectives. |
| Practice simulated situations | Take cues from real-life issues that your customer support team has successfully dealt with. Use the role-playing technique to navigate through the frequently faced challenges and come up with unique ways of addressing various situations. |
| Test, evaluate, retest | Test your staff periodically on the knowledge they have gathered about the product. You can introduce fun competitive sessions where the various departments of your company may participate and compete against each other. It's best to try out a mix of objective and explanation-based questions. |
| ## How can Docsie help? |
Are you in search of a reliable software partner that can help you document your product knowledge details? Here's presenting Docsie! The all-in-one Swiss army knife and the one-stop-shop that perfectly caters to all your documentation needs.
Beginning with highlighting your product, you can build a full-fledged knowledge base on Docsie and share it easily with all the stakeholders involved. With easy-access sharing, multiple version control, and availability in various languages - your documentation remains digitally safe and also becomes easily editable by all your teams and departments.
What's More?
You can translate your content into multiple languages, take the help of the ready-to-use templates, and even leave comments or assign tasks for your staff to complete. Docsie believes in seamless collaborations and therefore, provides a handful of amazing features that make working together a fun and enriching experience.
Final Thoughts
Knowing your product inside out is a skill. The more information and facts you can gather about the product, the more you can support your customers' needs and offer a good customer experience. With Docsie, you can create product documentation at lightning speed, thanks to its remarkable features. So, the next time you need to create rich and engaging content for your audience, choose Docsie as your trusted software partner and share product knowledge with your team members and customers.