If you own a product, a company, or sell something, this piece is for you. Even if you haven’t heard of product knowledge training ever before, keep reading.
Without adequate knowledge training for your product, your sales team can’t function, which leads to lost revenue, which leads to bankruptcy.
Hence, throughout this piece, we will discuss the basics of product knowledge training, how to improve it, implement it and boost your revenue.
Table of Contents
What does product knowledge training mean?
The term is pretty self-explanatory. Product knowledge is, well, knowledge of a product (duh!).
This “knowledge” encompasses anything and everything that can help understand and make others understand a product better.
It may be features, pricing, how it compares to competitors, the market conditions for the product and even drawbacks.
Product knowledge “training” is sharing this knowledge of your product with your sales and other teams.
So, let’s start with how it helps your business.
What are the key benefits of having strong product knowledge?
How can understanding your own product get you more sales? That’s a question you should be asking if you aren’t already. Maybe I’m just adding content here for the sake of it? Or are there any true benefits?
Go through the list of benefits below and be the judge:
1. Boost Sales
This is the final outcome or end-goal that all other benefits of strong product knowledge help you achieve. Everything boils down to “more sales”. But how does that happen?
Well, if you understand your product better, you can explain its features better. Your marketing material would be better. Your competitor analysis would be better allowing you to outperform and contradict them. All of this adds up to more sales.
2. Better products (again, lead to more sales)
Product knowledge isn’t just about the positives. It also means understanding the flaws of your products.When you know what’s wrong, you can improve those aspects. Your product becomes better with each improvement leading to more sales and other benefits.
3. Increased adoption and retention rates
This is more like a by-product of all the benefits that product knowledge training has. E.g. if your products become better, and if you offer better support, you’d ofcourse retain more clients. Similarly, your adoption rates should go up as well.
4. Better customer support
Customers often run across problems and confusion. Your sales and/or support team can only help them if they’re properly educated on the product. How can you solve a problem you don’t yourself understand? Again, better customer support = more sales.
5. Confident team
A product only sells as good as the seller. Hence, enhancing your team’s product knowledge helps boost their confidence. I’m sure you know what this does, don’t you? Yes, more sales.
How to Improve Product Knowledge Training for Your Business
Let’s get down to the crux of this article then. What methods can you use to improve product knowledge training for your business?
1. Automate and digitise training
It’s 2024. No one likes to sit through workshops or physically go to specific locations anymore. Sure, those are options we can use. However, you can always use a LMS (Learning Management System) to train your employees. These are platforms that deliver learning material/courses, train, assess, create and share reports about your employees. You can use a banking LMS, finance LMS or any other LMS that fits your business to impart your product knowledge training.
Your staff can learn all about your product from anywhere they want. They get the time & location freedom and you get centralised and accurate information on the total progress.
2. Use practical/real-life experiences
Even though it’s not as comfortable or likeable as digital/online courses, it’s one of the best ways to increase product knowledge for your business. It’s also often a good way to supplement or assess your LMS training efforts once that’s done.
You can host workshops and training programs. Create real-life scenarios where your team can be exposed to a real-life problem. It can be a sales pitch, problem solving, customer support or anything else. This not only helps them discover answers and gain confidence but also offers a practice ground.
3. Bite sized but consistent learning
It’s easier to do tasks that are broken down into smaller, achievable goals. It’s simply that you can write 10 pages if you work on a single page a day. But, even the thought of doing 10 pages in the next hour seems painful, doesn’t it?
Point being, your product knowledge shouldn’t be dumped at your trainees all at once. Rather, break it down and share it with them in smaller fractions. This also has a secondary benefit of being consistent. They’re continuously fed knowledge which is better than throwing information at them one-time which they’d forget anyway.
4. Offer incentives
“Education” isn’t the most fun of activities, not usually. However, you can incentivize your staff/teams to willingly and eagerly be more knowledgeable. This may lead to better pay, more leaves, better hours or even simple chocolates. The reward doesn’t matter, the fact that there is one does! Also, displaying each employee’s progress publicly helps motivate them to maintain leaderboards and work harder to overtake others in a healthy manner as well. A study concluded that 92% of employees are willing to do the same task again or be better if their efforts are recognized.
5. Assess and evaluate
This is a reason why I listed LMS as the best way to improve product training knowledge for your business.
LMS have tests and grading systems that automatically evaluate your trainees and prepare reports for you. You can also do it manually and for non-LMS methods as well.
Point being, you need to evaluate the progress of your trainees. This helps you set goals, understand and remove bottlenecks (if any) and avoid stagnation.
Final words- How to Improve Product Knowledge Training for Your Business
By now, you probably know what product knowledge training is, its benefits and how to improve it. If you read the fine print, you also should have a neat idea how it helps your business, don’t you?
Of course, there are probably a dozen other benefits as well as ways to improve product knowledge training for your business. This wasn’t an all-inclusive guide in any way. However, if you want a fast, effective method, I’d say stick to LMS and let computers do all the heavy lifting.
