Generative AI and sustainability both play a crucial role in the future of chemical product portfolios.
Technical Sales
April 2, 2024
That’s because sales representatives in technical industries face an ongoing challenge: accessing and synthesizing hyper-specialized product information that best meets a customer’s ever-evolving needs.
One day, a customer may need safety and quality information to evaluate compliance with regulatory requirements. On another, a customer may need technical support to troubleshoot application issues. On still another, the customer may need help investigating the application of alternate raw materials due to cost constraints, supply chain issues, or environmental concerns.
Whatever the request, technical sales reps are responsible for growing and maintaining excellent customer relationships built on their technical understanding of their organization’s complete product portfolio.
Typically, this technical sales process involves reps endlessly searching through documents, spreadsheets, product databases, and other unstructured company data for the right solution for each customer’s goal or detailed specifications.
It also often means having your company’s valuable subject matter experts answering the same time-consuming questions from hundreds of reps all day long. With these manual processes, technical sales reps are limited in their ability to scale the impact of their client services.
There’s a better way.
When it comes time to answer a technical service question, find the right product, or compare alternative options for customers, sales teams need a way to obtain and reallocate this expertise, fast.
Here’s what it takes to 10x your technical sales process.
Companies that operate in highly technical fields like chemical manufacturing offer hundreds to thousands of products — each one with individualized details and applications.
In-depth product training for new sales reps in those fields often takes 6-10 months. A deep, nuanced understanding of the products and industries can take years.
Whether you’re training a new sales rep or you already have a team of seasoned sales professionals, all of them require a thorough technical understanding of your products, competitive landscape, and industry trends if they’re to close the sale.
Given the complex, technical nature of advanced manufacturing product portfolios, technical sales reps rely on subject matter experts (SMEs) within the technical services organization for industry-specific questions, and for good reason.
Sales representatives can generate up to 65% more revenue when supported by two or more product experts.
Despite the clear ROI of expert-led support, there are often real-world obstacles to the traditional use of SMEs in the technical sales process.
Even with open-door access to subject matter experts, relying on employee communication for technical questions and conflict resolution is a major time suck. As it stands, the average employee spends up to 50% of their work hours on communication. The more complex the work environment, the more communication power teams must leverage to obtain cross-department answers.
Plus, with so many experts retiring and resigning, companies face a risk of drastically losing valuable expert knowledge, leaving sales reps in a never-ending search for answers and relying on second-hand information.
In the advanced manufacturing space, sales reps ability to access SME or expert knowledge is an essential component of the sales process.
In the advanced manufacturing value chain, closing deals is more nuanced than the typical sales funnel.
To successfully 10x their sales, Technical Sales reps must:
The ability to leverage technical expertise is at the core of each of these responsibilities. This holds true wherever the sales rep sits in the advanced manufacturing value chain, whether raw material producer or the ultimate end user of the product. No matter where in the value chain their organization falls, it can be challenging for new reps and seasoned reps to leverage new ways to increase sales velocity.
Sales teams need new processes that empower them with the knowledge needed to help their customers find the best solution to their problems.
That leads us to the third step to 10x your technical sales, combining these strategies with a tech stack that amplifies impact.
Several solutions are available to support the technical sales team. Some are more versatile than others.
Like traditional sales reps, technical sales reps need an easy-to-use repository of real-time product information for their organization’s product portfolio. Where traditional sales reps may use a Sales Content Management Solution, the nature of technical sales is often more complex, resulting in a mix of ad hoc expert insights, internal file storage solutions, and external product catalogs.
A single, comprehensive repository for technical specifications, product information, and sales enablement materials spanning an organization’s complete product portfolio is essential to driving 10x sales goals.
Generative AI offers many use cases for sales teams. According to the World Economic Forum, AI has the potential to increase gross domestic product in manufacturing by 2% every year.
As of now, sales professionals can use GenAI when they need to pull from open-source datasets. But this information tends to be general and doesn’t give reps insights for applying that knowledge to their companies and situations.
Technical sales teams might also build custom solutions with generative AI to suggest products or services that suit customer needs. While this can be helpful, these custom AI systems are often time-consuming and expensive.
Technical sales reps can’t 10x their efforts by doing what they always have. GenAI has unlocked new potential, but GenAI alone won’t work in complex industrial or advanced manufacturing industries.
Technical sales reps need a solution that combines GenAI with a comprehensive compilation of product data, expert insights, sales enablement materials, competitive benchmarking, and more. Combining GenAI with this single source of truth will then unlock revolutionary solutions that replace manual data compilation and analysis like product recommendations and product comparisons.
Nesh, the only technical Sales AI platform for advanced manufacturing, leverages your enterprise product data and expert knowledge with its AI toolkit and industry domain expertise, to help your sales reps solve the core problems we’ve addressed in this article:
Nesh’s revolutionary Sales AI is ready to help 10x your technical sales and accelerate deal cycles with intelligent solutions that will redefine your sales process. Take these two routine technical sales activities:
Advanced manufacturing companies often have north of a thousand products in their portfolio, making it nearly impossible for every sales rep to be knowledgeable on every product. These organizations also make and release new products each year, requiring sales reps to learn and understand a never-ending cycle of new products.
Often, product recommendation requests from customers require sales reps to locate fragments of product information, sift through the results, and generate analyses.
With Nesh Sales AI, technical sales reps simply type in their customers’ technical specifications and receive the most relevant product suggestions. They skip the cumbersome step of manual product data compilation and instead, focus on strategic analysis and recommendations that matter to their customer. Sales reps broaden their product knowledge and better leverage their organization’s complete product portfolio.
After a technical salesperson has found a product or multiple products to recommend, Nesh enables them to compare important features such as strengths and weaknesses for a specific customer use case or need.
More importantly, sales reps can quickly compare or benchmark the company’s product against a competitor’s alternative option. Robust comparison data, product knowledge, and strategic analysis help sales reps strengthen their customer discussions, build customer trust, accelerate deal velocity — and ultimately 10x their sales process.
Sales teams in advanced manufacturing and other complex industries need a technical sales process that delivers value to their customers without burdensome processes that waste time. With limited subject matter expert availability in a rapidly changing value chain, scrambling for technical product expertise captured in unorganized enterprise documents or product data is no longer sufficient.
Nesh is the AI-powered solution for technical sales teams of the future. It’s the GenAI-powered team member that unlocks your competitive advantage and helps you 10x your sales.
Ready to 10x your technical sales? The 10x technical sales reps use Nesh Sales AI to:
To learn what Nesh can do for your technical sales process, connect with our experts for a free demo.
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