137 Product Mastery: The Key to Sales Productivity (with Frank Cottle)
“Problem solvers are the ones who keep the clients, not good salesmen.”
Frank Cottle is the Founder and CEO of the Alliance Group of Companies, and an experienced speaker, strategist, entrepreneur, advisor, business leader and investor. His primary areas of expertise include integrating flexible workspace models to assist with corporate real estate repositioning, investment banking, finance, workplace technology, and business leadership.
In this episode, we talk about:
How to identify new markets
Disruptive innovations
What sales look like today
Outdated perspective on sales
The importance of having fun
Learning to sell vs. Learning your product
Sustainability of co-working spaces business
To learn more, listen to the full episode!
On the benefits of co-working spaces
The capacity to give people flexibility is elemental to the success of all businesses in the future and in the past as well.
Think of how many businesses struggle because of their fixed liabilities — we’ve solved that problem for businesses.
Business-people have fun
When you have a product that you think is going to change things and benefit people, just have fun. Nothing is more important to me than building my company and that to me is ‘fun’. And I think if you’re passionate about what you do, then you don’t have to be the world’s greatest salesman, you just have to have a tremendous amount of product knowledge, and I think that’s generally what’s missing with a lot of sales people.
They think they know how to sell, but they really don’t understand the customers’ needs and the product that they’re trying to sell.
Don’t learn to sell, learn your product and be consultative
You shouldn’t learn how to sell ‘consultatively’; you should learn your product and then be consultative, and there’s a big difference between the two. One teaches you to ‘fake it ‘til you make it’, and the other teaches you to be an expert.
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