Product quizzes - Do they help or hinder your sales team?

Many of our clients ask us to help them run sales team assessment programmes that include a quiz on the teams understanding of their offering. We are regularly asked how best to write the questions for these quizzes, so we thought we would share our thoughts with everyone.

This blog item is designed to provide ideas as to how to approach the creation of a product/solution/proposition quiz that not only tests sales people knowledge but also helps drive effective sales engagement.

What is the objective of the quiz?
As with all objectives think about what is the measurable outcome of doing the test, how will this ensure your sales team can effectively position your offer, qualify an opportunity and drive it towards a successful outcome?

Too often the sole objective of the quiz is to test that the sales person has read (and maybe understood) the sales collateral. This usually results in the questions being more focussed on the content of the collateral than the value of the content itself and how you use it to drive the sale.

We would recommend that the objective of the quiz is “to ensure that the sales person understands what customer problems the offer is designed to address, the key features of the offer, what the advantages of these features are and how they address the customer need, how to qualify the opportunity, the value your solution offers the customer and how you differentiate versus the competition”

Who is your target audience?
If you take our recommendation that the quiz needs to be linked to the sales process, then you have to consider “can I have one quiz for all?” There may be specific levels of detail that you would expect specific roles to have, if this is the case make the quiz role specific.

Try to avoid asking questions that add no value to the role, this will only devalue the quiz in the eyes of the participants.

How should you structure your questions?
If you have a specific sales approach (uncover need, position offer against need, qualify offer addresses need, validate customer sees value in addressing need with your offer, negotiate to a close) then use these steps as the structure of your quiz. This will then help your sales people see the value in the content you are providing and ensure they can use the content at the right time in the sales cycle.

Any structure you use should be relevant to your stated objective. If you need to do a more technical quiz your structure could be around, existing environment, specific technology needs, what the customer must have in place, how to check solution will work, etc.

The golden rules for questions
Remember you are asking a sales person to invest their time in answering a set of questions, something they probably have no desire to do, therefore the questions must be seen to be adding value:

• All questions should be relevant and add value to the sales process for the sales team
• Avoid pure pieces of information. i.e. 87.3% of people think.....
• Focus on the impact of the information contained in the collateral / training - “If the customer has the following need xxxx, which of the features address that need....”
• Avoid ambiguity in the questions - do not have any answers which are answered “all of the above”
• Group questions together around the key feature/advantage groupings that differentiate your people and your offer and link these to customer needs
• Do not ask purely factual questions based on content somewhere in the collateral - answers should not be a test on “have you read the collateral”
• Do not feel obliged to ask 20 questions just to have the target of 20 questions, if you can only find 18 relevant questions, only have 18!
• Sales people get bored easily, keep the structure of the question simple. Also ensure the quiz does not last more than 20 minutes
• You can base questions around a customer scenario, you could even add sound and animation to explain the situation.
• If you do any form of ranking questions make it an even number - on self assessment people are most likely to go for the middle answer, so do not give them a middle option

What happens at the end of the quiz?
Have you thought about the payback to the sales rep for investing their time?

If you are positioning the quiz as a test, you can have a pass/fail, but show them where they failed and what the impact of this will be to them - what they need to improve on to ensure they can sell successfully. As an alternative to a straight pass or fail you could have target scores for each section of the quiz and show the results against a target score. This could then be translated into a RAG result.

There should be some value to the sales rep when they see the results. Consider creating some words that explains why each section is important and how best to use the available content to help drive the sale

Point the user at content that could help them improve their knowledge

Have you thought about what happens if the sales rep falls below the required standard, do they re-sit the quiz, if so how quickly, is it the same set of questions, what happens if they fail again?

Success relies on effective communications
The quiz is likely to be part of an ongoing programme associated with the product/solution/proposition. Have you positioned its role?

Communication is key at the very least you need to:

• Explain the objective of the quiz and the benefit to the sales rep
• Position what you expect the sales rep to do
• When the quiz starts / ends
• How they should prepare
• What happens if they do not do the quiz in the required time frame
• Impact of pass/fail
• Communicate with sales managers their role in the process - they will make or break the quiz as they are the people who will ensure their people take it seriously
• Explain what happens after the quiz, what are you doing with the information, how will it affect the individual sales rep
• Do not rely solely on broadcast information, include some personal communications. If you have a strict timetable, personal phone calls to the sales reps (or managers) encouraging laggards to complete the quiz are invaluable.

Do you want to know more?

Either read our Helping business drive sales document or contact either Mark Savinson or Fred Nelson and let Accredit help you create and manage your solution assessments enabling you to ensure your sales organisation is maximising the opportunities your portfolio creates.