Prepare: Master Your Products and Build a Sales Resource Library

Sayings:

I originally set out to write about value investing, but a follower asked me to cover sales techniques instead. So I’ll share some practical insights from my own sales experience.

I’m not sure how other people get started in sales, but I prefer to plan before I act—in other words, do your homework before taking the next step. In sales, the highest-priority task is getting to know your product inside and out.

There are plenty of reasons to master your product: you need to sound professional, answer customers’ questions, keep the conversation flowing, steer it back to the product, and use your familiarity to recommend exactly what fits each buyer’s needs and close the deal.

You could list endless justifications, but the most important reason isn’t any of those surface-level points—anyone can handle that by reading the manual. What I really want you to do is build your own personal sales product library.

Find products you genuinely like, then categorize them, summarize their strengths, get thoroughly familiar with them, and repeatedly confirm that they’re truly good.

When I first joined my current company—a firm that sells WeChat Official Account ad space—there was a huge catalog of accounts, but I barely knew them myself. I didn’t know their follower ratios or actual read counts, and that’s a fatal flaw.

If you recommend an account to a client for the first time at an 80,000 RMB price point with 40,000 reads, and the client carefully reviews recent posts only to see reads of 10,000 to 20,000, they might tell you the account isn’t worth that price. They might say it again the second time. But what about the third? Wouldn’t they start to suspect you think they’re an easy mark and are trying to rip them off?

Building familiarity with your product and establishing expertise are among the most direct ways to earn customer trust.

Many sales trainings stop once the rep can smoothly answer product questions, but that’s only the first step. The real goal is helping salespeople build their own personal product library.

Every salesperson naturally gravitates toward one or a few products they like and unconsciously makes those their top recommendations. You might as well turn that instinct into a deliberate habit and develop your own method for presenting products.

Because in my view, all sales is persuasion—shifting the customer’s perception so the deal gets closed.

When you find products you genuinely like and refine a way to introduce them, it becomes much easier to convince yourself first. And once you’ve sold yourself, selling to customers comes more naturally.

As one influential figure put it, customers often don’t even know what they truly want. Your job is to tell them what they need, not just hand them whatever they ask for. You have to use your own framing to guide them and reshape their thinking so they believe the product you’re highlighting is exactly what they need. In that process, only products you genuinely love—and arguments that can persuade you—have a realistic shot at persuading the customer.

The more products you throw at a customer, the more likely they are to suffer decision paralysis. When you’re building your product library and picking the ones you like, you’ve already been comparing them against alternatives. That’s why you favor one over the others for recommendation. So by the time you’ve thoroughly familiarized yourself with your product catalog and rebuilt your personal library, you’ve actually completed your first sale: selling the product to yourself.

Then, when you finally face the customer, all you need to do is retell the process of how you convinced yourself—how you chose your favorite product after comparing it to others. Whatever “principles” people talk about are already baked into that process; there’s no need to force them.

If you can’t convince yourself, you’ll never convince a customer.

Clients don’t want a product manual. They want a reason to buy—and you’re the one who gives it to them.

I want to show you how beautiful my remaining years can be.

If you’re in sales, you must build your own product library. Every new salesperson needs something to build customer trust, and getting deeply familiar with your product—boosting your expertise—is the simplest, most direct way to do it.

Customers need a reason to buy. So give them the same reason that convinced you.

++++I’m currently unemployed, which probably doesn’t help public order.

My blog: Hello World | I Want to Talk to You

My WeChat: lixuehanoffice