YOU TALKIN TO SME?

How much information can your brain hold? Albert Einstein believed that the mind had a finite amount of memory. Have you ever seen a picture of Einstein? He is always wearing a white shirt, black pants and either a sweater or black jacket. How do I know this? That is all Albert Einstein ever wore! Because he thought the mind was limited in the amount of information it could hold, anything that he could do to eliminate taking up storage space he did, so all he had was white shirts, black pants, black jackets, and sweaters.

Today we know better, we don’t know exactly how much information the mind can hold, but we do know that we have never hit the limits yet. This causes another problem, how do we get all this information into the mind? All the bits and bytes, letters, numbers, words, and pictures need to be read, listened to, watched, or seen to be locked into our mind. So what’s the problem? TIME! To get unlimited information into your mind you will need unlimited time.

So what can we do to get the information needed to make a sale to the customer without taking all the time necessary to get it into our minds? We can use other people’s minds and knowledge. We are already doing this when we call a technical support line. No one person can know everything so we use the combined knowledge of many people to solve problems and disseminate information.

Now let’s take this thinking to the sales field. When you are in front of a customer, you can definitely pick up the phone and call a service center to get information, but the question now becomes, what is the quality of the information you are getting. We have all had the experience with a call center where we received less than excellent information and a lot less than excellent service. Both are unacceptable when you are in front of a customer.

Here we are in front of the customer and our choice is to not have an answer or call someone that may or may not help us make the sale. What’s a rep to do? BE PREPARED! No matter what you sell, a product or a service you need to have a SME available to you. NO NO NO not a little blue person, that’s a Smurf, I said a SME. A SME is a Subject Matter Expert. This is a person that is full proficient in a given subject. It may be about one particular product, a group of related products, or an entire product line. This is a person that you have confidence in. Someone you trust to help you answer the questions and make the sales.

Some SME’s are official, and have the actual designation of Subject Matter Expert, however in the majority of cases, the SME is simply someone who has already had all the problems, has already muddled through and found the solutions, has done his or her homework, and just knows more about the service or product than anyone else in the company.

I have seen SME’s that were on production lines that had no idea how to sell but helped top reps make sales every day. I have seen SME’s in purchasing roles, sourcing roles, and believe it or not I have seen SME’s that have been in management roles… YES… managers that knew more about something than anyone else… OK… JUST KIDDING!!! (The blog was just put on the banned list in thousands of companies worldwideJ)

How do you find a SME? Start asking around your place of business. Find out who compliance, finance, safety, shipping, and other reps go to for information about the service or product. That is your SME!

If YOU AIN’T TALKIN TO SME, you ain’t talkin to the right person.

Lorin