The employees of a company should be as familiar with the workings of that company’s product as possible.
That’s especially important in SaaS companies. Software products are often very complex, and knowing every detail about them can make or break their success in the market.
So, product knowledge is essential, and you should have a system for sharing it with your employees.
In other words, you should have product knowledge training.
Are you curious about it? You’re in luck because, in this article, we’ll provide you with everything you should know about it.
Let’s start!
What Is Product Knowledge Training
There is a simple way in which each employee of your company can contribute to the success of its products.
How? By having an in-depth understanding of those products.
Before we dive into how to achieve that level of knowledge, let’s define what product knowledge is. Deb Mukherjee, a SaaS marketing expert, explains it like this:
It sounds simple enough, but don’t let that deceive you into thinking that all-encompassing, comprehensive product knowledge is easy to obtain.
That’s where product knowledge training comes in.
As you might assume, product knowledge training is a way to provide product knowledge to employees, as knowledge management specialist Brayn Wills puts it.
Product knowledge training is designed to impart in-depth product knowledge to employees across departments.
In other words, product knowledge training helps employees better understand the product so that they can use that insight for the benefit of the company and the customers.
For instance, with product knowledge training, employees can learn about the following:
- Product features
- Use cases
- Prices
- Troubleshooting
- Frequently asked questions
- Competitors
And that’s only some of the topics that product knowledge training covers.
The amount of product information employees get during training is considerable, but that’s necessary if they want to become product experts.
That way, there’s hardly a situation that can catch them unprepared.
For example, thanks to product knowledge training, Spotify’s customer support team can quickly answer any questions from the customers and explain all the details about their streaming platform.
As you can see, product knowledge can undoubtedly come in handy.
Of course, customer support is only one of many departments that need to have excellent product knowledge.
Let’s dive deeper into the reasons why product knowledge training is essential across the board.
Why Is Product Knowledge Training Important
As we’ve established in the previous section, product knowledge training teaches employees about the product.
As simple as that might sound, it significantly affects everyone involved in the business process, from employees to customers.
When employees have a thorough knowledge of the product, they are empowered to do their job well, regardless of whether they work in sales, marketing, customer support, or any other department.
However, those three teams we’ve just mentioned should be the center of product knowledge training because they regularly interact with customers.
And that’s a crucial factor because, in the interaction with the customers, those teams directly shape customer experience (CX).
Here’s how Hotjar’s team defines CX:
In other words, every interaction the customer has with your business impacts their experience.
Having employees in customer-facing teams who know everything there is to know about the product can significantly improve that experience.
And according to research by Salesforce, 80% of customers consider the experience as crucial as the product or service itself.
Therefore, product knowledge training is a way to provide employees with the necessary tools to fulfill one of the most important customers’ needs—the need for a great customer experience.
Educated employees can better market the product, sell it, and support customers who have it.
As a result, you have more satisfied customers and a successful product that stands out among its competitors.
Which Teams Need Product Knowledge Training
While every employee should have at least some basic knowledge about the company’s product, for some teams, product knowledge training is not only nice to have—it’s a must-have.
Those teams work with existing and prospective customers every day, so they should know the product in detail.
Let’s start with the first one of those teams.
The Marketing Team
Even if you have the best product in the industry, customers usually won’t come to you automatically.
You need to present the product in the best possible light, and that’s the task of the marketing team.
Therefore, the marketing team should have extensive product knowledge to highlight all the best features, unique benefits, and the value of your product.
Among other things, with quality product knowledge training, they will learn:
- In-depth details about the product
- How the product solves customer pain points
- How it stands out from its competitors
With knowledge like that, they can create effective marketing campaigns to reach the target audience and make the sales team’s job easier.
For example, one of the great ways in which the marketing team can demonstrate the product’s value is if they use it themselves.
Wistia is a video marketing platform that uses its own product for making marketing videos.
As you can see above, they have tutorials about various video-related topics and use their own platform to make, edit, and host those videos.
To be able to do that, their marketing team needs to know the product and its capabilities in detail, and comprehensive product knowledge training can ensure that.
The Sales Team
It’s very challenging to convince someone to buy a product if you don’t know much about what you’re selling.
That’s why product knowledge training is essential for the sales team.
The training gives your sales reps all the information they need about the product so they can be more efficient in selling and ensuring that they close the deal at the end.
How efficient can the training be? Let’s look at the example from a Harvard Business Review study on retail employees and the effectiveness of training them.
The data indicates that the employees who participated in product-focused training had 46% higher hourly sales on average than those who avoided training.
Although the products in the SaaS and retail industries aren’t the same, the sales teams in both of them can certainly benefit from having a deep understanding of what they sell.
In addition to basic details about the product, its features, and other information we’ve mentioned earlier, the sales team should get more specific information from the training, like:
- Use cases
- Customer success stories
- Pricing plans, discounts, and special offers
Having that knowledge in combination with the other details about the product will result in better communication with the customers and convincing them that your product is exactly what they need.
And, of course, that results in more sales, revenue, and successful business overall.
The Customer Support Team
Regardless of whether your product is a super simple or complex piece of software, there will always be users who have questions or encounter issues while using it.
The customer support team needs to be up to the task and help them, but to do that, they need detailed product knowledge training.
The reason is simple—with extensive product knowledge, the customer support team can quickly and efficiently handle any question or problem, providing outstanding customer service.
And that’s something that customers highly value.
According to the State of Global Customer Service Report by Microsoft, for nearly a third of customers, the most important part of customer service is interacting with an agent who knows a lot about the product.
Since customer support deals with all kinds of problems, glitches, and questions, product knowledge training can be especially beneficial for them.
They should learn about:
- All the product’s features
- Most common issues and how to resolve them
- Technical information about the product
- Integrations with other products
- Frequently asked questions
In short, they should know as much as possible about the product.
The result will be high customer satisfaction and retention, with a strong possibility of some free marketing in the form of happy customers publicly praising the product and the support.
To sum up, product knowledge is essential for high-quality customer support, so training should be a priority for any SaaS company.
How to Create a Product Knowledge Training Program
Now that we’ve examined what product knowledge training is, its importance, and who needs it the most, let’s turn to the task of creating it.
It’s not easy to create a quality program that contains a large amount of information, while at the same time making it accessible and useful in the long term.
However, there are practices that can help, so let’s discuss them.
Set Goals for Your Training Program
When creating a great product knowledge training program, you should have clear goals and objectives that you want to accomplish with it.
That way, your program will focus on the things that matter the most to your employees, customers, and business overall.
One of the ways to set precise goals is to make them SMART.
SMART is an acronym that stands for:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
So what can SMART goals look like when you want to create an excellent training program?
Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you want to create a training program for your employees with a 90% completion rate. That’s a specific goal.
If you want to make it measurable, you can say they’ll complete two weekly lessons.
Lessons can be around 20 minutes long, so the goal is achievable for your employees.
By making the lessons full of information about the product, you’re making it relevantto the team and the company.
Finally, the training should be completed in six weeks, which makes it a time-bound goal.
By setting goals like that, you ensure that your training program is useful and precisely targets the areas in the product knowledge you want to improve.
Create an Online Course for Your Training Program
Let’s be honest for a moment and admit that learning isn’t everyone’s favorite idea of spending time.
You can’t make every topic a fun and thrilling one, but you can make it easier for your team to learn in other ways. Creating online courses for your product knowledge training is one of them.
Online courses are as convenient as it gets when it comes to learning and training.
They can be accessed at any time, from any place, and on any computer, tablet, or smartphone with an internet connection.
They are also self-paced, so employees can decide how much time they want to devote to training in a particular session.
Another benefit of an online course is that you can use different engaging practices to motivate employees to learn.
For example, HubSpot has the HubSpot Academy, which offers many online courses on various topics.
In those courses, they use presentations, videos, quizzes, and other types of content to keep people engaged.
For instance, HubSpot Sales Software Course lessons are made up of several shorter videos.
That makes the lessons easier to consume, employees can learn something even if they don’t have hours of spare time, and the whole training process is more efficient.
To summarize, online courses are a very convenient and versatile way to organize your product knowledge training, so don’t miss out on the benefits they offer.
Build a Great Product Knowledge Base
An important part of creating your training program should be ensuring easy access to all of the information about the product.
Why?
Because no matter how educated, smart and resourceful your customer-facing teams are, they’re still human, which means that sometimes they’ll need to refresh their memory or simply double-check the information they give to the customer.
Therefore, building a detailed knowledge base can be very valuable.
It can store a virtually endless amount of product knowledge, it’s available 24/7, and employees can quickly find what they need in it.
You can build a knowledge base like that with Archbee.
It’s a product documentation tool that allows you to create and store product information for your employees easily.
You can organize documentation into categories and subcategories, insert images and videos, and everything is easily searchable.
A comprehensive resource like that is immensely helpful for employees. They can use it to learn about the product anytime and anywhere, as well as reference it while they’re working.
Evaluate the Success of Your Training Program
When you create your product knowledge training, and your customer-facing teams participate in it, the work still isn’t over.
Every company should find a way to evaluate how successful its training program is.
After all, a lot of time and effort goes into creating one, so it would be a waste not to improve it as much as possible.
A straightforward way to learn if the training program is effective is to ask the participants for feedback.
For example, you can use surveys to collect feedback. You can create your own surveys or use templates that can be found online, for instance, on the ProProfs website.
As you can see, you can combine the type of questions to get well-rounded and helpful feedback.
Once you get it, you can tweak the training program according to your employees’ needs.
Being the ones participating in the training, they can easily spot issues and weak points that the creators may have overlooked.
Also, as the product evolves and gets newer versions, product knowledge training should change to keep up.
Therefore, you should regularly evaluate the success of your training program to give the participants relevant materials and keep them in the loop.
Conclusion
As we’ve discussed in this article, product knowledge is crucial for the business success of SaaS companies.
If employees who regularly interact with customers don’t have sufficient knowledge about the product, you can’t count on great marketing, sales, or customer support.
In other words, you can’t count on the success of your product or customer satisfaction.
By creating product knowledge training, you also create the foundation for both.
