Software Product Sales Training

Uncategorized
Wishlist Share

About Course

Purpose. To turn recruits with no sales experience into certified Sales Consultants — professionals whom customers treat as trusted advisers rather than salespeople — able to sell any software product [Company Name] brings to market. The training method is fully product-agnostic; each cohort practises on a live case product (currently: Nexstock, inventory management software for multi-branch retailers).

Approach. Consultative selling, built on the SMART Sales System / building-blocks method (Michael Halper) and supported by SPIN questioning, active listening and value-based selling. The consultant leads with the prospect’s problems, asks before asserting, introduces the product only after pain is confirmed, and walks away honestly from poor fits.

Format. Intensive 2–4 week programme, delivered online through the company LMS with daily live sessions, in-person labs and Accra-based field work. Every module mixes theory (curated videos and written lessons), practice (workshops, recordings and role-play labs) and project work (real field research and supervised live outreach). Modules unlock in sequence; each must be passed before the next opens.

The Journey at a Glance

Module

Days

Focus

Key output

0 — The Consultant’s Mindset

1–2

Product selling vs consultative selling; guardedness and trust; rejection and buoyancy; the Consultant’s Creed

Mindset Manifesto + Creed

1 — Understanding What You Sell

3–4

How software businesses make money; features → benefits (“so what?” ladder); the Product Brief; honest limits

Building Blocks 1–2 (product; what makes it different)

2 — Knowing the Buyer

5–7

Best-fit customer; the faces inside the business; value and pain at three levels (work / money / life); field research with real Accra retailers

Building Blocks 3–5 + Field Report

3 — The Consultative Conversation

8–10

Pain questions and current-situation questions; listening; the discovery conversation; the honest customer example; five role-play labs

Building Blocks 6–7; assessed discovery role-play

4 — Reaching Out

11–13

The five-step sales process; building the prospect list; cold calls, email and WhatsApp; follow-up rhythm; supervised live outreach to real businesses

Outreach Portfolio + live prospect tracker

5 — Meetings, Demonstrations and Objections

14–16

Problem-led demonstrations; price and proposals; answering worries (accept / redirect / resolve); asking for the decision; walking away well

Worry Playbook; assessed full meeting

Capstone — The Full Sales Cycle

Final 2–3

Complete simulated cycle vs trained role-players: cold call → discovery → demonstration, price, objections, decision — including hidden poor-fit files and one unpredicted twist per brief

Certification

Assessment and Certification

Final grade: Module grades 40% (equally weighted) · Consultant’s Portfolio 20% · Live Capstone assessment 40%.

Capstone marking (two assessors, 1–5 per criterion): consultative posture 20% · questions and listening 20% · product and value fluency 15% · honesty and fit judgement 20% · process control and the decision 15% · professional presence 10%. Pass: ≥3.0 overall, no criterion below 2, no automatic-fail event (invented facts, pressure tactics, or forcing a sale on a poor-fit brief). Distinction: ≥4.2. One coached retake permitted.

Certification means: DRC will put this person in front of a real customer, under its own name, without a chaperone. Graduates enter a structured first-thirty-days ramp (shadowing → joint meetings → independent full cycle), measured on honest activity, not revenue.

Principles That Run Through Everything

  1. Talk less about the product; learn more about the person. The product appears only after its problems do.
  2. One step at a time. Every contact has one small goal: the next step.
  3. Honesty is the strategy, not a constraint. No invented customers, no bluffed answers, no forced fits — in subscription software, only well-matched customers stay.
  4. Rejection is information. Every no is logged, learned from and left with the door open.
  5. Respect the culture. Greetings, patience, referrals and reputation carry Ghanaian business; the consultant honours all four.
  6. The academy improves every cohort. Field research, live outreach and role-plays feed a living master pain list, worry playbook and revised curriculum.
Show More

Course Content

Module 0 — The Consultant’s Mindset
Duration: Days 1–2 (approx. 10–12 learning hours) Format: Video lessons, reading, reflection exercises, discussion, practical assignment. Module Overview Welcome to the Sales Consultant Academy. Over the coming weeks you will learn to sell software not as a salesperson pushing a product, but as a consultant diagnosing a business problem. The method you are learning is fully product-agnostic: master it once and you can sell any software [Company Name] brings to market. To make the learning concrete, this cohort uses a live case product as its worked example throughout — Nexstock, an inventory management software for multi-branch retailers. Wherever Nexstock appears in this course, read it as an illustration of the method applied to a product, not the product you will be limited to selling. This first module contains no scripts, no product training and no sales techniques. That is deliberate. Technique built on the wrong mindset produces a pushy salesperson with better vocabulary. Mindset built correctly makes every technique that follows feel natural. By the end of this module you should be able to explain — in your own words, with conviction — why talking less about the product you sell will help you sell more of it. Learning outcomes. By the end of Module 0 you will be able to: 1. Explain the difference between product selling and consultative selling, and why the former triggers buyer resistance. 2. Describe the psychology of “guardedness” — why prospects deflect salespeople — and how a consultative posture lowers it. 3. Describe the identity of a Sales Consultant: like a good doctor, someone whose first job is to understand the problem, and whose second job is to help. 4. Reframe rejection and objections as information rather than personal failure. 5. Commit to a personal “consultant’s creed” that will anchor your behaviour throughout the programme and on the job.

  • Everyone Sells, and Selling Is Not What You Think
    01:18:32
  • How to Sell Software to Businesses
    18:27
  • Product Selling vs Consultative Selling: The Core Shift
    18:27
  • What is Consultative Selling?
    00:00
  • The Psychology of Guardedness and Trust
    42:28
  • Rejection, Objections and the Consultant’s Emotional Core
  • Your Consultant’s Creed

Module 1: Understanding What You Sell
A consultant who does not truly understand their product cannot be trusted. But a consultant who only understands their product — and nothing about the customer — is just a product-seller with a nicer title. This module builds the first half of that equation properly. You will learn how software businesses actually make money, why that changes what you are really selling, how to climb from features to benefits without falling into feature-dumping, and how to assemble the first two building blocks of your sales message: product details and what makes it different from the alternatives. As always, the method works for any product. The worked example throughout is our current case product — Nexstock, an inventory management software for multi-branch retailers — and your project assignments apply the method to it. When [Company Name] assigns you a different product, you will repeat this exact process in a fraction of the time. Learning outcomes. By the end of Module 1 you will be able to: 1. Explain the SaaS/subscription business model and what “selling a subscription” means for the customer relationship. 2. Tell the difference between features, advantages and benefits, and turn any feature into a benefit using the “so what?” ladder. 3. Produce a complete Product Brief for a software product: what it is, what it includes, how it differs, what it costs, and what it does not do. 4. Deliver a clear, jargon-free explanation of a software product to three very different listeners. 5. Complete Building Blocks 1 and 2 (the product’s features, and what makes it different) for the case product.

Module 2: Knowing the Buyer
In Module 1 you learned the product. Now you learn the person who might buy it — which matters more. A consultant with average product knowledge and deep buyer knowledge will outsell the reverse every single time, because prospects do not care how well you know your software; they care how well you understand their business. This module answers four questions in order: Which businesses should we talk to? Which people inside those businesses? How does our product improve their world (value)? And what is hurting them right now that we can take away (pain)? Your answers become Building Blocks 3, 4 and 5 in your workbook. The module ends with the most important assignment of the whole academy so far: going out and speaking to a real business. As always, the method works for any product. The worked examples use our case product — Nexstock, inventory management software for multi-branch retailers. Learning outcomes. By the end of Module 2 you will be able to: 1. Describe a “best-fit customer” for a software product, and explain why selling to everyone means selling to no one. 2. Name the different people involved in a business purchase — the owner, the money decider, the day-to-day user, the helpful insider — and explain what each one cares about. 3. Map a product’s value at three levels: what it improves in the work (technical), what it improves in the money (business), and what it improves in someone’s personal life (personal). 4. Turn each value point into the matching pain point — the problem that exists when the product is absent. 5. Complete Building Blocks 3, 4 and 5, tested against a real business through field research.

Module 3: The Consultative Conversation
You now know the product (Module 1) and the buyer (Module 2). This module teaches the skill that makes someone a consultant rather than a talker: the ability to run a conversation built on questions and listening. The best salesperson is not the one with the smoothest pitch — it is the one who asks the best questions and truly hears the answers. You will build the last two building blocks in your workbook: your question set (pain questions and current-situation questions) and your customer example. Then you will practise — a lot. Half of this module is role-play, because conversation is a physical skill like driving: reading about it changes nothing until your mouth has done it many times. As always, the method works for any product; worked examples use the case product, Nexstock. Learning outcomes. By the end of Module 3 you will be able to: 1. Write pain questions from a pain map — one or two natural questions for every pain point. 2. Write current-situation questions that reveal how a business does things today. 3. Listen actively: stay silent, follow up on what was actually said, and summarise the other person’s words back to them accurately. 4. Read a prospect’s answers as hot, neutral or cold, and respond correctly to each. 5. Tell a short, honest customer example in under a minute. 6. Run a complete fifteen-minute discovery conversation, unscripted, from greeting to agreed next step.

Module 4: Reaching Out and the Sales Process
You can now hold an excellent consultative conversation — but only if someone is sitting across from you. This module teaches how conversations begin: how to organise your selling into a simple step-by-step process, build a list of the right businesses, and reach out by phone, email and WhatsApp in a way that opens doors instead of closing them. Everything you write in this module is assembled from the seven building blocks in your workbook — you are not inventing new material, you are arranging what you already built. The module ends with the academy’s first taste of the real thing: supervised live outreach to real Accra businesses. As always, the method works for any product; worked examples use the case product, Nexstock. Learning outcomes. By the end of Module 4 you will be able to: 1. Describe a simple sales process from first contact to closed deal, and name the one goal of each step. 2. Build and maintain a clean prospect list of best-fit businesses with the right contact people. 3. Assemble a consultative cold call outline from your building blocks, and handle gatekeepers and voicemail with respect. 4. Write short outreach messages — email and WhatsApp — that lead with the prospect’s problems, not our product. 5. Run a polite, persistent follow-up rhythm without becoming a pest. 6. Conduct real outreach under supervision and book a genuine discovery conversation.

Module 5: Meetings, Demonstrations and Objections
By this point a real prospect has agreed to give you thirty minutes. This module teaches what happens in that room: how to run a demonstration that shows their problems being solved rather than a tour of buttons, how to talk about price without fear, how to answer worries and doubts calmly, and how to ask for a decision the way a consultant does — as the natural next step of an honest conversation, not a trap snapping shut. As always, the method works for any product; worked examples use the case product, Nexstock. Learning outcomes. By the end of Module 5 you will be able to: 1. Prepare a demonstration around a specific prospect’s confirmed problems, using their real branches and products. 2. Run a problem-led demonstration: recap → show → check → agree, keeping the prospect talking throughout. 3. Present price after value, plainly and without apology. 4. Answer the most common worries using the three choices: accept, redirect, or resolve. 5. Ask for a decision clearly and without pressure — and accept a no with grace. 6. Recognise when walking away is the right professional outcome.

Student Ratings & Reviews

No Review Yet
No Review Yet