It took me a while to be comfortable being called a sales and service expert. And in the last month of conferences and events, I heard a lot of professionals struggle with the same thing. How about you? Are you an expert in your field?
An expert is defined as “Someone who is very skillful or highly trained and informed in some special field.” And there are different types of experts as you can read in the whitepaper from the National Speaker’s Association. The great news is most professionals DO qualify as an expert.
To help us claim our expertise, following are several questions to help you embrace your expert status: 
- How much more do you know about the topic than most of the people you are in contact with?
- In what ways are you developing your knowledge and skill on an ongoing basis?
- Do people seek out your advice on the subject matter? And, do they pay you for that advice?
- How do you educate others about your industry or products/services?
- In what ways do you translate your knowledge into useful solutions of your product or service to the user?
- What types of acknowledgement have you received for work? From clients, your company or industry?
- What ethics and values do you exhibit in your daily interactions?
Your answers to these questions will help clarify your type of expertise.
As sales professionals, we should be an expert in what we represent. I truly believe that sales is an education profession. Not only do we need to be skilled with communication and relationship building, we need to be able to educate others on what our solution can do FOR them. The hard part is that we need to do this without lecturing and instead find ways to collaborate and explore with the prospect/buyer.
A caveat in with claiming our expertise…
Never become so much of an expert that you stop gaining expertise. View life as a continuous learning experience. Denis Waitley
Well said Denis, expertise is an ongoing endeavor especially in today’s information highway. Yet our expertise today is helpful to someone. We need to make sure we are finding and selling with those someones, otherwise our expertise doesn’t help anyone.
What do you think? How can we effectively use our expertise to sell and serve in our markets?
