My first sales manager referred to it as “buried treasure,” and I’ve heard other sellers call it “the golden sales nuggets,” or the “nuances of selling.” At SAVO we refer to it as Tribal Knowledge.  Tribal Knowledge is comprised of the stories, anecdotes, and sound bites that are critical to a seller’s ability to gain credibility and yet are typically not formally captured anywhere.  Tribal Knowledge tends not to live in documents and is best shared in a forum that encourages feedback, collaboration, and refinement.  In order to understand why tribal knowledge is so important, we must first define where it lives and what it is within the context of sales and then explore at a high level what the costs of failing to capture and institutionalize it really are.

 

One of the challenges for the front line seller is that, unlike presentations, product brochures or other marketing collateral, tribal knowledge doesn’t live on the typical sales portal. The typical sales portal is limited to formalized collateral only and is generally centrally administered.  Tribal knowledge, on the other hand, is far more dynamic and timely.  It is often traded in the black market of content creation or in emails, and it is decentralized by nature. Unfortunately, at most organizations, access to it is highly dependent on each seller’s ability to build a personal network of product managers, industry experts, technical gurus, top sales reps, executives, marketers or other subject matter experts. 
 

Tribal Knowledge also manifests itself in many ways within a sales organization.  While individual examples of tribal knowledge can be dismissed as trivial - “Oh that’s just a little customer story I like to tell” - in aggregate we’ve found that these insights and sound bites are often the most popular and highly regarded sales assets for our customers.  For example, at the top of every seller’s wish list is a desire for more case studies, but digging deeper, we find that what sellers often want isn’t the formalized, glossy ROI case study that takes marketing 6 months to create. Instead, it’s the five to ten sentences, the credible “sound bite,” or story that the seller can tell when a customer asks, “So what are you doing with XYZ Company?” This is the type of information that rarely lives in a document and requires a more collaborative platform to share, update and improve the customer story. The second item on the seller wish list is typically timely and better access to competitive intelligence.  Invariably pockets of subject matter experts in the organization know a great deal about competitors, but few front line sellers can tap into that Tribal Knowledge. 

Another common example of tribal knowledge comes in the form of objection handling.  As new objections crop up in 2009, many organizations are finding that is critical to have a strategy for sales and marketing to gain visibility into and collaborate about the best way to handle these objections. This is not only valuable for outside sales teams, but also inside sales teams who, because they sell over the phone, have the least time to respond and margin for error. Here are some other examples of the types of Tribal Knowledge that have been especially game changing for our customers:

While every seller knows that without these stories and sound bites they cannot be effective, many organizations have not thought through the costs of doing nothing to address the demand. Instead, the buried treasure remains buried for all but the most tenured reps.  Fortunately, an increasing number of organizations and analysts have started to quantify the costs; however, it isn’t hard to extrapolate a few of the most glaring costs are:

When all of us think about the wise people we know, we would never think of someone who gave us canned and regurgitated advice. Instead, we think of someone who listens, empathizes and tells us about what they have learned in their own life. They share their Tribal Knowledge.  For companies that want their sellers to be trusted advisors, solution sellers, the quintessential Sherpa leading their customer up the mountain, they must find a better means to capture, institutionalize and collaborate about Tribal Knowledge.