Knowledge is power
Right? We’ve heard it our whole lives.
We strive every day (especially this decade) to consume every single thing that comes across our phone, Fitbit, laptop, tv, tablet, billboards, chalk drawings on the sidewalk, whatever is throwing information at us, we skim, store, and move on — and still don’t have enough time in the day to consume everything.
In fact, we have to specialize — meaning, we start to consume the information that is most important to us, be it tech news, news about our industry, politics, religion, culture, whatever.
A great term that is being passed around by various media and analysts are the words “Tribal Knowledge.” It makes perfect sense in the world of sales — how one person “knows” an industry or solution for a vertical and then when another member of the “tribe” needs help, they approach the knowledge holder and gains that knowledge. Sadly, many times the information needed is when that knowledge holder is on vacation, doesn’t have time, misses the message, and so on. It’s unfortunate that there is no clear way to share successful campaigns immediately with fellow team members.
But, there always is the sales leaders “Win!” email that says “Congratulations to Francine who just got us a $400K deal with Acme.” And that’s pretty much it. Not the “how.”
But, if a sales rep has the time, they will contact Francine and ask her what she used, what she did, etc. so they can copy it and use for themselves. If only we all had that kind of time.
Recently, one of our founders was giving a pitch to some investors and brought this very concept up to them — that “the context in what was successful in the past” is kept with each individual and not shared out to the team.
No, we don’t believe that the information is kept out of malice or unwillingness to share — it’s because no one has the time to share — except for that one time a year where the whole “tribe” gets together and is trained over a few short days — commonly referred to as the “annual sales meeting.” Unfortunately, many of those sales meetings are exactly as described, they are training of sales reps by sales and marketing leaders — rarely sales professionals teaching other sales professionals what is/was successful.
And that’s where Illumineto comes into play. Because our product was built by sales professionals for sales professionals, we built the product with teams (or tribes) in mind.
We knew that there was an inherent flaw in the majority of sales teams throughout the world — and that was the “individual knowledge” was extremely hard to share and be acted upon by others in the tribe.
And that’s where teams comes into play with Illumineto’s Spark product. If you are using Spark and have already set up a team, then you already understand and are experiencing the “tribal knowledge” that is being shared.
Why not share your successful pages and share that content that helped you win the deal? We’re sure fellow team members will be appreciative, as well as you being appreciative to discover a successful campaign used by a fellow team member.
It’s easy to do, but, if you need more help, we have video’s on how to set one up, we have FAQ’s, and we have our in-product help-line (that little blue circle in the lower right of Spark).
Start building the tribal knowledge in your organization by setting up your teams in Spark — success breeds success.
