Sales people are Just In Time Learners

Chuck Carey, CEO of compendian.com left a great comment on Gerhard Gschwandtner’s (@gerhard20) post ‘Is Sales Enablement just lipstick on a knowledge management pig?’ on July 31, 2009:

“[…] a lot of organizations today […] are attempting to in some way capture and deliver information to their people. They may use SharePoint or Groove or other methods of doing so, most of these solutions are not easy to use and don’t provide a very good search engine to allow the person to get what they want.

I believe that sales people are what I call ‘Just in time learners’, in other words they learn what they need to know when they need to know it. If you put them through sales or product training they lose what they learned quickly, unless they can use it and reeinforce it. That is why organizations are attempting to provide information in a way that sales people need it. So the delivery of Just in time Knowledge makes sense to me.

Most sales people are overwhelmed with too much information. So, if they could get the specific information they need, the way they need it, when they need it, it would help them move the sale along. Plus if sales people can tap into knowledge that has been gained from similar experiences that would be of value as well. The problem has been, as you identified, capturing that knowledge from people who have it. That is why people need to be trained with the right questions to ask so they can be transcribed in a way that will provide value to others. […]”