When we are called into a company to audit their selling capabilities, among many other things we look closely at knowledge management. We hope to see a real “system,” but more often than not, we don’t.

One large company we worked with had what Joe referred to as a sales information portal. It was nothing more than a digital filing cabinet containing any and all documents relating to the keywords “sales” and “selling.” Although they (the marketing team) were proud of the amount of competitive data they had accumulated, there was very little that a salesperson could use to help them strategize on how to win a deal.

The best potential source of that information would have been the sales team itself, but they weren’t interested in investing their time contributing to that knowledge base because they didn’t see any usable outputs. It’s a viscious circle we have seen again and again.

However bad things are with respect to sales knowledge management in large companies, in smaller companies the situation is considerably worse. There are a number of reasons for that, but the most troubling is that the hiring authorities believe that they can hire sales people that can be successful without “that kind of support.”