how can you know as much as we do?

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”

Henry David Thoreau

I do not care how much experience you have or how much experience, and institutional knowledge, your business has, at some point if you are going to try and provide a service to another company they will say something like: “you cannot know as much about our business as we do, how can you be better at our sales efforts <or whatever you are attempting to help improve>?”

Here is the truth. We can’t know as much you do.

Here is another truth. We can be better at something you do, than you.

How can that be? Well. Two things (focused on sales just to make the point):

– We know sales engineering.

This means we know how to delve into decision maker buying processes, assess attitudes & behaviors and have a wealth of expertise with regard to ‘nudging’ a decision maker toward a sales meeting & decision. A company could spend pages describing a sales engineering methodology, but why? Why not simply say “by month two you will have about 8 confirmed quality sales meetings.” Or whatever specific need outcome you have we can deliver.

We may not know as much about your business as you do today but this we know. This means rather than talk about experience, we can talk about outcomes. But. It is what we know, and our experience, that permits us to talk this way.

– We remember everything we learn in the process and never go by ‘gut.’

What most tenured experienced business people have at their fingertips is gut & feel based on all their experience. It is invaluable. And it is also sometimes untrustworthy. Please note the ‘sometimes.’

We say that because sales engineering in the development phase should eliminate sometimes and insert certainty <or as close to certainty as possible>. The business truth is that ‘feel & gut’ should be incorporated into the final sales presentation and not sales engineering.

Which leads me to say almost every business methodology, or practice, is built upon remembering everything we have learned and applying it, and reapplying it with new learnings, to strengthen response to certain cues and different decision maker characteristics. Basically good methodologies are machine learning well implemented by people.

Now.

The truth is that almost any good methodology has a behavioral aspect. No business likes to claim something isn’t unique or proprietary but most sales efforts are grounded in a learning program model called Super-Memo and was developed by the Polish researcher Piotr Woźniak.

I say that because almost all success in sales engineering is based on insuring that everyone remembers everything they learn, and apply it properly, as well as insuring the DECISION MAKER remembers everything they have learned about your product or service.

Which leads me to a basic premise anyone who claims to know their shit about any replicable methodology knows – long-term memory has two components: retrievability and stability.

Retrievability determines how easily we remember something and is dependent upon how near the surface of our consciousness the information lingers.

Stability has to do with how deeply information is anchored in our brains.

All memories are different. Some memories have a high level of stability, but a low level of retrievability. For example, try to recall one of your old phone numbers and you probably won’t be able to, but, if you see the number in front of you, you will recognize it immediately. Even if you learn something and memorize it without practice over time it will become increasingly difficult to remember. The amount of time it takes for you to forget it completely can be calculated, and ideally you should be reminded of the word precisely when you are in the process of forgetting it.

In addition, the more often you are reminded of the word, the longer you will remember it for.

All that to say most business decision makers have multiple tasks and multiple things on their mind and it is difficult to assume they will be able to retrieve whatever information you may have given the last time you shared information. In addition, anchoring information in a decision maker’s memory is a process.

Now. All of that, or much of that, could sound a bit esoteric when all you asked was :how can you know as much as we do?”. Its important stuff because we are in the business of doing business so that your business succeeds. And the lifeblood of any success is knowledge and using it well in a relevant way.

Which is where I say here is what we can say in the end about ‘how can you know as much as we do about our business.”

If a business provides a service to another business what matters is that we not only learn your business, we learn the decision makers business, the business itself, and then have a system and methodology in place to insure we remember the business at hand as well as make sure the business decision maker remembers everything they should have learned and use it in the interest OF the business in an ongoing way.

Suffice it to say most effective business isn’t about what you know it is what is remembered APPLIED against what you may know in the existing context of what you know. In order to create movement, progress, velocity, scale – whatever word you choose – you have to be sure everyone knows what they are supposed to know <remember> so you do not have to recreate the wheel and basic value is steady so it offers some traction for the growth and improvement.

In the end. No other business can know what you know, but they can know how to make what you know work better and be more successful.