We keep hearing the comment that ‘sales should become modern’. Not now, probably for many decades now.
The definition of “Modern” is different for different companies, different industries, different regions, different people. For example, someone writing their contact details in a trusted notebook may consider a spreadsheet database of all contacts as “Modern”, whereas another company with a full-fledged CRM implementation may consider the same spreadsheet database as “Ancient”.
Knowledge is power: it is true in every industry, more so when you are on the field trying to sell a product or a service to a bunch of folks who have a problem and won’t accept anything less than a perfect solution to it.
Field sales executives use knowledge-bases to fill this gap. They read all the engineering documents, whitepapers, marketing materials, FAQs, customer testimonials, research for the product/service online, some even create their own knowledge articles such as how a particular product/service compares against a competitor, what strategy can be used to sell the product/service to a particular industry etc.,