The Ever-Illusive Tacit Knowledge

When it came time to learn how to ride a bicycle, how many of you went to Bicycle 101 before taking off on your first venture?  You can Google ‘how to ride a bicycle’ today and find lots of information but back in my day you got on the bike and rolled the dice. I doubt it is different for folks today. Even with Internet links or good advice from parents or loved ones, you don’t really know the ‘how-to’ of cycling until you get on and shove off. Once you’ve paid your dues, then and only then do you know how to ride a bicycle. It is no longer ‘explicit’ information on a written page or computer screen. What you have now is tacit knowing. You have experience.

I think the bulk of our actions during waking hours are founded on tacit knowledge. It is constantly there churning away, directing each step. But it’s not just pure memory. Tacit knowing or knowledge is often defined as ‘know-how’ versus ‘know-what’. There is a feel to this information, intuitive, something operating deeper than stored ‘explicit’ memory. And know-how comes with experience, from doing. As I mentioned in another article, the know-how that financial producers gain is typically a product of the school of hard knocks. We often pay a pretty steep price for tacit knowledge. In our industry, mastery is a fantasy without it. Any one of us can be product knowledge experts and many are. What differentiates one sales person from another when their product knowledge and sales training are the same or similar? The difference is the realm of intangibles, the ‘software’ of sales. It is the world of tacit knowing.

Companies lean heavily on explicit knowledge because it is much easier to teach than know-how. They assume you’ll come by the intangibles along the way. Perhaps for that reason, hard knowledge is valued over the ‘touchy-feely’ world of tacit knowing. Regardless, those that truly succeed and master telephone sales skills have stuck a crucial balance between the two spheres of knowing. Our customers and prospects put their trust in us and agree to long-term relationships because they are confident we know what we’re doing. That is a direct product of explicit information that makes sense to them and something deeper that feels right. This is especially true today because human beings are more aware that what feels right is equally as important as the hard information they get to help them make decision about their future.

Can tacit knowledge be taught – can this vital way of knowing the world of telephone sales be transmitted successfully from one sales person to another? Can we somehow glean ‘technique’ from those that have achieved a degree of excellence and develop those skills in a less traumatic way than the ‘hard knocks’ we are all too familiar with? I’ll explore that in my next article. This will be one of the foundational goals of a new web based learning environment that I’m developing and will launch by June of 2009. Stay tuned.