My first sales manager referred to it as “buried treasure,” and I’ve heard other sellers call it “the golden sales nuggets,” or the “nuances of selling.” At SAVO we refer to it as Tribal Knowledge.

In my previous career in sales I was a user of many leading CRM applications in addition to a homegrown solution I helped my IT organization develop. There’s no doubt that CRM can drive significant value to the organization as a whole when implemented successfully, however when I was in sales you’d never hear me admit it.

When I sat down to write this piece I thought about doing something along the lines of why B2B organizations should be embracing social media. This is something I believe strongly in as the social media guy here at SAVO. However this topic has been touched on quite a bit lately, and there are great blogs out there already like Mashable that can give some good insights on this topic

A recent McKinsey Quarterly interview with Cisco CEO John Chambers resonated with themes I’ve been hearing from thought-leaders within the SAVO customer base. In the interview Chambers, the ultimate ‘top-down command-and-control’ leader, describes Cisco’s transformation from a traditional model of decision-making to a collaboration-based, ‘human-network’ driven style of decision making that he coins ‘The Innovation Business Model.”

Even the most top-down, buttoned-up organizations are harnessing Tribal Knowledge from the field. Check out how this article from the New York Times about how U.S. Army is using the Tribal Knowledge of its 140,000 members of the Army’s online forums to re-write its field manuals.