With the proliferation of not-so-tangible services, as opposed to tangible products, in the marketplace, the knowledge salesman has come into prominence. Owing to the customised and amorphous nature of knowledge-based products and services, knowledge selling calls for a slightly different set of skills than traditional selling. To a large extent however, the basics of traditional selling apply to knowledge selling as well.

The growing proportion of services in the economy (currently 51 per cent of the Indian economy) has spawned a new breed of salesman – the knowledge salesman. The intangible nature of most services, and the fact that services selling requires a greater degree of customisation than product selling, presupposes a high level of familiarity with the service on the part of the salesman. A natural choice as salesman therefore, is the ‘technical person’, the person involved in the creation of the service. This phenomenon has been observable in the software sector for years now, with people starting their careers as programmers, and then moving on to project management and business development. This is in contrast to the practice in the old manufacturing economy, where the dividing line between manufacturing and marketing/sales is much more well-defined, and difficult to cross.

The drafting of ‘non-sales’ people into selling activity, though necessary, brings with it its own set of problems. People from a technical/production background are sometimes so wrapped up in their product or service that they tend not to look at things from the customer’s perspective. Sometimes, they are burdened with the ‘I know all about my product – I don’t need any help selling it’ attitude, indirectly revealing their complete ignorance about the customer!

Speak the customer’s language: One of the first things a knowledge salesman learns is to speak to the customer in the language he understands. An excessive use of jargon can put a prospective customer on guard, and make him wonder if the person he is talking to is all fluff and no substance. There is a fairly common and completely avoiadable tendency among people with a technical background to use abbreviations (even company-specific ones), which make little sense to the customer.

Don’t always call a spade a spade: Using cold logic on the shop floor or in strategic decision-making is one thing, but it’s not always the preferred route in making a sale. Customers have egos and customers in a buyer’s market have even bigger egos. The knowledge salesman would be better advised to say ‘Companies such as ‘X’ and ‘Y’ have been using our service and have found that it has lowered their administrative costs’, rather than ‘The reason you are having financial difficulties is that your administrative costs are too high – something our service can help you deal with.’ The customer already knows the cause behind his woes – there isn’t much to be gained by rubbing salt into his wounds.

Talking less about oneself and more about the prospect: Being from a product development background could mean that the knowledge salesman is obsessed with the qualities of his own product, and blissfully unaware about the prospect and his business. The knowledge salesman would do well to ask himself: How prepared is he with  questions, ideas and answers when he walks into the prospect's office, how much research he has done on the customer before he enters the sales presentation, and how little information he can give about himself and still effect the sale.