Many professionals posit that sales is a matter of persuasion. Others insist it’s all about building relationships. Still others encourage listening to motivational speeches guaranteed to have you jumping out of your seat in excitement.
The truth is simpler and yet, more complex. This is it: selling requires knowledge management. Knowledge is not what you know. It’s knowing what you don’t know that you should know. Managing it involves a learning curve best achieved by efficient, effective communication.

B. J. Fogg
Author B. J. Fogg writing in his new book, Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do (Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, CA, 2003) says that “When it comes to persuasion, computers not only have an advantage over traditional media. They also have six distinct advantages over human persuaders.” He goes on to cite the six areas computers dominate persuasion including two that speak directly to server sales: “managing huge volumes of data” and ability to “scale easily.”

Both of those areas of computer “persuasion” should speak to you. Servers manage huge volumes of data. And they need to be able to scale easily, according to client preference. It’s a fair bet that of all the critical tasks involved in managing a company network, the server applications in those two critical areas top the list of IT demands. Fogg’s book concentrates its ten chapters on dealing with the persuasive technology of computers, from their value as “tools, media, and social actors,” to their ability to simplify tasks, apply customization, and even reinforce target behaviors. This is knowledge management at its most functional.
Fogg’s book supports the value of knowledge management by revealing how advancement in computer technology is moving to the emotional. By that judgment, it’s a small step to internalizing the management of not only how computers work to make our lives easier, but also how they seem to display intelligence, interacting with the end-user as an intelligent life form.

Accepting that our machines are becoming more lifelike every generation (a generation in a machine’s life is much shorter, of course, than a generation in human life), it’s important now to embrace knowledge management not as product know-how, but as an awareness that understanding the human side of servers is as necessary as understanding the hardware and software inside of them. Failure to do so will lease an unforgiving world on you. A world where ignorance is not in the unknowing, it’s in the un-thinking.

Thomas J. Watson
In mid-twentieth century, Thomas J. Watson, Chairman of the Board at IBM, said this about that newfangled invention called a computer, “I think there’s a world market for about five computers.”
At that time, he was probably right. We know that his limited view of computer technology did not prevent IBM from becoming the technology giant it is today. Yet, Watson’s statement did show a mistaken assumption. Perhaps, even a lack of knowledge? As Chairman of the Board, Watson was an astute businessman. He went on to lead IBM to leadership status in the computer industry. The fallacy of his comment, which traveled through industry circles with a chuckle and not a little support, I expect, was a cause of poor knowledge management. At the time, he had no clue to the amazing things computers could, and would, do but neither did anyone else. Watson improved on his knowledge management and actively pursued a learning curve that gave him the information he needed to take IBM forward, into the emerging technical world of the latter 20th century where it became the respected brand name company it is today.

We can see, then, that knowledge management is a continuing process. We are light years beyond anything Watson could have imagined. IBM offers blade servers, rack servers, web servers, e-mail servers, storage area networks managed by specialized servers, and more. Watson’s off-hand remark is an historical anecdote in the same vein as Bill Gates’ famous prediction that “No one will ever need more than 640K of RAM.” Along with the Internet and B2B e-commerce, knowledge management as a discipline, in that long-ago world of the 20th century, was yet to be discovered.
It’s a force to be reckoned with in this century. In fact, IBM’s latest blade server, the BladeCenter JS20 containing 64-bit PowerPC chips is a testament to how clearly a company should apply knowledge management to their products and services. This new BladeCenter technology is designed to allow manufacturers to improve energy efficiency or performance. It allows a company to utilize processors that run as fast as current ones, but consume less power, or chips that use the same amount of power but run at higher clock speeds.

Watson could not have predicted such advancements back in the 1950s no matter how complete his knowledge of the industry was. But, he or others at IBM, likely imagined them. In this century, it’s all about young Einsteins and pre-employment Bill Gates’s preparing to take over the world with nanotechnology or open source programming. Regardless of their coming innovations, you know that the customer is still king and the king wants equipment that will manage large volumes of data in an easily scalable environment.
The freedom of invention those young Einsteins, young Bill Gates’s and young Linus Torvalds’s use to push the envelope to the bleeding edge, is theirs, not yours. If you would be a successful high-tech sales professional your freedom comes in learning what the Einsteins, the Gates’s and the Torvalds’s of the new millennium are up to, and managing that knowledge to your benefit.

Basically, it’s all about Communication
Let’s get to the crux of it. Knowledge management principles become apparent during the communication process. This is not news. We’ve discussed the necessity of good communication before. When you understand and accept that knowledge in and of itself is useless—unless you are a scientist locked in a lab surrounded by test tubes—then you must accept that the only way to make use of the knowledge you acquire is through effective communication—the relaying of ideas, thoughts, and information. The following blog entry from a student at SUNY Buffalo, studying Infomatics at the Graduate level (a new discipline designed to combine technology and communication, as described in Fogg’s book), shows that effective communication is a by-product of knowledge management, and it supports the fact that knowledge management is necessary for effective communication. Not a catch-22, more a connected circle, where you have a series of dots connected in a never-ending loop.

Tom Collins, author of the blog, found at http://knowledgeaforethought.blogs.com says this: “Good information design will help us notice useful information when it first comes to our attention. It will make it easier to retrieve when we need it later.” (Emphasis his). Servers could not manage (support) the company network without good information design. Knowledge management requires you to understand what that means, in order to better serve your clients. One piece of the design, the part that gets us to notice the information, is embedded in the hardware and software. The ability of the two to communicate and work nicely together, allowing us to retrieve the information, is the second part of the design. Together, they bring everything back to the basics.

Industry publications everywhere are touting this shift back to the basics. Technicians, IT managers, programmers, and executives are finally getting it when it comes to knowledge management. Without effective communication, information design is non-functional and the information it is supposed to provide is unreadable. In order for information design to work, for the server to speak to the network and also communicate with humans, knowledge management needs to be built into it. Fogg presents this reasoning in his book by showing numerous examples of the computer’s ability to compliment the user, to question the user, and to relate to the user one on one, as if an innate intelligence is at work, allowing the machine to respond as more than a mere white box. Done properly, as described by Collins above—knowledge becomes information, and information becomes noticeable and retrievable.

Connecting the Communication Dots
So far, we’ve learned that knowledge management is more than storing information in a database for later retrieval, although that is a part of it. We’ve learned that a shift back to the basics—the model employed in grade schools everywhere: begin at the beginning, proceed to the middle, move on to the end, and stop, is still a useful working model. And we’ve learned that real knowledge management is employed through communication, which requires an exchange of thoughts, whether between people or between machines. Let’s use the way digital technology has changed the very way human beings talk to each other, personally and professionally, as an example.

In this century, interacting person to person has leaped beyond Morse’s invention of the telegraph, beyond Bell’s invention of the telephone, and beyond simple e-mail applications. Now, we expect our mobile and wireless tools to integrate the communication process for us—to keep us connected on a 24/7 basis, no matter where we happen to be at any given moment; at home, at work, or in the air.
A report by Techtarget.com, in the second week of February, said that “Many IT executives, especially those whose IT spending stalled during the recent recession, are feeling the pressure to use new, feature-laded collaboration suites and to upgrade to servers that can handle ever-increasing waves of e-mail and instant messaging traffic.”

This is knowledge management taken to the next level. Who, among us, would have predicted 5 years ago that the popular teen tool, instant messaging, would flow into business space? Yet, the need to communicate in what we euphemistically call “real-time” has transcended the e-mail model and now requires that instant gratification of a reply within moments, instead of hours. E-mail was THE application in its day; free and easy, with almost instant contact ability, it became the favorite way to connect not only with clients and corporate locations in varying parts of the country or world, it became a quick and simple way to connect within company offices in the same building. Time proved, however, that e-mail was real-time communication only to the viewer, not the sender leading many business professionals to continue to rely on the phone for instantaneous contact.

Phone trees and automatic voicemail have put an end to that. The phone’s real-time function is a thing of the past. As noted above, e-mail is convenient, but not as real-time as it sometimes needs to be. Instant messaging is. The very name conveys the result: INSTANT MESSAGING. Woe be it to the salesperson who is not proficient in its use. Beyond instant messaging, one needs to be familiar with VoIP, and video conferencing.
Is it any wonder, then, that we need servers that can handle multiple applications, improved data transmission, and scalability systems that are seamless to the end user? Back and forth, give and take, from you to me, the ones and zeros fly through a broadband connection we no more think about than we think about how the light works when we flick that switch. It happens as it should happen, instantly.

Small Curve in the Road Ahead
Intel’s two new 4 Gigabit per second optical transceivers are the latest products in the storage area market. Compatible with existing 2-Gig and 1-Gig systems, these transceivers give knowledge management a short learning curve.
Recent reports also show that Intel is expanding its chipmaking empire by debuting a batch of optical transceivers that offer twice the speed of current Fibre Channel storage systems—at a cost that is competitive with current, slower systems. Such advancements are the stuff of Fogg’s “Persuasive Technology.”

Knowledge management
It’s not what you know. It’s recognizing what you don’t know and learning how to communicate what you do know. It involves using the basics; without them you will just be a talking head, and your clients or customers will respond in kind. I leave you with a quote from Fogg’s book; Chapter 6, page 124: “Computing technology that is viewed as incorporating expertise (knowledge, experience, and competence) will have increased powers of persuasion.”
It helps to remember that the human brain is the most powerful computer ever built. Use yours to advance your knowledge management skills and you will realize instant results that lead to increased powers of persuasion and—to more sales.