In the chemical industry, commercial success has always relied on more than data.
It depends on the experience of salespeople, product managers, and technical experts, the insights they’ve built over years of customer interactions, formulations, substitutions, and regulatory constraints.
But as organizations grow and experts retire or move on, a critical question emerges:
How do you preserve and scale this expertise so that every salesperson, present and future, can benefit from it?
In many companies, valuable product insights still live in notebooks, inboxes, or individual memory. This “tribal knowledge” is real, rich, and impactful, but rarely documented, structured, or shared. And that creates risk for sales performance, customer experience, and long-term business continuity.
The Risk of Lost Knowledge
Chemical sales processes often depend heavily on senior expertise:
- confirming product equivalences
- validating performance differences
- advising on compliant substitutions
- interpreting regional regulatory nuances
- explaining historical customer use cases
It works, until the expert is unavailable.
Or overloaded.
Or gone.
When that tacit knowledge disappears, the consequences are immediate:
- Slower responses to customer inquiries
- Inconsistencies in recommendations
- Longer onboarding for new sales reps
- Increased internal back-and-forth between teams
- Higher risk of outdated or incomplete information being shared
In a competitive market where speed, accuracy, and trust matter, relying solely on individual memory becomes a structural bottleneck.
Turning Tribal Knowledge into Structured, Shared Intelligence
To avoid losing expertise, and to make it accessible across teams, chemical companies increasingly turn to Product Information Management (PIM) as their system of record for commercial knowledge.
A PIM like ionicPIM doesn’t just store data.
It structures, connects, and contextualizes it so that knowledge becomes usable at scale.
Examples include:
- Competitor product mappings
Capture equivalences, substitution rules, and differentiation points so reps can provide confident alternatives instantly.
- Application notes and selling arguments
Document proven talking points, usage contexts, and performance explanations at product level.
- Regulatory insights per market
Store the compliance considerations traditionally known only by a few experts.
- Product relationships
Formalize cross-sell and up-sell logic through structured product associations.
- Historical customer learnings
Document typical needs, recurring objections, and what solutions worked in similar cases.
This turns individual know-how into a repeatable, shareable, scalable asset, available to every salesperson, everywhere.
Best Practices to Capture and Structure Commercial Knowledge
- Identify high-impact knowledge first
Focus on insights that influence customer recommendations, compliance decisions, or product positioning.
- Embed expertise directly into product data
Storing knowledge in wikis or PDFs isn’t enough.
Link it to the relevant products inside the PIM so it becomes immediately usable during sales interactions.
- Define ownership and maintenance routines
Assign domain owner, sales, technical, HSE, product management, and treat knowledge updates as a standard part of product lifecycle management.
- Use consistent structures
Templates, controlled vocabularies, and product attributes ensure knowledge becomes comparable, searchable, and easy to maintain.
- Measure adoption and impact
Track KPIs such as:
-
- Faster onboarding (often 30–50% reduction)
- Fewer clarification loops with experts
- More consistent recommendations across regions
- Improved customer satisfaction and response times
From Individual Expertise to a Strategic Company Asset
When knowledge becomes structured and shared, it creates tangible value:
- Faster, more confident sales responses
- Less dependency on a few experts
- Better alignment across sales, technical, and regulatory teams
- Stronger customer experiences
- A durable foundation for long-term commercial performance
This is the essence of commercial excellence: not replacing experts, but amplifying their knowledge across the organization.
With ionicPIM, chemical suppliers transform the expertise of today’s teams into an enduring asset, powering every future salesperson, every customer interaction, and every commercial decision.
Ready to Scale Your Selling Expertise?
Discover how ionicPIM helps chemical companies turn individual know-how into structured, reusable knowledge at the core of their commercial process. Contact our experts.
Explore the full use case: Drive Commercial Excellence in Chemical Sales.