A sales rep turns a corner while driving to one of the biggest calls of the year when a jolt from under his car forces a change of plans: he just ran over a pothole and now needs to swap out his tire, except he’s never actually done a tire change by himself before. There’s no time to wait for AAA so he must figure it out himself. What does he do? In 2019, he calmly pulls up YouTube and watches a user-generated video demonstration of exactly how to perform the tire change on the make, model and year of his car, before turning around, grabbing his tools, and successfully executing the task himself. Within twenty minutes he’s back on the road driving toward the meeting feeling ready for anything.

This is what it feels like to be ready in a world where you can pull a device out of your pocket and extract whatever day-to-day lessons you need from somebody else’s life experiences. Sales reps already use consumer apps like Waze to learn about open routes in real time based on other drivers’ experience of current road conditions, or Duolingo so they can practice and learn new languages using friendly competition with other would-be travelers. But what about the tasks involving the actual substance of salespeople’s work? What if our rep were to hit a different kind of “pothole” that day: one in the form of a text message from his internal champion letting him know that the company’s CFO would be joining the call unexpectedly? He doesn’t normally call on CFOs, and would need a five-minute debrief with a colleague to understand the pertinent discussion points to use, but no one is available right now.

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