Using Knowledge Management to Enable Your Sales Team

Your sales team is made up of a number of talented, knowledgeable individuals, right?

(At least, we hope that’s the case!)

All kidding aside, the thing is:

The knowledge and skills your sales reps possess aren’t all that’s needed for them to be successful.

For your sales team to truly excel to their highest capacity, they must be able to put their knowledge and talents to good use.

As a 2019 report from CSO Insights shows, sales enablement is the key to improving performance across the board.

Specifically, strategic sales enablement leads to:

• Better alignment with the customer’s path to purchase, and their overall journey
• Improved alignment between marketing and sales
• More engaging and actionable sales efforts
• More conversions and higher win rates

It’s also worth noting that such success leads to higher levels of satisfaction amongst team members, too. This, in turn, will make your sales reps more likely to stay engaged and onboard with your team — and more willing to continue growing professionally.

Now, as CSO’s report shows, there are two caveats to all this:

1. A formalized approach to sales enablement is necessary to experience the benefits we just mentioned.
2. Developing and maintaining this formalized approach will require a shift in focus from your sales team, as well as your organization as a whole.

This is where knowledge management comes in.

What is Knowledge Management?

At Helpjuice, we subscribe to the following definition of knowledge management:

“Knowledge management is the systematic management of an organization's knowledge assets for the purpose of creating value and meeting tactical & strategic requirements; it consists of the initiatives, processes, strategies, and systems that sustain and enhance the storage, assessment, sharing, refinement, and creation of knowledge.”

Essentially, knowledge management is all about ensuring your team always has the data, information, and knowledge they need to perform to the best of their abilities. Building a comprehensive knowledge management framework means putting in place the structures, processes, and tools needed to access and use this knowledge appropriately.

In this article, we’ll be focusing on the key ways a solid approach to knowledge management will enable your sales team to ramp up their efforts and see their conversion rates skyrocket.

How Can Strategic Knowledge Management Lead to Better Sales Enablement?

To be blunt:

Your sales team cannot possibly operate to their highest potential if your knowledge management efforts aren’t up to snuff.

But, if your team does have a solid grasp of its knowledge management processes, the path to enabling your sales team will become crystal clear.

Let’s take a look at just what we mean by that.

Creation of Standardized Sales Processes

Earlier on, we mentioned the importance of creating a more formalized approach to sales enablement.

As should come as no surprise, sales teams that standardize their internal processes — both their sales processes and their sales enablement processes — outperform those that take a more haphazard approach.

Source

Again, to formalize and optimize your sales processes, a formal approach to knowledge management is also necessary.

See, one of the key benefits of knowledge management is that it allows you to truly understand what the knowledge your team possess means to your organization. Conversely, not having complete control over your team’s knowledge will render it useless.

Some examples of the knowledge we’re talking about here:

• Customer and target persona data
• Your sales team’s current performance data
• The intangible knowledge your sales reps possess (knowingly or otherwise)

Only once you’ve taken stock of this and other organizational knowledge can you begin to develop strategic standard operating procedures for your sales team to follow.

The idea is to use everything your sales team knows about what works (and what doesn’t) when nurturing prospects toward conversion. This will allow you to create sales playbooks, prepare for objections, and otherwise develop an optimized plan of attack for engaging with your target audience.

On this note, it’s also important to understand that bottom-up knowledge management ensures the sales processes your team creates align with what actually works for your team. Your sales team knows what works best, and proper knowledge management allows them to take the reins in putting this knowledge into practice.

Along with helping create these standardized practices, strategic knowledge management also helps your sales team stay focused on these processes and continue to follow them over time. With open access to your organization’s entire collection of knowledge, your sales reps will always have what they need to put their best foot forward.

Improved Cross-Team Communication and Collaboration

In optimizing and systematizing your sales processes, your sales team will become more aligned as far as the “big picture” goes.

Once this “big picture” alignment occurs, the next step is to ensure your team can stay on the same page on a day-to-day basis. This will allow your team to communicate and collaborate more effectively with each other — and with other members of your organization.

(In contrast, a disjointed team would have a difficult time working together, as everyone would constantly be playing “catch-up” in some way or another.)

Again, knowledge management comes into play.

In developing your KM initiatives, your team will be looking to put in place the structures and channels needed for knowledge to flow freely throughout your organization. Here, we’re talking about the tools and processes that will allow your teams to communicate and collaborate whenever necessary.

Focusing on technology, there are any number of knowledge management tools your team can use to facilitate better communication and collaboration in different ways.

For the purpose of sales enablement, some of the key knowledge-related tools you’ll need in your tech stack include tools for:

• Direct and group messaging with sales and other team members
• Collaborative creation and content development
• Documenting and communicating customer engagement and sales progress info

More than just making these tools available, strategic knowledge management again focuses on optimizing how your sales team uses them to accomplish your goals.

Here, the idea is to systematize the flow of information and knowledge on each of your communications channels. This, in turn, ensures your sales reps will always know where to look when in need of specific information.

Thinking of our above examples, your sales reps might:

• Consult recently-created marketing content to refresh themselves on current promotions and offers
• Check a customer’s engagement history records before reaching out to them
• Deliver quick-hitting updates to teammates as needed via direct message

In each of these cases, the right “type” of info is recorded and communicated in the most appropriate spot — again ensuring others can easily find it when in need.

On that note, creating a comprehensive knowledge management system means allowing this knowledge to flow between the various tools in your tech stack, and to truly permeate your organization. In integrating these tools, you’ll make it even easier for your sales team to find the information they need, whenever they need it.

Tying all this together, proper knowledge management allows the knowledge possessed by your individual team members to be effectively communicated throughout your organization. In some cases, this will better enable your sales team to make on-the-ground decisions in real-time; in others, it will allow them to improve their overall approach to a specific customer or situation.

In either case, this ability to communicate with one another enables your sales reps to maximize their efforts moving forward.

Value-Packed Customer Engagements

Your sales reps’ ability to convert prospects aligns heavily with their ability to keep said prospects informed and motivated.

Once again, knowledge management plays a huge role here.

Overall, the goal is to be able to deliver whatever information a given prospect needs at any given time — and to deliver it in the most effective way possible.

To do so, your team first needs to better understand the situation at hand. This means digging into a variety of data and info, such as:

• CRM data to identify the customer’s needs and expectations, and learn about their engagement history
• Product specifications, service terms and restrictions, and other information the prospect will need to know
• Info on promotional offers and the like that may pique the customer’s interest

This goes back to what we said in the previous section:

The easier it is for your sales reps to access this info, the better able they’ll be to put it to good use.

The result:

A value-packed experience for the prospect, each and every time they engage with your sales team.

After all, if you can:

• Answer your customers’ every question
• Provide specific, needs-based information to your individual prospects
• Deliver highly-relevant offers to these prospects at just the right moment

...the prospect will have every reason to listen to what you have to say. This, of course, will work like gangbusters in increasing your conversion rates.

There’s also the customer-facing side of knowledge management to think about, as well.

Here, your goal is to prepare the prospect for a sales call or similar engagement by allowing them access to certain need-to-know info. An external knowledge base, for example, provides a breadth of company knowledge for the consumer to digest at their leisure.

There are three key benefits to providing such self-service options to your prospects.

1. For one thing, the modern consumer typically prefers it. Generally speaking, they’d much rather find the answers to their more basic questions on their own than wait around for your sales or support staff to help them out.
2. On that same token, it also saves your sales team a ton of time and energy in providing this basic information over and over again. In turn, they’ll have more resources on-hand to engage with prospects who do need their attention.
3. Finally, and most importantly: Because your prospects will come to your team prepared with the information that matters most to them, it will be incredibly easy for your sales reps to pile on relevant offers and other value to get them to convert.

Again, if you’re always able to give your prospects the information they’re looking for (either proactively or upon request), you’ll pave a clear path to conversion for every lead you generate.

A Continual Focus on Growth

As you’ll recall, the definition of knowledge management we provided earlier also defines what it’s all for:

Creating value, and meeting tactical & strategic requirements.

More than just meeting sales quotas and other KPIs, true sales enablement is about finding ways to exceed these expectations as much as possible.

Once more, we turn our focus to knowledge management.

First off, your team’s knowledge management efforts will allow you to squeeze as much value as possible out of the knowledge you currently possess. By gaining full control over your organization’s collective knowledge, your team will be able to pull previously-unseen insight and meaning from it all.

Your team will also be better able to identify and take advantage of new sources of knowledge, as well. Really, a huge part of KM is the unceasing, proactive search for new knowledge and insights, gathered from an ever-increasing number of reputable sources.

This continuous pursuit of knowledge will inevitably lead to regular breakthroughs and a-ha moments from your sales team. From the insights your team consistently gathers, they’ll continue to discover:

• New platforms and channels on which to engage with your customers
• Current and future trends regarding consumer needs and expectations
• Evolving sales tactics and customer experiences — and the technology to deliver them

Once you’ve gotten your knowledge management initiatives up and running, you can further strengthen your sales team’s collective knowledge by developing communities of practice within your organization.

A community of practice is a group of individuals aiming to learn more about a given topic or discipline, with the specific intent of putting their new knowledge into practice. For our purposes, members of your sales team (and other departments) may create a CoP focused on sales enablement.

In creating a sales-focused community of practice, you’ll essentially guarantee that your sales team’s knowledge and abilities will continue to grow over time. What’s more, you’ll also ensure that their efforts remain focused on gaining specific knowledge for specific, practical purposes.

To put it plainly:

A strong approach to knowledge management begets professional growth.

On just the surface, the more your sales team knows, the better they’ll be able to perform.

And, as your team begins to see this growth in their performance, they’ll become even more focused on ramping up their KM efforts — knowing that doing so will continue to help them grow along the way.

Wrap Up

Helpjuice’s knowledge base software allows you to create a centralized hub for your organizational knowledge, allowing your sales team to put it to practical use whenever needed.

You can also use our software to develop an external knowledge base, allowing your customers more control over their own buying experience. In turn, they’ll be that much closer to conversion once they decide to reach out to your sales team for more info.

In both cases, the result is clear:

More — and more valuable — customers for your business.

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