Improve Sales with a Knowledge Management Platform
Is your sales team equipped with the tools it needs to handle the pressures of an accelerated competitive environment? For most organizations, the answer is no. An enterprise knowledge management system can be just what is needed to create a sales culture that drives better collaboration and conversions.
Salespeople value their peers and managers as an essential source of knowledge. Sales knowledge management platforms are designed to ensure your entire sales team, newcomers and veterans alike, have access to the same valuable information that enables them to stay on top. Companies successfully capturing sales knowledge are providing their team with one of the best resources they could ask for in increasing their productivity.
Foster a Culture of Knowledge-Sharing
A good knowledge management system (KMS) allows for real-time collaboration, not only with fellow sales members, but with people from other departments such as marketing and legal. Sales staff should be encouraged to brainstorm ideas, innovate new solutions, and solve common problems through collective wisdom and experience. This approach is particularly helpful for sharing ideas on how to help move deals forward when leads offer objections.
Get Everyone on the Same Page
Sharing and cataloging knowledge is just the beginning. To ensure consistency, everyone in sales should also have a clear, united understanding of your organization’s value proposition and goals. A KMS gives you and your sales team an easily accessible place to find the most current company outlook and position while preventing stale knowledge from making its way into the sales process.
Simplify Collaboration
Anything management can do to make it easier for marketing and sales to help each other can be a boon to the company’s bottom line. Marketing’s job is to discover the targeted audience’s pain points and most common questions so relevant content can be created. That content should be easily accessible by sales (something that happens far too rarely in most organizations.). Not using marketing’s insight into your leads’ thinking is too valuable an opportunity to pass up.
Using Metrics to Make Improvements
Sales is very metrics-driven. The feedback customers and prospects provide your sales team can help in making adjustments to pitches and responses which can lead to increased engagement and conversions. Nearly every touchpoint during the sales process offers the opportunity to glean valuable information from customers. Capturing and organizing that feedback in a KMS makes it possible for a sales team to find it, see it, and respond easily and quickly.
Customized Training
A KMS expedites training by tracking:
Database content most frequently accessed
Questions salespeople and customers ask most
Types of activities salespeople perform that produce best results
Pulling all that information into one place can result in creating a much stronger sales training strategy. And it isn’t just for new hires. Seasoned salespeople can benefit as well; progressing from good to great by taking advantage of training sessions that focus on which approaches no longer work and which ones are hitting the target.
The Future of Knowledge Management for Sales
Understanding which data and knowledge to use to make informed decisions is what sets the winners apart from the competition. This is where an efficient KMS for sales can help your organization gather and coordinate data that helps predict the future. For it is businesses that can use current trends to shape their future sales goals and leverage their knowledge-based resources as customer-focused sales solutions which will ultimately extend their competitive advantage.
