Knowledge management can sound incredibly abstract. Its classic one-line definition as “the process of capturing, distributing, and effectively using knowledge” is not something that immediately brings concrete applications to mind.
However, knowledge sharing holds a huge potential for businesses – especially in sales and marketing.
According to the Society for Human Resource Management, Fortune 500 companies lose a stunning $32 billion annually by failing to share knowledge. Smaller businesses, too, are missing out on productivity, synergy effects, and ultimately on revenue.
Knowledge management systems are, however, within reach for any business. They do take time, effort, and the right tools to implement. But once set up, they can benefit the entire business – whether IT, customer service, sales, or marketing.
In general, knowledge management has four components:
- the people who lead, participate in, and support knowledge sharing
- the pre-defined processes for knowledge flows, and rules for their measurement and a management
- the content and tools necessary to connect the right people with the knowledge they need
- a clear, overarching strategy for knowledge management, tailored to the needs of your business
By laying out a strategy, defining processes, onboarding your team, and investing in the right content and tools, you can harness the power of knowledge sharing for sales and marketing.
But before we deep-dive into how exactly you can go about is, there is one question left to ask: Why bother, exactly?
Why Harness Knowledge Management for Sales and Marketing?
Increasingly, the success of modern marketing, especially digital marketing, hinges on E-A-T: Expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
For example, search engines will thoroughly evaluate the quality of content on your business’ website. The more in-depth, expertise-packed, authoritative content you publish, the higher your site will rank in search results, and more potential customers will visit it.
Similarly, digital marketing offensives like email campaigns and social media ads are much more likely to be successful if they address customers’ pain points.
And if anyone knows what customers tend to look for and ask about your products or services, it’s your sales team. They know a lot about what your audience looks like, what interests them, and what doubts they have before purchasing.
Conversely, your marketing team might already have created a ton of resources – from Q&A pages to infographics – that your sales team could use. Similarly, their audience research could provide valuable insights for your sales team.
All of this illustrates the importance of implementing a solid system for knowledge transfer within and between sales and marketing teams.
The central question now is how to go about that exactly.
5 Steps to Establish a Knowledge Management System for Sales and Marketing
Any knowledge management system must handle distinct processes:
- tracking new knowledge that is created every day
- identifying knowledge important for internal and cross-team operations
- collecting knowledge and making it easy to share with others
- reviewing existing knowledge for relevance and accuracy
- making it easy for team members to selectively access existing knowledge, and add new knowledge to the system
All this involves both humans and technology. On the tech side, you will have to choose the right software and solutions to work with. On the human side, you need to ensure that everyone is aware of your overall strategy for knowledge management and the specific processes involved.
Here is how to achieve this in five steps.
1 – Foster a Culture of Sharing and Collaboration Among Sales and Marketing Teams
This begins by encouraging the right mindset, right from the start. Assure new hires and existing team members that admitting to failure won’t have negative repercussions – or you will miss out on countless learning opportunities.
In parallel, you have to create spaces in which knowledge sharing can happen. These can be virtual, like an internal wiki accessible to anyone or dedicated knowledge management software. Or you could dedicate a few minutes of every department or organization-wide meeting to sharing new insights.
To encourage people to participate in knowledge sharing, lead by example and incentivize the knowledge management process. For example, you can give shout-outs or small bonuses to team members who take initiative to expand shared knowledge.
Similarly, think about formalizing a process for knowledge sharing when someone is about to leave your team – whether they are retiring or changing jobs.
2 – Centralize Sales and Marketing Knowledge Management Systems
A second major component is setting up a tech system that is conducive to knowledge sharing.
Within larger teams, disparate ways of recording information emerge: from post-its over internal wikis to collections of cryptic documents shared between a few people.
The problem? Siloed knowledge.
Centralizing all this information is a challenge. To face it, knowledge management platforms are vital assets.
Having all your knowledge in one place drastically reduces friction. People will be able to access information they need quickly and effortlessly. It also simplifies managing and, crucially, updating information.
When considering different types of knowledge management systems, give preference to cloud-based platforms. As 2020 has made abundantly clear, virtual teams communication is indispensable. Having information accessible from anywhere, not squirreled away on an internal server, is an invaluable advantage.
3 – Turn Sales Data into Marketing Knowledge – and Vice Versa
Data does not equal knowledge.
Every day, your business generates thousands of bits of data, especially in relation to sales. How many sales did you make in a day? Which products sold best? What were the buyers’ demographics? How did your number of subscribers change?
The good news is that you can transform data into knowledge through analyses. And it’s crucial to share these analyses for the knowledge they contain.
For example, in a joint meeting, you might be able to link a digital marketing offensive on a particular social network to a spike in sales in a sub-section of your target audience. The information that you gain from making such a link will benefit both marketing and sales initiatives.
One central component of this is to have a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system that is accessible for both your sales and marketing team.
This system can share any customer-specific information – from when they sign up for your newsletter to when they decide to purchase a subscription.
While it is possible to move data between systems, you need to make sure that this happens regularly, to prevent information from becoming siloed and inaccessible for those who need it.
4 – Create Synthesis Content and Promote It
Once you’ve started to build a knowledge base, you will quickly realize that information accumulates fast.
At this point, it is essential to manage knowledge – to vet it, remove duplicates, and to create synthesis content.
Synthesis content can come in a lot of different forms: long-form blog posts, manuals, infographics, extensive how-to guides. Their purpose, though, is the same: to summarize the large volumes of information recorded by your knowledge management system.
These synthesis documents can then be harnessed by both your sales and marketing teams – as internal training materials, for inter-departmental briefings, or even for inbound marketing purposes.
5 – Monetize Your Consolidated Knowledge and Content
Finally, you can consider monetizing the knowledge that you have consolidated, and the content you’ve created.
Depending on your niche, there might be countless potential clients who could benefit from your insights. No matter if you’ve compiled a lessons-learned database for virtual team management, a wiki on your product, or a set of sales strategies that work well in your niche, there are others who will value this knowledge.
Having a solid knowledge management process helps you create outstanding materials, on the basis of well-founded information. You can put together synthesis products aimed at external audiences, such as e-books, white paper designs, and online courses integrated in your website.
These, in turn, can become part of your marketing and sales strategies – adding value to your core products.
For example, you can offer them to entice potential customers at various points in their buying journey – offering an e-book as a freebie for signing up to your newsletter, for instance.
Or, you can advertise them as additional training materials for users of your product. Potential users of complex products, such as various Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms, appreciate the possibility of having bespoke training courses.
Conclusion: Reduce Friction and Increase Productivity in Marketing and Sales with Knowledge Management
Knowledge management has the potential to increase productivity and reduce friction in any company, no matter its industry or size. This is especially true for the sales and marketing domains, which offer countless opportunities to exploit synergy effects.
To implement knowledge management systems allowing you to take advantage of these synergies, you have to consider both technological and human aspects. Carefully choose the right tools – from internal databases to cloud course platforms.
A prerequisite for this is fostering a culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing among your team. You need to inspire and encourage them to actively participate in the process.
At the end of the day, both your marketing and sales teams will benefit from unprecedented insights that will allow them to improve their operations and boost their productivity through knowledge sharing.
