Modern buyers expect sales reps to address their current and previous requests or pain points proactively. That’s why most businesses aim to break down the barriers between sales, marketing, and customer support and support sales reps with up-to-date resources.
But what’s the best strategy to break down these silos?
Using knowledge management systems (KMS) and making sales team collaboration easy.
A KMS is a team collaboration essential that allows sales and cross-teams to easily search, access, and share information for informed decision-making.
This article shares insights on the importance of knowledge management systems in improving sales team collaboration.
Knowledge management systems are cloud-based platforms for storing and organizing information into a single centralized source. It helps improve team efficiency, alignment, and facilitates easy collaboration.
Here’s why a KMS is crucial for sales:
Another important sales element KMS helps with is collaboration. The following section covers how it makes way for smoother sales team collaboration.
Smoother sales collaboration with other revenue and customer-facing teams is a big win for any business.
Here are four ways KMS makes this possible:
A popular whitepaper mentions how timely access to the right information is the “lifeblood” of any enterprise. Yet, a typical knowledge worker spends about 30% of their workday looking for information.
KMS fixes this by providing a single source of truth for all types of sales content, data, and best practices.
Whether it’s looking for contracts lost in heaps of folders or the latest sales playbook, reps are often stuck spending too many hours searching for information instead of engaging with prospects.
However, a KMS ensures standardized and relevant information is stored and accessible centrally instead of the usual siloed form of data organization. This improves collaboration, communication, and overall productivity as sellers can easily access the knowledge they’re looking for.
Also, unlike databases, a KMS is not geographically limited and allows users to access information from any location with their browsers.
Knowledge management can have various solutions like forums, learning management (LMS), insight libraries, chat integrations, and document collaboration features.
These provide sales teams a treasure trove of knowledge and insights shared by revenue-generating teams and managers. Also, such in-built KMS tools help sellers clearly communicate their next steps and goals with team members so everyone is on the same page.
A KMS ensures cross-functional departments like sales, marketing, product, and customer support work with the same material via seamless collaboration and reduces any room for error or effort duplication.
For example, product teams can upload the latest product roadmap and product updates to the central knowledge base and help sales teams improve their presentations.
The top benefits sales teams can gain from using knowledge management systems:
KMS makes relevant information easy to locate and accessible and helps sellers be more productive.
High productivity means more effort is spent on value-adding sales tasks, such as building prospect relationships, upskilling, personalizing outreach, and closing deals quickly. That way, less time is spent on researching or recreating content and more on selling.
Inconsistent data in sales leads to misalignment and contradicting messaging. Sales reps may end up communicating outdated details to prospects or customers, thus straining brand reputation.
However, with a KMS, sales reps can access the most up-to-date information and resources to better align their sales strategies and communicate confidently. For example, product features are prone to updates and it’s best if sales teams stay informed by accessing the latest details to address customer queries.
Effective onboarding is crucial for a new hire sales rep as it can set the tone for their sales performance.
Knowledge management for onboarding can help businesses systematically collect, organize, and distribute tailored information to ensure new hires have all that’s needed to get accustomed to the organization’s sales processes quickly.
For example, KMS enables access to the latest role-specific knowledge like best practices, sales playbooks, and company policies, and also facilitates knowledge transfer from higher-ups.
A KMS can have in-built analytics and reporting functionalities that allow sales teams and leaders to refine their strategies and make informed decisions.
For instance, managers can access performance insights to understand potential training gaps and reps can access insights informing the type of content beneficial at each sales stage.
Here are a few suggestions and best practices for enabling your sales teams with the right KMS:
Start identifying the most essential knowledge needs for a KMS by answering questions such as these:
Analyze these questions and others based on your unique sales challenges to develop hyper-relevant content.
Considering the many options available, choosing the right KMS will need a more in-depth evaluation of several key factors to ensure it meets your sales team’s specific requirements.
These are some top factors you must look for while choosing the best-fit KMS:
Knowledge hoarding is a major challenge most enterprises face. The rise in remote work, lack of awareness, or technological constraints can be some reasons holding employees from sharing information with other team members.
Facilitating a culture of knowledge sharing by providing the right tools like KMS and educating the team on technologies like AI enables them to contribute, access, and collaborate on information in real time.
For example, make communication easy by using an AI digital assistant that integrates with Slack where salespeople can share ideas on the fly and quickly extract insights from past conversations.
Look for a KMS that integrates with sales enablement tools and your existing software, such as Slack, Google Drive, and Outlook.
Docket AI, for example, unifies sales data across your internal sources and integrates with the best sales enablement tools to offer centralized knowledge management and just-in-time insights.
Initiate a regular review and update process to keep the content current. Look for a KMS that allows automation, such as sending automated reminders to alert for potential changes made or if it’s time for a content review.
Track how effective the KMS has been in improving sales team collaboration. Look for metrics, such as total time saved searching for answers to prospect queries, the sales cycle reduction rate, and the average deal win rate.
We’ve seen how knowledge management systems provide tangible benefits for efficient sales team collaboration.
From centralized information access to faster onboarding and improved cross-team collaboration, investing in the right KMS brings your sales reps closer to conversion.
Introduce your sales team to powerful AI tools for knowledge management. Docket AI empowers enterprise sales teams with instant knowledge and brings them up to speed in just a few hours.