Council Post: A Brief Guide To Knowledge Accumulation for Service Companies -- In Sales And Beyond

Each business faces the challenge of efficient knowledge accumulation and exchange. At service companies like mine, sales departments are usually first-priority knowledge recipients because they have to respond fast to various complicated situations. See for yourself.

Markets are rapidly changing and generating new trends. Who should stay on top of the trends? Salespeople. Huge amounts of information that are impossible to retain in their entirety come in every day. Who should be able to retrieve this information at the right moment? Again, salespeople. Technologies become outdated quickly. Who should keep tabs on the tech market dynamics? Nice guess: salespeople. For service companies, every client’s request is unique and bears its own set of preferences, needs and goals. Who should be well informed on these needs so the company can retain these clients? Well, that’s clear by now.

That’s why I’ve compiled a list of best practices for accumulating sales knowledge and knowledge management how-tos that are applicable to any business.

Your sales reps should have easy access to the following three knowledge sectors.

This is data on the client's industry matched with information you've previously gathered on the industry.

If you've previously interacted with clients in the same industry, you can apply this knowledge to better identify the segment the client belongs to. The knowledge can be varied and may include valuable industry-specific skills and knowledge of common challenges, competitors of different tiers, competitors’ strategies, product information, pricing policies and even industry jargon.

Process knowledge includes internal collaboration processes, as well as the tools and rules that allow service companies to find, compare, categorize, match and apply relevant data from their previous projects. 

When this knowledge is at their fingertips, salespeople can use accumulated information more efficiently and raise the value of their communication with clients, thus helping them secure deals faster.

This is information about an optimal set of technologies to be used in the requested solution, which is a scenario that's common for technology consulting companies.

This type of knowledge, which includes the platforms and technologies you'll use on the project and that the client already owns, is critical for evaluating resources, efforts and budgets for the project.

When it comes to huge amounts of data, processes get bottlenecked easily. For example, if there is no centralized and easily searchable knowledge database, valuable information might not reach those who need it.

If you can't share a new significant piece of information promptly across the company, sales reps and their colleagues will be the ones to lag behind and could mislead potential clients.

At the same time, if employees lack the knowledge of specific steps in a knowledge-sharing process or disregard the requirements for data accumulation, even the best knowledge database can provide confusing results that misguide salespeople and harm sales overall.

To make knowledge accumulation efficient and beneficial to all departments, I recommend following these steps:

This can serve as the "brain" of an organization where you store and organize all valuable knowledge. All employees involved in knowledge accumulation should have access to it at any given moment, and it should serve as a single point of truth. You may consider enrolling enterprise resource management software (ERPs), intranets, document management systems (DMS) or specially designed data repositories for this purpose.

Some businesses choose to hire external consultants when necessary, but it is important to have an in-house team that will gather, store, manipulate, classify and retrieve information continuously.

Small firms may want to appoint a data officer or a knowledge master. Larger companies may require a full-fledged knowledge management department. Knowledge specialists can oversee information flows and help employees expertly navigate seas of tools, folders and data. Additionally, they should be responsible for keeping information indexed, searchable, complete and updated.

3. Keep The Processes Transparent And Organized

At the end of the day, no matter how great the knowledge team is, all employees should take part in knowledge accumulation. This is impossible to facilitate if you don't establish internal guidelines.

You can frame these guidelines around the following steps:

• Educating employees on using the right search criteria and techniques.

• Promoting a practice of sharing new information within and between departments.

• Tracking changes to the documented knowledge.

• Gathering employee feedback on the missing information and filling these gaps.

Accumulated knowledge is useless if you don't apply it to make informed decisions. Each person in your company, from top-tier executives to interns, should know how to interact with data and use it in their daily routines.

• Have a single hub with continuously aggregated data from different sources.

• Be “data-literate,” or able to "read" different data types coming from various departments, whether it’s statistics or visualizations.

• Make proper decisions based on several data sources, not just gut feelings.

When you have a knowledge management system in place and need to process massive data records and provide analytics, you may consider automating some of the tasks, like capturing data from different sources or preparing reports. You can do this through your customer relationship management (CRM) platform, DMS or other specialized data delivery tools.

Properly applying knowledge can help you differentiate your service company from the rest. However, it is not that easy to reach that goal, as knowledge accumulation might end up chaotic and useless. As a result, employees who need to leverage multifaceted data in their work, like sales reps, might not have access to it. To avoid this, each business should accumulate knowledge systematically, centrally and with data users and ease of access in mind.

Source: Forbes.com

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