How to Improve Your Sales Processes with Knowledge Management

Knowledge is the foundation of the competitive advantage offered to the customers. In Sales teams, effective knowledge management helps provide a quick expert response to prospective requests. It also gives a grounding to the further prospect journey through the pipeline to the deal outcome. The article will share what knowledge management is and how to apply it to the sales process.

Successful Sales and Marketing teams know everything about their product, services, methodologies, and technologies. At the same time, they stay updated with the market trends in competition, customer preferences, the environment, and more. The challenge is to ensure that valuable data is easily accessible to every employee at any moment.

Knowledge management makes it possible.

Benefits of Knowledge Management for Sales

With powerful knowledge management, businesses have more chances to stay competitive. Besides, it is linked to the innovative potential of startups. While being innovative is expensive and requires much research effort, integrating knowledge management into the sales process in the existing team is less costly and brings tangible results faster.

So, what are the benefits of applying knowledge management to sales?

Improved Sales Performance

One of the primary purposes of knowledge management is to keep the information available in the right place at the right time to support decision-making. In short, it makes decisions quicker, more informed, and, thus, more likely to be successful.

Regarding the sales process, time stays at the core of the number of sales activity metrics. Let’s look at some of them:

• Time spent on manual data entry;
• Time spent selling;
• Time in each stage;
• Average conversion time.

By raising the quality and accessibility of information, there are good chances to shorten the sales cycle to pursue the key sales performance metrics, such as Monthly Sales Growth or Customer Lifetime Value.

Higher Communication Quality

With a proper analysis of the internal and external knowledge exchange, businesses may see a rise and fall in the communication flow. Whenever a fine piece of information takes too much time to reach a prospective customer, it is a reason to ask, “Why does it take so long to process this particular type of request?.”

Frequently, an attentive manager will come to find that the reason behind such pitfalls is a non-intuitive organization of knowledge in the company.

Easier Automation

As long as computers perform automation, data consolidation is the only way to be fruitful with it. Investing in knowledge management may seem grand. But still, how organizations manage their information becomes crucial when they decide to bring optimization to the table.

Smoother Workflow

A rich knowledge base sharpened to the team’s needs makes many business processes smoother. Among them are:

• Onboarding of the new teammates;
• Mentorship and professional development training;
• Demo calls with prospective clients with useful information at hand;
• Design of the personalized proposal.

The common denominator in all of them is knowledge sharing.

Improving Sales Processes with Knowledge Management

In short, sales knowledge management will help any department to close deals faster, share verified information quicker, and keep the database of valid information updated.

To understand what knowledge management has to do with the sales process, let’s explore the concept in more detail.

Learn What Knowledge Management Is About

Knowledge management is a complex concept. One of the possible ways to look at it is to understand the high-level process behind it. The typical cycle looks like this:

• Knowledge discovery. Any new piece of information coming in is a discovery. It can be unique knowledge about the product or the new requirements from the prospective customer.
• Knowledge storage and organization. As the new knowledge has arrived, it is put in a corporate knowledge base for accessibility and later interaction.
• Knowledge distribution. To make new knowledge valuable, you need to share it with every team member for them to be on the same page. In the Sales and Marketing teams, updates about new product features or updated prices for the service are standard information to receive. If not appropriately delivered, any current deal is at risk of failure.
• Knowledge use. Sales and Marketing teams use knowledge daily to handle objections, plan advertising messages, and make proper proposals for prospective clients. How they use this information is a significant factor in the deal outcome and, thus, revenue gain and growth.

As you can see, knowledge management and sales are closely tied together. But using the right toolkit can help you effectively manage this flow.

Onboard Knowledge Management Tools

Knowledge management is not a new concept. In a world filled with big data, many companies have already made attempts to build reliable products for keeping control over the volumes of information generated regularly. Therefore, there is no reason to come up with something custom and invest in development.

OneBar is one of the sure-thing options. It is a knowledge management system powered by AI with a web version, flawless Slack integration, and a Chrome extension. Let’s take a closer look at it.

OneBar Knowledge Management for Sales Enablement

OneBar is a knowledge management platform that helps collect, consolidate, and ensure easy access to internal information. It saves the team from unnecessary monotonous documentation flow and frees the space for creativity and things that only human skills can accomplish.

Below we will review just some of the use cases of OneBar for the sales and marketing processes.

Build an Internal FAQ

Customers tend to ask all the same questions from deal to deal. Many of them are objections that must be handled right away. With a robust FAQ, Sales Reps will no longer spend time on an endless search for a valid answer and will have the only source of truth available at any time.

Stop wasting time on repetitive questions!

Create Space for Collaboration on Answers

Question is the core entity in OneBar. One of the primary purposes of the system is to find a prompt expert reply to a customer request. Sometimes team members will need a colleague’s advice to refine the response.

Instead of reaching out to colleagues in multiple channels, copying and pasting request details, OneBar offers to engage everyone to work on a request in a single space with the invitation and commenting features.

In a shared space, teams can:

• Ask @onebar bot questions;
• Capture answers from messages and threads;
• Receive content updates;
• Set up automatic responses, but preserve their manual verification and management.

Organize a Knowledge Base Like a Pro

All companies have their knowledge organized in some way, and frequently it is not easy to navigate, especially in a large company.

OneBar offers the best features to navigate vast knowledge bases:

• Tagging answers;
• Assigning subject matter experts;
• Configuring expiration notifications.

It keeps the database manageable and up-to-date in moments of need.

Give Access to Knowledge Across Communication Channels

Sales teams hold a lot of communication through multiple channels, such as Gmail, Intercom, or LinkedIn. With a OneBar Chrome extension, it is possible to access the knowledge base and keep it at hand wherever the browser surf journey goes.

Integrate Content Instead of Copying

Organizations already have their knowledge spread across channels, such as Google Drive or Confluence. OneBar integrates it all with a single link and shows a live preview of the documents.

Drive Search for a Valid Answer with AI

The intelligent AI-driven search is embedded at the heart of OneBar. Instead of the ordinary keyword-based search, it analyzes the semantics and delivers precisely what you mean.

Integrating OneBar into knowledge management for sales and marketing gives equal flawless access to the shared database of verified information. It turns team members into genuine product or service experts.

Final Thoughts

In the Sales and Marketing teams, knowledge management helps achieve higher communication quality, better performance, and smoother workflow and opens new opportunities to automate mundane tasks.

Adopting the new work methodologies and approach to information management may seem like a big step that needs substantial preparation efforts. On the bright side, we have shared the tool available for instant integration and use. With OneBar at hand, you will transform the way knowledge is organized and shared in the team and with the customers.

If you have any questions about how your business can use OneBar to boost sales, don’t hesitate to reach out to us for a consultation at info@onebar.io.