THE NEW VISION OF SALES KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT (SKM)
Improving the Effectiveness of Sales Teams through SKM
Prospects and customers demand a lot more of sales professionals today. With the explosion of information available on the Web, buyers are now far better informed and well advanced in their buying process before ever interacting with a sales professional. To add value, sales professionals must demonstrate a high-level of expertise and deliver knowledge to the prospect in the shortest time possible – if not instantaneously.
Introduction
In order to develop sales staff who can meet the expectations of the well-informed buyer, companies are adopting Sales Effectiveness solutions. Sales Effectiveness solutions enable sales and marketing organizations to effectively manage the challenges of today’s buying cycle, in which buyers now manage the pace of the sales cycle and the delivery of information.
Sales Effectiveness solutions surround sales professionals with comprehensive, always-available knowledge support through Collaborative Sales Readiness (CSR) that fosters a continuous learning environment for sales readiness and product training, and Sales Knowledge Management (SKM), which addresses on-going, day-to-day knowledge needs. Together, CSR and SKM reshape sales productivity.
First, CSR gets sales professionals ready to sell more effectively and efficiently. Then, SKM offers on-going support that provides them with the exact knowledge at the precise moment of need to drive the buying process forward and build deeper trust with prospects and customers. This white paper discusses the requirements for successfully implementing Sales Knowledge Management (SKM). Separate white papers outline the business benefits and methodology for Sales Effectiveness and the requirements for successfully implementing CSR.
Requirements for Successful Sales Knowledge Management (SKM)
To create a useful Sales Knowledge Management (SKM) environment, organizations need four key capabilities:
(1) The ability to quickly create and organize knowledge
(2) The ability to find useful and relevant knowledge
(3) The ability to effectively share ad-hoc knowledge across the organization
(4) The ability to organically capture and grow knowledge
Unfortunately, traditional knowledge management solutions do not meet these needs because:
· They require lengthy implementation cycles that demand high levels of effort to centralize knowledge or reuse existing corporate knowledge.
· To create knowledge, subject matter experts (SMEs) and other contributors are forced to use proprietary authoring tools best suited to power users. This creates a significant knowledge-creation bottleneck.
· Knowledge management is seach-based, which limits the ability of the user to find relevant knowledge quickly and requires high levels of domain expertise.
· Peers and experts cannot share ad-hoc information efficiently as knowledge management does not help sales professionals find and interact with the right peer or expert.
· Useful ad-hoc knowledge cannot easily be captured and maintained as part of the corporate memory.
Solutions must offer easy methods
For organizations to successfully implement SKM, solutions must offer easy methods to leverage existing corporate knowledge as well as facilitate on-going knowledge creation, capture and re-use by providing:
· A knowledge bank designed so that existing corporate knowledge can be quickly leveraged without needing to physically move or replicate the content.
· Easy methods for contribution via familiar tools so that a wide range of contributors not just trained knowledge engineers can add knowledge without training or specialized knowledge tools.
· Interactive methods for finding releavant content to accommodate various levels of skill and simplify the process of obtaining knowledge.
· Knowledge-sharing communities and peer networking that facilitate the free flow of ad-hoc information among peers and experts through online discussion forums, emails from experts and the like.
· Automatic ad-hoc knowledge capture for rapid, organic knowledge growth, sharing and re-use.
In the full article...
With underneath button you can download the full article 'The new vision of sales knowledge management (SKM)'. Here you can read about the following subjects:
· Growing Knowledge Oranically
· Managing Knowledge Contribution
· Sales Knoweldge Management (SKM) success depends on ease of use
· Conclusion
- The need for a knowledgeable salesforce
- Case study AgustaWestland Ltd
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- Elearning Software
