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Improving Sales with Knowledge Management: Can It Be Done?

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Robin Singh
Improving Sales with Knowledge Management: Can It Be Done?

Did you know that if you follow up with web leads or respond to their inquiries within 5 minutes, you are 9 times more likely to convert them?

Yeah, this is exactly the conclusion of Dr. James Oldroyd’s study on Lead Response Management. And when you transfer this to reality, it becomes clear that in order to improve sales one should not treat leads like an economic term.

Leads are just regular people like we all are. If keen to convert them to customers, we have to be able to answer their questions quickly and tend to their concerns and, more importantly, we have to learn from them and understand their experience in order to improve products, services, customer service and relationship management.

Since there are a lot of active and passive factors that influence the efficiency of the sales department, we will break down the entire intercorrelated network into basic elements and provide you with examples of how cloud-based knowledge management software can significantly increase and improve sales.

Empower the Sales Team with Information

We live in an era where there are many businesses supplying the market with products and services, giving the customers plenty of different option to choose from. If a salesperson or customer support agent quickly and accurately responds to the leads’ questions, the chances of conversion are very slim. To develop a smooth sales funnel, an organization has to be able to respond to customer inquiries, and cloud-based knowledge management software allows sales, customer support operatives to do so efficiently.

The employees can search the repository of the organization’s knowledge at any time. They can connect via any device and quickly come up with an answer that satisfies the customer. This intervention is like a quick follow up on a lead that has a high chance of converting into a sale in the next couple of moments.

Since a knowledge base (KB) software allows multiple users to work on one article, a salesperson can always post a question as the article title where top salespeople and any of the high-ranking employees can answer it. This ensures that the next time a potential customer asks the question, the sales department will have instant access to the right information.

Value Proposition as Organization’s Goal

A value proposition is one of the leading factors of improved sales. What you choose to offer to your customers should position you as unique and better than the rest of the crowd. Based on the opinion of marketing experts, it seems that the value proposition is hardly ever achieved on a global, organizational scale.

Making it an organizational goal and writing a number of articles detailing the “how and why” behind your offer, you will make sure that the way you communicate your value proposition stays consistent. Make it a standard part of the training material for new hires. Interlink the main value proposition ideas whenever it is mentioned in other articles via context-sensitive help, and voila, you’ve got yourself an organization where everyone knows why their products or services are different from the competitors’ offers and what makes them superior.

Promote Interdepartmental Collaboration

Making successful sales is the cherry on top of the hard work of the different departments in an organization. In order to transform the business into a well-oiled machine, the interdepartmental collaboration has to be on the highest level possible. The collaboration doesn’t necessarily always need to have an active element. In fact, passive collaboration through the sharing of experience is also beneficial.

Take, for instance, the marketing and sales departments where employees share their experience and knowledge. In a knowledge base, people working in sales can find insights that can make compelling cases for the leads.

Gathering Questions and Answers from various channels (Social Media and Live Chat) and combining those with the results of marketing research makes valuable content for both the marketing and the sales department. Make sure that it is found in the knowledge base and that employees are made aware of it existence.

If you are already using sales enablement software, you will be able to use the content from your knowledge base to deliver the best possible sales content to your customers. The synergy of knowledge base software and sales enablement software provides incredible results when it comes to customer retention and lead generation.

Track the Problems to their Roots

Since KB software can be integrated with Google Analytics, you will be able to identify the articles in the knowledge base that are performing poorly in terms of traffic along with the ones that are putting up good performing. This way, you can focus your attention on improving the content that customers want and provide them with new content addressing their main pain points.

This is extremely useful for ecommerce establishments. Because you are able to track the routes and devices customers are using to find the knowledge base. You can edit the titles, content and make it more SEO-friendly in order to increase your website traffic.

By doing so, you will be able to attract valuable prospects in need of an answer, who will then stay on the website and decide to make a purchase as most people prefer a store that has an amazing self-service help center.

The parting words

As you can see Cloud-based Knowledge Management Software is a powerful solution that benefits many different departments and the organization as a whole, hence the answer to the question in the title of the article would be: “Yes, knowledge management can significantly improve sales.”

KB software can be easily integrated with other software solutions. This way, it is much easier to get all your employees on the same page, and quickly teach them the best practices, which leads to increased productivity and business growth.

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Robin Singh
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