How Sales Content Collaboration Powers Sales Knowledge Management

Sometimes, finding the answers you need for a prospect can feel like looking for a needle in a stack of needles. 

Let’s say a prospect asks a one-off, edge case question there’s not a straight answer for. Maybe it’s for an offering you don’t often sell to this industry. Where do you look to find that answer? You might...

• search in the sales Wiki or Sharepoint instance.
• message your Pre-Sales team in Slack/Teams.
• email your product management group.
• sift through boilerplate language and one-pagers to find a nugget of information.
• dig through your Sales Enablement solution for resources that may have info.
• ask the proposal/pre-sales team to dig through the RFP software to find an answer.

...after all that, you still might not get the correct answer in a timely manner. Probably leaving you feeling a bit like Ron Swanson about technology:

So, how do Sales Content Collaboration platforms power knowledge management?

1. They centralize all the content (i.e., knowledge) from sales.

For time-sensitive and one-off requests, it’s impractical to go through all of the different motions listed above to find one nugget of information that may be hiding in a 500-question RFP from six months ago. 

Sales Content Collaboration funnels all your external-facing document-based sales content through one central platform — allowing all your reps to leverage the knowledge of the smartest person in the room on that specific subject matter.

And that’s not just the opportunity-specific content — these platforms also house content created, curated, and approved by subject matter experts across the organization. Have an in-depth security question? A question on an obscure legal regulation? It’s likely already in the system.

2. They equip salespeople with a wide search base with real-world answers.

Because of the wealth of content within the systems, they also serve as the best search engine for client-facing answers.

Sales wikis can be great, but (Sales Enablement pros, cover your ears!) they can be hard to maintain and sometimes contain the “marketing” answer...perhaps not the facts you need for a prospect.

Within Sales Content Collaboration platforms lie thousands of responses to actual customer questions so you can see firsthand the best possible answers to your specific prospect’s questions. These platforms do this by keeping the opportunity data from the CRM intact so you can filter down by specific parameters:

• Deal context: region, product offerings, company size, deal size, etc.
• Deal outcome (win/loss) data: Did we win this opportunity?
• The person responsible for the response: Was it your best presales engineer? That’s probably a good response!
• The AE on the deal: For any follow-up questions you may have.
• When the response was last updated: Was it 4 years ago or yesterday?

All of this empowers salespeople to deliver better, more complete responses to their customers faster.

3. They allow for synchronous collaboration and enablement.

If salespeople can’t find the right answers on their own, they’ll often reach out to team members. But, that doesn’t guarantee an immediate response - particularly if you have a global team spread across various time zones and regions. 

Sales Content Collaboration enables your sales team without the Sales Enablement team having to lift a finger — that’s the best part. Instead of going through a million motions to find one little nugget of information, Sales Content Collaboration can be their first stop, and then they can dig into the details to find the best possible answer. 

This also benefits brand-new salespeople who may not know the more common information right away. Then can learn straight from the smartest people in the org, with no back and forth to make that a reality. That’s what we call a win, win, win.

Don’t undervalue your mid-funnel sales content.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: Sales content is the most underrated asset of your business. If harnessed correctly, sales content can be a wealth of information, a training tool, and Sales Enablement’s MVP.