Why Does Your Team Need A Knowledge Enablement Platform?

Your organization is constantly collecting information. Whenever a sales rep engages with a customer, a new lead downloads marketing content, or an existing client calls the help desk, you’re gathering valuable information about your customers and your product. 

But how easy is it to actually access that information? If your company is like many organizations, all of that information can end up stuck in various systems, departments, and other information silos where it cannot benefit other departments. 

A knowledge enablement platform can help break down those data silos and share your company’s data with everyone who needs it. 

What is knowledge enablement? 

Knowledge enablement, also called knowledge management, is the practice of making sure important information is available to an organization. One of its key goals is about being able to quickly find and tap any sort of institutional knowledge within an organization, and then sharing that knowledge with the right individual exactly when they need it. 

Knowledge management recognizes information as one of three types of data: 

• Explicit
• Implicit 
• Tacit

All three types of knowledge are important to an organization, but the easiest to codify is explicit knowledge, the sort of information that often gets written down or entered into a CRM. Implicit and tacit knowledge are often learned by experience: the way a sales rep closes a deal, for example.

Knowledge enablement is also a form of sales enablement; it gives your sales team the tools they need to do their jobs more easily. 

What is a knowledge enablement platform? 

A knowledge enablement platform is any software that processes, stores, and organizes institutional knowledge. There are several kinds of knowledge management platforms, including knowledge bases, wikis, content management systems, and business intelligence systems. 

All of these platforms store knowledge and allow it to be retrieved by employees, but not all of the systems are used organization-wide. Content management systems are largely used by writers, while customer relationship management platforms might be used by the sales or customer experience team alone. This can cause problems when one platform isn’t able to communicate with the other. 

Why share knowledge? 

Data silos can be damaging for an organization. Silos often develop organically when a department works in isolation, and they’re very common. According to a recent report, more than half of organizations (54%) report their customer experience operations are managed in silos, while only a third of customer experience professionals say they can actively communicate and collaborate across teams to drive improved CX.

Unfortunately, they’re also not good for your company. When one department doesn’t have access to another’s data, it can mean you’re gathering the same information more than once, don’t have the full picture when you’re making business decisions, or are writing weak proposals because you don’t have enough information. 

For this reason, it’s important to make sure that your company’s knowledge management strategy takes company-wide sharing into account. Ombud, for example, offers a platform that shares information across the entire sales process, curating knowledge and storing it in a centralized searchable repository. This doesn’t mean all the knowledge is limited to sales, representatives from departments across the company can add to this database or search for information.

This can be particularly helpful when a bid team is searching for information from a subject matter expert (SME), or if someone in marketing needs to understand the challenges often heard by the help desk. Knowledge management puts all your organization's best information at everyone’s fingertips. 

Interested in learning more? Find out how Ombud can help you compile a central library of all of your organization’s most important sales knowledge. Request your demo here.