Knowledge Management System Market Research : Sales & Marketing
Contents:
Introduction
Conversion of knowledge
Use Cases
Problems and Solutions
References
Introduction Tacit and Explicit Knowledge:
Knowledge within an organization exists at two levels individual and collective.
The transfer of knowledge from individual to collective level marks knowledge creation at the organizational level.
Tacit Knowledge
"Tacit Knowledge is the knowledge of experience, tends to be subjective and physical. It is about 'here and now, relates to a specific practical context."
Characteristics of Tacit Knowledge:
Tacit Knowledge is personal, known by an individual, and is context specific;
Tacit Knowledge is highly experiential and difficult to document and communicate;
Tacit Knowledge sharing involves learning;
Tacit Knowledge cannot easily be codified but can only be transmitted via training & experiences; and
Tacit Knowledge is about, ‘know-how’, ‘know-what’, ‘know-why’, and ‘know-who’.
Examples of Tacit Knowledge:
Hands-on skills, special know-how, and experiences of employees;
Tips on dealing with a difficult challenge;
Feedback from customers over the phone;
Best practices of the most prolific salesperson; and
The opinion expressed by management about why competitors are doing well.
Explicit Knowledge
"Explicit Knowledge of rationality and trends to be metaphysical and objective often relates to past events or objects 'there and then', oriented towards a context-free theory."
Characteristics of Explicit Knowledge:
Explicit Knowledge is more formal;
Explicit Knowledge is context-independent;
Explicit Knowledge is easily shared;
Explicit Knowledge is reproducible; and
Explicit Knowledge can easily be codified, documented, transformed, and conveyed in a systematic way.
Examples of Explicit Knowledge:
Documented work, Procedures, and Policies;
Operating procedure for a job;
Contacts of potential customers in the database;
Formal customer complaints and suggestions; and
Code of conduct for the organization.
Knowledge Conversion:
Explicit-to-Tacit: Internalization
Visual or codified knowledge available within organizations can be internalized by employees by watching, reading, and observing the artifacts. At times, explicit manifestations of tacit knowledge can also be seen in body language or facial expressions.
The process of converting Explicit-to-Tacit is called 'Internalization' and takes place through learning and training.
Explicit Knowledge creates a new Tacit Knowledge.
Examples:
Reading a newspaper, watching television, learning through textbooks, etc.
Tacit-to-Tacit: Socialization
Tacit knowledge is difficult to transform and even more difficult to convert into tacit knowledge. This can happen only through one-to-one interaction and socialization of individuals. Since this type of knowledge is independent of symbols, this can also happen without the use of any language.
The spiral of organizational knowledge creation (Nonaka, 1994) describes the diffusion of knowledge that starts from socialization, followed by combination, externalization, and finally internalization.
When knowledge communities meet, and common interests get together, they informally exchange a lot of information with each other.
The information gets disseminated across the 'grapevine'.
Examples:
Telephonic conversations, get-togethers, public meetings, group discussions, market surveys, opinion polls, etc.
Tacit-to-Explicit: Externalization
The process of converting Tacit-to-Explicit is called ‘Externalization’, which means making internal & implicit knowledge, external & explicit.
Tacit Knowledge can only be made explicit when it is possible to codify and express such knowledge formally, in forms associated with Explicit Knowledge.
Examples:
Daily or weekly reports, reviews, monthly technical reviews, traceability matrices, writing journals and articles, etc.
One common problem is with respect to managing tacit knowledge, especially that residing in knowledge workers. When knowledge workers leave the organization, they take away with them a lot of tacit knowledge about the customers, markets, and the firm’s environment itself. In the eventuality of their joining a competitor, such knowledge changes hands and could be easily replicated. The risk, however, arises when customer relationship managers leave the organization, which may lead to customers migrating to other organizations. Very often firms do not calculate the cost of tacit knowledge. We call it the latent cost of owing the intellectual capital of the firm.
Sales use case:
selling process: Individual to collective Salespeople meet various types of customers in the course of their work. Through several interactions with customers, salespeople build an accumulated stock of knowledge, which is also known as their experience. This experience helps them categorize customers, as well as selling situations. The classification helps salespeople sell more effectively to new customers, using the a priori mental schema for classification. This knowledge is often called declarative knowledge. However, it has been shown that salespeople use yet another type of knowledge called procedural knowledge when they exhibit an effective set of behaviors with their customers, as an outcome of their past learning. Simultaneous use of declarative and procedural knowledge by salespeople is popularly called adaptive selling strategy.
salespeople who are working at peak productivity for 15 months only. Then, you have to replace them which costs 1.5 – 2x their annual salary.
In other words, companies spend an enormous amount of money to train sales professionals that leave in about a year. And, when these employees leave, they usually take their knowledge and expertise with them.
Every time a salesperson leaves, sales knowledge is leaking from your organization.
sales reps waste a staggering 26 hours per month finding, editing, and managing content across a number of locations. At the same time, only 14% are confident that they use the most up-to-date content.
11% on Training and 11% to keep up to date with trends.
Training and Onboarding
The customer journey is very fragmented today and the sales pipeline is no longer linear — it branches in dozens of directions. So, if a sales rep has just joined your organization, there will be a lot of information to take in. Studies have shown that more than ⅔ of this information will be forgotten after the initial onboarding.
Instead of relying solely on onboarding, you can continuously capture, store and update the knowledge about your sales process in a knowledge base (KB), corporate wiki, or some other document management system.
The biggest advantage of this approach is that your sales reps will always have the most up-to-date information at their fingertips.
Your document management system should serve as a centralized, searchable knowledge hub that can make it easy for your sales team to:
Find relevant case studies, blog posts, and customer references.
Capture information about what has or hasn’t worked in the past and associated lessons learned.
Store information about how to use specific sales tools and technologies.
Contain onboarding documents that make it easy for new hires to get up to speed.
According to Salesforce effective training is directly tied to sales performance: 80% of high-performing sales teams have very good training processes in place. Also, in Accenture reports, companies receive an average ROI of 353% for each dollar spent on training.
sales stats: Continuous training gives 50% higher net sales per employee.
Reboarding = Continuous Onboarding and Training
Solution
So, how can you implement continuous training? Here are a few practical tips to get you started:
Identify gaps in knowledge. Look at the reports from your CRM — What do sales reps need to improve the most? Look at the searches in your internal KB — What information are they looking for but not finding?
Create “snackable” content. Sales reps are notoriously busy so it’s best to present new information in small pieces.
Gamify the experience. You can introduce a scoring system to create friendly competition and stimulate sales reps to learn on an ongoing basis.
References:
Transforming Tacit Knowledge into Explicit Knowledge for Delivering Business Goals - Nisha Kainth* Dr. Sandeep Vij
https://www.salesforce.com/ca/blog/2016/12/invest-in-training-sales-team.html
https://chartmogul.com/blog/sales-knowledge-management/