Making Knowledge Sharing Easy

In March, a survey conducted by IBM found that 80% of CEOs see collaboration as being critical to growth. Yesterday, I wrote about how difficult it is to get salespeople to buy in and use a sales portal managed by Marketing. Yet, if the two departments continue the standoff, the ability of companies to meet their strategic sales objectives will stall.

I see part of the problem as "ownership."  Salespeople "own" their knowledge and they are resistant to sharing because they see allowing their knowledge to become a company asset means (to them) they are expendable. Salespeople are competitive.  By their very natures, they are driven to be the best at what they do. For the sales portal to be effective, it has to give them tools that make a difference in elevating that perception.

Marketing is charged with providing the messaging, value propositions, information and presentations that sales is supposed to use to sell. But sales says it doesn't work. Marketing says they ask Sales what they want, give it to them and still, Sales turns up their collective noses.

Salespeople probably don't know what will help them be more effective in a way they can articulate. At least not when they're asked directly and they aren't in the midst of experiencing a frustration. This is why it's critical to have the sales portal be a collaborative zone that connects the two departments.  But, in order for it to be a bridge, contributing to it has to be easy and it has to come from both sides.

Sales needs to be allowed to contribute without much effort. Their contributions will aggregate and provide marketing a better idea of what's missing and how to deliver tools Sales can actually use to be more effective at selling.

Some ideas are:

• comment boxes that allow portal users to add notes and reactions to content


• rating systems that allow them to quickly check a box that says "this content is worth a 1 - 5 in my sales arsenal


• a WYSWYG content editor for them to post sales success or loss stories that are tied to the materials they used (your system can be smart enough to know this)


• discussion threads with company experts around competitor objections


• suggestion boxes that post the suggestions to the portal and make marketing accountable for responding (not necessarily doing them, but acknowledging the suggestions and saying what they can do and by when)


• Notifications to sales when something new is posted to the portal so they don't have to search. And for heaven's sake, put it out there prior to the free world getting knowledge of the latest campaign. Sales should always know what's going on before they hear about it from outside.

It may sound like this is putting a lot on Sales, but Marketing doesn't get a free ride here.  What they do get is feedback on what value their materials are providing to sales. They are able to see usage rates for content and know if something is falling flat or not being utilized.  If the CRM system is hooked in to track the materials salespeople access when planning for a phone call, email, meeting, demo, presentation, and proposal, then marketing can track which content is used and how often. 

Marketing can also produce metrics about how strong a roll they play in contributing to the company meeting it's overall sales goals. The materials used by salespeople to close a sale will be tied to the lead.  Marketing can start to see trends by segmentation as to what's effective and what's not working.

Important to remember that collaboration is conversation between people, not something tossed over a wall. Response is important and it needs to be constructive.

The key is that Marketing has to modify and adjust content that doesn't work and they need to do it quickly. They need to be responsive to whatever knowledge the salespeople share. If they are not, then this whole collaboration thing is for naught. There will be no bridge and marketing and sales will continue to work at cross purposes.

Sales will find out their knowledge becomes bigger and better when used collaboratively and their success will increase demonstrably through having better tools and messaging that works. They will spend less time researching for every meeting and sell more.

The company's brand will become stronger through consistency.

This isn't an easy process and it may not be particularly pretty at first, but as Marketing strengthens their relationship with Sales through collaborative work that provides better tools, the respect will grow.  Being able to produce metrics that tie it all together for the C-level will give Marketing the credibility it needs for that seat at the executive table.  And for bigger budgets that have demonstrable ROI.

What efforts are being made at your company to bridge sales and marketing?  Is it working?