What is knowledge management?
Knowledge is one of the most valuable assets for every organization. From product and service information to historical context about customers and competitors, there's no shortage of knowledge to go around. However many organizations struggle to collect and share this knowledge with employees, which is why knowledge management is so useful.
Knowledge management is the process of harnessing, organizing, and sharing important workplace information across an organization. This is often done by maintaining and storing knowledge in one central location that is easily accessible by anyone who needs it. This provides organizations with a unique competitive advantage that enables them to share, learn, and update business information to increase efficiency and productivity.
Types of organizational knowledge
When it comes to knowledge management in business, this includes acquiring, growing, and sharing information that falls into three main categories:
- Explicit knowledge: Explicit knowledge is the simplest form of knowledge to share. It's fact-based information that includes rules, instructions, data, and policies. Common explicit knowledge management examples include company manuals, how-to videos, white papers, and guides. This information is clear-cut and easily defined, explained, and stored.
- Implicit knowledge: Implicit knowledge is information that's shared between people without being explicitly stated outright. This requires people to read between the lines to understand the context. A good example of implicit knowledge is when you're about to go outside and someone tells you to bring a jacket. While they don't explicitly say it, you can use context clues to figure out why you need a coat — because it's cold.
- Tacit knowledge: Tacit knowledge includes intuitive information that's learned through first-hand experience and practice. Unlike explicit knowledge, it's more difficult to capture and store efficiently. One great example of tacit knowledge is the sales skills that a seller learns and develops over time.
While it's important to focus on each type of knowledge, implicit and tacit knowledge are crucial to the success of go-to-market (GTM) teams. That's because this information lives among your highest performers and most seasoned employees. The best practices, tips, and tricks they've learned while interacting with prospects and customers are valuable expertise that should be codified and shared across the team to help replicate and scale success.
Why is knowledge management important to enablement?
The meaning of sales enablement is to provide frontline teammates with the right resources, content, and tools they need to engage with prospects and current customers as effectively as possible. But without knowledge management, this wouldn't be possible. After all, GTM teams need a way to capture, organize, update, and share information at scale. Knowledge comes in many forms, and GTM engines heavily rely on knowledge sharing through:
- Sales playbooks
- Sales decks and presentations
- Competitor briefs
- Product hubs
- FAQ docs
- Training
- All-hands updates
- Team meetings
It's also important to note that effective knowledge management encourages subject matter experts and teammates across the organization to share useful information that naturally comes from conversations with prospects, customers, and partners over time. For example, if a sales rep closes a deal with a customer who was also considering a competitor, they should share the tactics and information that were useful in winning the deal. Then, the enablement team can add this information to specific playbooks and battle cards for sellers to use in future deals. Or, if you notice one customer support agent has consistently higher customer feedback, it may be a good idea to have them share techniques and processes with the rest of the support team. Without encouraging the transfer of this tacit knowledge, revenue teams miss out on sharing information that the entire team can benefit from. In fact, one report found that organizations that ask top performers to actively share their knowledge close more deals and increase win rates by 54%.
Additional benefits of knowledge management
At the end of the day, the importance of knowledge management in organizations can't be overstated. If done well, knowledge management can positively impact an organization in the following ways.
