Complete Guide to Sales Institutional Knowledge and How to Preserve It

Millions retire each month and younger talent switch jobs in search of better opportunities. And sales teams are no exceptions. 

In sales organizations, employees who have been around for over three years have a treasure trove of institutional knowledge. And when they leave, critical sales knowledge is lost with them.

Unless you have a system to preserve it.

Preserving accumulated institutional knowledge saves you from spending thousands of dollars or countless hours training new hires.

This article is your go-to guide on understanding and preserving institutional knowledge for efficient sales teams.

What is institutional knowledge in sales? 

Institutional knowledge in sales, also called tribal knowledge, is the organization’s collective memory. It’s a sum of information, such as data, skill sets, processes, techniques, know-how, and experiences your sales reps, executives, and leaders possess.

It acts as the blueprint for everything sales-related and helps reps boost efficiency. For example, sharing institutional knowledge helps a sales organization maintain customer service quality irrespective of the changing staff.

What are the types of institutional knowledge 

Institutional knowledge in sales can be categorized under three types:

1. Explicit knowledge  

This type of institutional or tribal knowledge is the easiest to get your hands on as it's already recorded or documented. It is tangible information that you and your team can view, share, store, update, and transfer.

For example, sales training materials, presentations, pitch decks, sales rep performance reports, sales playbooks, manuals, and so on. 

2. Implicit knowledge 

This type of knowledge is less tangible than explicit. It is often undocumented and based on your team’s experiences, unique insights, know-how, personal sales strategies, and accumulated skills.

Capturing this knowledge can be quite hard as it requires your sales teams to share it via training programs, webinars, and interpersonal interactions.

3. Tactic knowledge 

This knowledge type is the hardest to capture as it’s deep-rooted, undocumented knowledge and involves insights, practical know-how, and intuitions that stem from hands-on experiences. 

For example, a seasoned sales rep judging a particular prospect based on their interactions and categorizing them as a cold or a hot lead is pure tactical knowledge.

Why is institutional knowledge important in sales 

Sales experts leaving their jobs or moving on to better roles within the company take abundant hands-on experiences with them. 

Let’s see why preserving this institutional knowledge can have dramatic effects on sales efficiency and the company’s bottom line:

1. To save the organization from running into huge losses

A recent report by Panopto shows how total annual productivity is lost due to inefficient knowledge sharing and causes enterprises losses in millions of dollars. 

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Clearly, a lack of an efficient process to share and preserve institutional knowledge could have major repercussions for the company and impact the bottom line. 

2. To increase team productivity and minimize any room for confusion

Multiple studies indicate salespeople spend 31% of their time searching for the right sales content.  

Sales productivity comes when teams have instant access to adequate, verified information. 

Hands-on institutional knowledge ensures sales reps don’t have to start from square one, but rather use their higher-ups' real-time insights to reduce any potential room for miscommunication or confusion that could hamper productivity. 

3. To knock down information silos 

Information silos occur when different individuals generate new data or insights but fail to integrate that information to be used strategically. 

A lack of information free flow due to silos or knowledge hoarding can have a direct impact on sales team productivity. 

Institutional knowledge allows employees to hand over key sales information and experiences to everyone in the organization for hands-on subject matter expertise. 

4. To improve onboarding 

It takes a new sales hire 25 weeks to reach full productivity:

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And institutional knowledge has a direct correlation with bringing down the time taken to onboard new hires. Access to curated sales information and accumulated insights drastically reduces the learning curve and ramp-up time. 

5. To prevent employee turnover 

Almost 81% of employees are frustrated when denied access to information that could help them do better at their jobs. Dissatisfaction can result in them quitting sooner rather than later, and sales are no exception.  

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Eventually, businesses run into huge losses due to higher-than-expected turnover and subsequent work delays. 

The fix? Efficient sharing of institutional knowledge can boost employee engagement and offer them access to a wide variety of learning material stemming from real experiences.   

How to preserve institutional knowledge in sales  

Here are seven main strategies to adopt to prevent the loss of valuable sales institutional knowledge:

1. Understand the current internal sales landscape

The first step to preserving institutional knowledge is to get to the bottom of your organization’s sales landscape, i.e., its current state.

This means identifying:

• Key knowledge sources where abundant sales resources exist and are accessed by sales reps on a daily basis
• Critical knowledge holders—could be senior salespeople, account executives, or managers
• Areas of vulnerability in a sales process that potentially causes the most delays, lost deals, and team misalignment 

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Assessing these areas lets you build an institutional knowledge preservation plan. 

2. Identify who your key knowledge holders are

Look for individuals in the sales team who possess strategic insights and technical know-how. 

Some of the best tricks to find them are:

• Analyzing metrics, such as quota attainment, average time taken to close deals, and average deal sizes closed
• Watching out for their team interactions. They are often the go-to people in a team
• Implementing peer feedback to pinpoint who the actual SMEs are
• Analyzing their contributions to internal resources, such as company wikis, sales playbooks, folders, etc.

3. Document key knowledge 

Tactic institutional knowledge is often challenging to document as it exists in the minds of your employees while explicit is easier. 

So develop a strategy to capture both forms of institutional knowledge via tools like interviews, storytelling sessions, luncheons, and cross-department catch-up sessions.

4. Introduce knowledge transfer programs 

Knowledge transfer sessions are essential to extract knowledge from experienced salespeople. 

For example, scheduling mentoring sessions or asking new hires to shadow SMEs so the necessary tactical knowledge is transferred. 

5. Create a knowledge-sharing culture 

Make knowledge sharing second nature by fostering an environment where employees feel encouraged to contribute.

You can build a supportive space by:

• Providing a collaborative platform where employees share ideas seamlessly. It can be as simple as a Slack channel
• Rewarding top knowledge contributors
• Maintaining open communication channels between leaders and reps

6. Train employees on tools and skills

Sales leaders must empower sales teams with the latest skills and tools to effectively partake in knowledge sharing and receiving. For example, offering training programs or workshops about using AI sales enablement tools.

7. Monitor and update 

To ensure information relevance and accuracy, sales knowledge managers need to:

• Establish and monitor knowledge management KPIs, such as time to find information, number of contributors, resolution time for issues, etc.
• Gather feedback from key stakeholders
• Continuously review and update knowledge assets

How Docket AI helps with institutional knowledge  

Docket is your AI sales engineer and sidekick that unifies key sales tribal knowledge, driving more productivity and selling.

Here are some ways Docket helps you preserve and use institutional knowledge with powerful AI:

1. Auto-captures tribal knowledge from top sales assets

Docket learns from your top sales performers by sifting through their Slack conversations, customer calls, emails, shared folders, and presentations. 

Docket then delivers instant on-demand responses to company-wise sales-related institutional knowledge via conversational tools like Slack. 

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2. Reduces sales onboarding time

Sales onboarding tends to be one of the lengthiest processes. An AI tool like Docket can accelerate onboarding and let new hires ramp up quickly.

For example, new sales reps can instantly get answers to their technical inquiries and answer prospects instead of spending hours looking for relevant information. 

3. Boost sales team productivity with easy knowledge-sharing 

Sales reps constantly seek insights from product marketing, engineering, IT, and marketing due to the challenging nature of B2B sales cycles. As a result, a lot of time gets wasted on information hunting and performing repetitive tasks.

That’s when Docket AI’s knowledge management capabilities come in handy. It learns from your top performers by analyzing their tactical knowledge and converting it into conversational intelligence.

Wrapping up

Capturing and retaining institutional knowledge boosts sales efficiency by drastically reducing the time spent on redundant activities. It’s a shortcut to sales success as new reps no longer have to start from scratch, and can instead, learn from past experiences. 

Docket AI, with its intuitive capabilities, lets you capture, organize, and readily share your institutional knowledge.

Book a demo today!