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Learning by example is the best way to drive individual performance in sales organizations.
Knowledge sharing, or learning from collective experiences, plays a key role in transferring real-world insights among individuals and sales teams. ‘
However, this is easier said than done.
Such informal and experiential knowledge is often unretained or undocumented in sales.
That’s when capturing tribal knowledge comes into play.
Read on to learn how to make tribal knowledge work for you and help drive tangible results.
Organizational tribal knowledge for sales is the collective understanding, insights, skills, and know-how of a group of employees, hence the word “tribe”.
It includes information, such as sales process best practices, closing tactics, pricing tips, technical details, etc., that’s shared informally between individuals and not necessarily documented or presented.
For example, salespeople, account executives, and other client-facing teams largely use Slack or Microsoft Teams to exchange specifics. These interactions are rarely documented and are confined to communication apps.
Access to tribal knowledge can result in multiple profitable outcomes for sales:
A 2024 Salesforce guide on sales productivity woes shows how most reps spend about 70% of their time on non-selling tasks.
This can be largely due to a lack of guidance in finding the right resources to guide their sales efforts which pushes the need for manual search across data sources.
However, access to organized tribal knowledge can drastically reduce time spent on trial-and-error processes as reps have firsthand access to rich resources.
As seasoned salespeople work on various deals, they encounter several situations and objections where they find new solutions for successful deal closures.
These experiences make up critical tribal knowledge that can help newbie sales reps navigate the sales process through foolproof decision-making.
Tribal knowledge can provide a competitive advantage, especially if it includes unique insights about your target customer and creative sales pitches to address their pain points, which are unknown outside the organization.
Uncaptured tribal knowledge in sales can pose some challenges and potential drawbacks:
When an experienced sales rep with substantial tribal knowledge leaves the organization, their unique insights and understanding are also lost.
Memories are fleeting. Relying solely on an individual memory due to undocumented tribal knowledge can result in sales process inefficiencies, miscommunications, and onboarding delays.
A lack of a centralized approach to tribal knowledge management can lead sales reps to approach target customers differently. For example, some prospects receive better insights than others, leading to more holes in the sales process.
Uncaptured tribal knowledge can lead to avoidable roadblocks and risks that can hamper your sales processes. These include:
Because tribal knowledge is undocumented and mostly word-of-mouth, a lot of it is rarely shared between individuals, leading to knowledge silos, also called knowledge hoarding.
As a result, only specific salespeople or managers have access to valuable insights, and sales teams may lack the necessary resources to replicate their higher-ups’ successful strategies—indirectly impacting business performance and revenue.
Sales organizations already face lengthy onboarding cycles. They heavily rely on training and onboarding programs to maintain sales rep performance and most practical information is passed on orally.
However, due to a lack of a formalized structure to record information, a lot of it needs to be refreshed, leading to onboarding delays and knowledge gaps in new hires.
Unlike traditional knowledge, tribal knowledge is based on personal experiences and exchanged via interactions. However, there may be multiple versions of the same piece of knowledge between multiple seasoned sales reps.
This variability leads to inconsistencies in how tasks are performed and decisions are made.
For example, two sales teams may approach lead nurturing strategies for the same target audience in different ways, leading to multiple inefficiencies.
Top salespeople always have exclusive strategies and ideas that differentiate them from the rest. When these go unshared, budding salespeople miss out on tactics that could make them top performers and contribute to the organization’s sales goals.
Here’s a step-wise approach for sales teams to capture tribal knowledge and ensure it is transferred effectively:
Your key knowledge holders can be top-performing salespeople who are subject matter experts and considered the go-to resources for sales insights.
You can also consider employees who have been in your organization for a while as they tend to possess a wealth of knowledge from experience.
Once you have identified the most knowledgeable sales experts, the next step is to assess what knowledge exists and what’s missing.
Collect tribal knowledge from these experts and determine which parts can be retained, left out, or missing. Conduct regular audits and fill in these gaps so you’re not passing down outdated, untrustworthy information.
Sharing tribal knowledge is an ongoing process and it’s best to use creative ways to ensure employees continue to share information.
Storytelling, for example, brings out multi-dimensional concepts about each individual’s sales practices and allows tactical information to be shared in an easy-to-digest format.
Similarly, conduct conversational interviews where you invite your top knowledge holders to share best practices, go-to resources, and how they overcame objections.
Record and transcribe these interviews to document them in the next step.
The best way to continuously capture tribal knowledge is to document it as you go. That way, you provide your sales teams with a ready-to-use blueprint to carry out sales processes.
You can turn tribal knowledge into interactive visual guides, playbooks, presentations, and FAQs, or develop it into training materials.
For example, experienced account executives who have a better understanding of handling specific objections can document their insights in a sales playbook and help new hires sharpen their negotiation skills.
Integration of AI tools can transform the way information is stored, accessed, and used. They help sales teams streamline knowledge-sharing processes, improve decision-making, and boost overall productivity.
For example, an AI-powered digital assistant like Docket auto-captures tribal knowledge from data channels, such as Slack, emails, presentations, Google Drives, etc. It aims to access company-wide tribal knowledge by providing instant answers to sales rep queries, thus enhancing sales team productivity by making information more readily accessible.
Tactfully distributing tribal knowledge is as important as capturing it. Here are four strategies to get you started:
Start regular team huddles, lunch-and-learns, webinars, and “Ask an Expert” Q&A sessions with your sales teams.
For instance, sales onboarding can be a time-consuming process for fresh hires, but having a structured FAQ session where you bring in experts helps foster a knowledge-sharing culture from the get-go.
Pair new sales reps with seasoned sales experts to facilitate experiential, on-the-job learning. New reps can shadow experts to gain practical, hands-on knowledge, and get up to speed quickly.
Incentivize knowledge sharing to encourage experienced professionals to actively partake in mentorship and share their tactics, lesser-known sales hacks, strategies, and more. For example, offer them monetary bonuses based on a points-based system.
Collaborative tools like Slack channels, online forums, and discussion boards make it easier for your remote and in-office sales teams to brainstorm ideas and exchange information.
Leverage AI with tools like Docket that integrate your sales enablement tools with Slack to dig through your internal tribal knowledge and provide answers to queries on cue.
Up-to-date, refined tribal knowledge ensures sales reps don’t communicate outdated information to prospects. Some best practices to maintain tribal knowledge:
Encourage sales teams to review the current knowledge base and provide feedback monthly or quarterly. Conduct regular check-ins and team catch ups where subject matter experts review strategies.
You can also use customer feedback, including pain points and preferences to keep the tribal knowledge sources aligned with the latest market changes.
Assign dedicated content managers responsible for keeping the information current and accurate.
Track changes made to your knowledge sources via version control and ensure only the current version is accessed by sales reps.
Make peer-to-peer knowledge sharing a part and parcel of your ongoing training programs.
Conduct refreshers where you and the team review the changes in sales processes, market trends, and competitors.
Keep a check on your tribal knowledge-sharing initiatives by measuring their impact on your sales KPIs.
Track sales performance growth as a result of up-to-date tribal knowledge by measuring the total onboarding time, average deal closure rate, employee engagement rate, and sales cycle length.
Sales organizations overlooking tribal knowledge risk losing incredible insights that can propel their deals forward.
However, single handedly capturing, retaining, documenting, and disseminating tribal knowledge is no easy task.
Add an AI tool like Docket to unlock your hidden tribal knowledge and give your sales reps instant, accurate answers to win critical deals.
