Knowledge Fragmentation and Its Impact on Enterprise Sales

As we all know, the key to a successful enterprise sale sits at the intersection of many teams. Sellers, Account Managers, Sales Development reps, Marketers, Data Analysts, and Product Managers all play a role. And they all hold different, critical pieces of the puzzle in terms of customer knowledge.

Do all these enterprise sales organizations have a CRM? Of course. But is all the intelligence related to the sale in the CRM? Definitely not. Anecdotally, I’ve heard estimates that 50% of customer data is scattered elsewhere throughout the organization. And that’s not to mention other sales enablement resources, marketing content, and product documentation that is stored on other drives or applications.

A true 360-degree view of the customer is critical for enterprise sellers to succeed. And as revenue targets keep increasing, frictionless access to important data and resources is more necessary — and challenging — than ever.

If you work in Sales Enablement, or Sales Operations, or Sales Management, or [enter your sales-adjacent department here], I’m guessing this sounds familiar.

Since I joined Seva a little over a month ago, I have had dozens of conversations with dozens of companies. Through these discovery meetings, I heard a uniformly consistent frustration from customer-facing teams, echoing the scenario that I have outlined above. The specific pain points are falling into three major categories:

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1. Onboarding: Sales managers want to get their new hires out in the field so they can start selling. When it comes to sales onboarding, time literally is money — hence why many companies are mandating that ‘ramp-up’ windows decrease to 30–60 days (from a typical 90). A huge obstacle in this effort, however, is providing new sellers a clear picture of the accounts they’ll be taking on, especially if they’re inheriting them from a former team member. Old emails, decks, proposals, one-sheets, and call notes are not in one place, yet all of it is crucial for understanding how to approach the account.

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2. Enablement: Studies have shown that a large portion of sales content goes unused. However, simultaneously, sellers view easy access to content as the number one hindrance to sales productivity. This disconnect is massive, and growing. Sales Enablement teams find it difficult to control content, monitor usage, and evaluate the effectiveness of what they provide.

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3. Cross-team collaboration: Account managers, customer success specialists, sales engineers, and product managers all work together on major accounts. Because work is happening quickly, and processes for knowledge management and information sharing are not formally institutionalized, key documents and customer intel are often lost, and proper sharing is inconsistent.

At Seva, we’re tackling these issues. As the work stack continues to grow, information fragmentation is getting worse. Our knowledge management platform combats this by unifying the myriad of cloud applications, and coalescing teams around the right pieces of content and data that are relevant to their jobs.

Do you struggle with these same challenges? If you’re interested in hearing more, please let us know.

We’re looking forward to listening, learning, and continuing to refine our product vision as we head into 2020, and sharing our takeaways as we go.

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