Knowledge Management Management

Five Hints For Managing Sales Opportunities

As president of KnowledgeFarm, a knowledge management consulting firm, Peter Dorfman understands KM's potential for helping agents find sales potential in even the most basic communications with customers. Here are his suggestions for formulating your KM sales strategy.

1. If KM contributes to the upsell process, you also need to implement customer relationship management tools successfully. The most basic concept in CRM is this: Everyone who has customer contact has the same view of the customer. And everyone is a potential sales agent, including people whose fundamental responsibility is support. If your CRM platform cannot support this ideal, scrap it and start over.

2. Conceptually, the cross-sell or upsell decision is no different from problem diagnosis and resolution. You analyze a situation, map it to past experiences and offer a solution. It just happens to be one that includes a revenue-generating opportunity.

3. The knowledge capture and retrieval tools that are used for problem resolution in customer support can be applied easily to upsell situations. The primary difference is in the content and the metrics, not the mechanics of the customer interaction or the retrieval process.

4. What stops many organizations from applying these KM techniques to the upsell process is the way they staff their call centers. Only designated agents are empowered to recognize and act on selling opportunities. That's mostly because of turf battles over who should have access to the commission pool. If all agents can refer customers to sales, should all agents expect a share of commissions? This issue is real, but finding a way around it does not have to be difficult or divisive.

5. What works for the call center should work for Web-based customer self-help. If customers can find solutions to problems through an on-line knowledge base, they should just as easily be able to identify needs that can be met by upgrading their products or services, or by buying something else from you. The solutions in your knowledge base should guide them quickly and easily to an agent who can take their orders.