Employee Knowledge: The New Corporate Asset

Much like standard corporate assets, like desks, buildings, and machinery, it is time that companies begin considering employee knowledge as a corporate asset. The seemingly disparate information that is rolling around in the heads of your employees about your company’s market, customers, and competitors, when collectively analyzed, has the opportunity to give you detailed, proactive insights not otherwise obtainable. One excellent way of harnessing this information is to develop an on-going employee knowledge transfer process specifically focused on your field sales and marketing teams.

 Having the ability to gather information on an on-going basis from the brains and experiences of all your employees would be extremely useful. Starting with employees that interface with the outside world on a regular basis is often the biggest “bang for your buck”.  Using your sales and marketing teams as your “field intelligence partners” allows you and your company to gain proactive information rapidly, many times that is not otherwise available. The old adage “you don’t know what you don’t know” applies here.

 I have found that having a formal process to collect market, customer, and competitive information from your sales and marketing teams involves very specific training and a very specific process.  For large companies or with companies with greater than 100 field employees, it becomes difficult to turn information into actionable intelligence if there is a significant amount of it coming in. Training your field intelligence partners on what to provide, and just as important, what not to provide is crucial for success. This includes training on legal and ethical considerations, such as the passing of documents marked confidential (example: sales person obtains a competitor’s pricing sheet from a client. Sheet is marked “confidential”).  In addition to training, having a very simple and easy to use process to regular submit information is just as important. Allowing information to be submitted using regular email as well as telephonically (even using a voicemail system) can be effective.

 One way to streamline this process is to create field “intelligence liaisons”. These are especially trained sales & marketing staff that provide on-going market & competitive information as well as can become the “go-to” person for specific information needs.  Another tactic that works is to have regional “intelligence roundtables” where you invite managers and directors (or your field liaisons) that contribute on a conference call every month on specific topics you have proactively provided to the team before the call.

 In my experience, it is important that there is an incentive beyond an “it’s your job” attitude in order for this process to work. Educating participants that the strategy will allow them to receive aggregated intelligence back to them as a reward is often plenty. I have also seen companies successfully use an annually president’s award for participation work effectively as well.

 I have seen and managed several systems like what I have described above with varying success. It comes down to the culture of the company, willingness of the employee to participate, and a very structured data collection system.