When a new client first starts working with you, they wonder who to call when this or that happens, or where to go to find a specific resource. Your prospects are also asking a lot of questions about pricing, features, services and more. So how do you answer all of these questions from various groups and stakeholders?
The simple answer is: leverage your company’s knowledge base.
At a recent DFW HubSpot User Group meeting, we had a great conversation about how a company can leverage information obtained from customer service representatives and use that to develop a company’s knowledge base and to use that in the content creation process. This is a great idea and a wonderful addition to some of the things that I have been writing about in terms of leveraging an organization’s knowledge base.
For starters, I have made it a policy that if a question has been asked more than once and I have had to create a lengthy and detailed email response to it, I am writing a blog post about it. It’s as simple as that. I have become steadfast in my belief that it’s important to write once and share with many. After seeing the same questions being asked repeatedly by clients and prospects, it makes much more sense to somehow archive your response and use it again and again and again.
That’s the beauty of taking your email response to a client or prospect and using it for content on your blog or within the sales process. Writing a blog post about a question that is often asked serves several purposes. Among those are developing more content for your website, answering important and frequently asked questions and revving up your website’s SEO. But leveraging your company’s knowledge base doesn’t end just by writing a publishing a blog post about the question. Far from it. It extends well into the sales process and gives your sales team some firepower to deal with the most common questions they receive in the sales process.
If you have dozens (or even just a few) salespeople who are answering the same questions over and over via email, you might as well capture those responses and archive them somewhere they can be used by other salespeople within the organization and improved. Most CRMs enable you to use this templated approach. You can write an email once and then pull it up from a list of available templates and then customize it as needed before sending. This way, instead of creating an email from scratch each time, the information can be leveraged across the organization.
These are the kinds of topics and items we talk about at the DFW HubSpot User Group meetings. If you are in the DFW area and have questions about HubSpot or any other topics related to inbound marketing, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. If you are in DFW, I hope you can make it to a DFW HubSpot User Group meeting sometime. Make sure to say “Hello” if you do.