A strong knowledge base tells your customers, your industry, and the search engines that you’re an authority in your field. It’s also especially useful in regards to sales enablement. While it might be time-intensive, putting together a knowledge base article on a topic related to the product or service you offer allows your sales team to do their jobs more efficiently. And when your sales team is enabled, you get more deals past the finish line — which in turn benefits your entire organization.

Not convinced yet that it’s worth the effort? Keep reading to learn more about what constitutes an effective knowledge base, how it can help your prospects, and your sales team.

4 Factors of A Strong Knowledge Base

The reason for building a conversion-driven knowledge base is time-intensive is because it has to be comprehensive if it’s going to be impactful. It also has to be easy for prospects to find.

As a way to inform your knowledge base strategy, think of it as a place on your site where prospects can go to get answers to the questions that they would normally reach out to your sales team for. Similar to an FAQ page but broader, and with a bit more depth. The base should include enough information to guide prospects to the next stage of the funnel. It’s not a replacement for other marketing and sales materials, but a supplement.

To ensure your knowledge base hits the right marks, make sure it:

• Is informative
• Covers a lot of ground
• Touches on various areas within your service or product offering
• Can be easily found on your site, ideally within its own designated area

It’s obviously very important to build your knowledge base right. Below, we’ll get into the specifics.

How a Knowledge Base Helps Prospects

To be useful as a sales enablement tool, your knowledge base has to benefit your prospects in some way directly. And from the outset, it does, serving as a reliable place where prospects can go when they need to pull information related to specific topics quickly.

Having this resource means that your audience doesn’t have to wait for direct communication when they have a question. Instead of waiting around for customer support or an account manager, prospects can just read one of the many resources available to them and decide how they want to proceed from there. The result is better educated, better-qualified prospects, and a tool that benefits sales as much as it does marketing.

How a Knowledge Base Helps Your Sales Team

Sales professionals are busy, and they’re often juggling a lot of prospects and a lot of prospect needs at once. And just as your knowledge base serves as a one-stop-shop for prospects to get answers to their questions, it’s also a resource that your sales team can use to do the same. Referencing a comprehensive knowledge base and/or sending it to the prospect is often much more valuable than just sending singular pieces of content.

Making it simple for your sales team to use the content you’re creating is crucial since otherwise, they’ll just be messaging you all day, asking if you know where the content is that they’re looking for. A knowledge base takes the guesswork out of curating content for specific prospect needs, allowing your sales team to grab what they need when they need it quickly. And since a knowledge base is sectioned off based on category, a rep doesn’t have to look hard to grab personalized content that targets unique objectives.

A knowledge base also helps your sales team re-engage when necessary by providing plenty of options for a quick touch-base with a dormant lead. If a rep hasn’t heard from a particular lead in a while, they can simply pull a piece of content from the knowledge base and use it to pick the conversation back up where it left off.

Is Your Knowledge Base Hitting the Mark?

As with most things in marketing, it never hurts to take a step back and re-evaluate your existing knowledge base. Here’s a quick overview that you can use to drive your strategy and ensure your knowledge base makes an impact:

• Make sure all articles tie back to one pillar topic
• Keep titles simple and straightforward
• Keep the content itself short and concise; if you need to elaborate, create a blog article on the topic and link to it
• Add visuals and videos, and don’t forget to include all relevant tags and alt text
• Run articles by others from your marketing and sales team to get another set of eyes on the page and ensure there are no obvious informational gaps

Put in the time now with your knowledge base, and you should see a lot of benefits later on. And as always, check back regularly to ensure that it’s still performing how you want it to.