In sales, your team is constantly learning new things. They pick up valuable insights about prospects, develop new strategies, and become more knowledgeable about the ever-changing market. If you don’t know how to document all those lessons, you’re missing out on continuous opportunities for improvement.
It doesn’t matter how experienced your team is; there’s always room to get better. Every missed sale and failed pitch is an opportunity for growth. But if you’re not documenting those moments, they become nothing more than fleeting experiences. That’s why capturing lessons learned through formal reports and accessible databases is crucial.
The concept of capturing and documenting lessons learned comes from the world of project management. It’s a technique that leaders often use at the end of a project to reflect on experiences. The goal is to make the entire project team feel heard, compile lessons into a project management body of knowledge, and avoid mistakes in future projects.
Those same concepts apply to sales, turning every experience into teachable moments that continue to push your team further than ever before.
Why Are Lessons Learned Reports Valuable for Sales Teams?
The task of recording and applying lessons learned often falls upon project managers and leads. But it applies to sales departments, too.
A detailed report about gathered information, positive experiences, and even negative observations can help your team reach its full potential. Sales are ever evolving. The market is constantly changing, and every customer brings something new to the table. It’s a brand-new experience for your sales representatives whenever they pursue a lead. The information they obtain throughout the sales cycle is valuable, so why not put it to good use?
Lessons learned reports help your sales force build upon past experiences. They can learn from failures, use the newly obtained information to close deals, and apply every lesson to develop new strategies that lead to victory. Every lesson matters! When things go well, you can use lessons to replicate wins. When you encounter a project failure, team members can correct past mistakes, find the root cause of the loss, avoid repeats, and improve future project work.
There’s so much information to gain from documenting lessons learned. Instead of letting those important moments pass, you can capture them and turn every experience into an actionable blueprint for continued growth and success. Ultimately, having a knowledge base can empower your team and equip them with the insight they need to close deals faster and more efficiently than ever before.
Five Simple Steps to Document Sales Lessons Learned
Ready to start capturing lessons and putting them to good use? Documenting lessons seems complex, especially if you’re busy with current projects and sales cycles. But it’s easier than you think, and the work you put in now can continue to pay off for years.
Follow these five steps, and you can build a knowledge base of lessons learned that empowers your team as they sell their way to success.
1. Recognize Valuable Sales Knowledge
The first step is to recognize the knowledge that’s worth capturing. There’s plenty of insight to gain, and you can find valuable information from some of the most unassuming places. The most noticeable source of sales knowledge comes from success. Analyzing big wins can inspire your team to replicate the results using similar strategies.
However, there’s more valuable sales knowledge beyond the wins. Failures can become teachable moments, too. Negative experiences help you identify weaknesses, restrategize, and avoid repeating mistakes. The same goes for new opportunities and sales obstacles your team must overcome.
Recognizing capture-worthy sales knowledge can happen at any point during the sales process. Individual reps can note lessons during the post-call process and after closing deals, for instance. You can also have lessons learned sessions where you discuss new sales knowledge, formulate future project plans, and discuss experiences as a group. Enablement platforms like Flockjay can also provide prompts to gather information as you use sales content and tools.
2. Record the Learned Lesson, Ideally with a Formal Template
The next step is to record lessons for future reference. There are many ways to do this, but best practices involve formal templates. A lessons learned template allows you to organize and aggregate information into a searchable database. Randomly written notes and documents on a shared drive can be helpful, but a lack of formalized documentation makes it more difficult for your team to use lessons for future use.
A template ensures that every tidbit of knowledge is easy to understand, document, store, and surface. It also paves the way for future analysis, helping you turn those lessons into actionable insights and sales blueprints. You may further formalize information by transforming what your team learned into impactful sales content.
3. Share New Sales Content With the Right People
Lessons learned are only helpful if they’re available to the right people. From day one, the information must be accessible to sales representatives and managers. However, it should also be open to sales enablement teams. Remember: The goal is to turn those lessons into usable insights and strategies. Enablement teams can do that, putting everything your representatives learn to good use.
Ideally, you’ll use your sales content management software to improve real-time accessibility across the board. It’s also wise to encourage peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, making it easy for reps to spread the knowledge and win together.
4. Organize Resources in a Lessons Learned Database
Over time, you’ll gather a wealth of knowledge and formally document a treasure trove of insights. Eventually, you’ll want to organize that information into a lessons learned database.
A database dramatically improves accessibility. Reps, managers, and enablement professionals can refer to the database to find relevant information on the fly. This step is about consolidating lessons for easy analysis, presentation, and reflection. You want those lessons readily available to everyone who needs them, positioning your team to learn and soar.
5. Surface Valuable Sales Knowledge at the Right Time
Having a database of lessons available can make all the difference. But you must surface those insights at just the right time to see the best results. Shared knowledge will have the most impact when it’s directly relevant to the challenges your team faces. It’s that “Aha!” moment that spurs your sales reps to find helpful solutions when they need them most.
Platforms like Flockjay make surfacing insights a breeze. With Flockjay, sales leaders can spotlight the best lessons and most impressive winning moments. Doing so makes it easy to implement successful strategies across your organization, retaining knowledge and paving the way for even more wins.
Capture, Structure, and Surface Sales Knowledge With Flockjay
Empower your sales reps to capitalize on past successes and build upon a continued legacy of wins. Every engagement comes with new lessons that will shape the next experience. With Flockjay, you can capture them all and never lose another game-changing insight again.
Turn knowledge into power and give your team the blueprint to success! The Flockjay platform can ensure sales readiness and help your reps take flight. It’s a powerful piece of enablement software that can turn successes and failures into lessons that make your sales team soar.
