Current state - most teams rely on herd knowledge, contained in their most senior team members heads

Most teams relying on herd knowledge.

• Director - ‘Within my region, SEs often asking in Slack “Has anyone done this before” as no systematised way to surface information”

• Director “Loss reasons and retrospectives would be nice. The reality is we don’t do them. We are good at sharing wins &w in stories, but notoriously bad at talking about learnings’

• Manager “Our sales and SEs are on different tools. Notes are scattered across Google Docs, CRMs, Slack, and memory. It’s not that we don’t have the learnings - it’s that no one sees them when it matters.”

• Director ‘We repeat past mistakes as learnings are scattered inaccessible when needed. 100% thousand percent. We step in our own shit constantly. Constantly.

• Director ‘New people don’t know what old people [know]. And there's a lot of information stuck in people's heads. And the old people that do know what they’re doing forget stuff.”

• VP - “We don’t really do retros. Today it lives in the heads of certain people who I'm going to say are trusted to be able to identify those flags and I'm lucky enough to be one of them. But there's not a lot of them in the leadership team that are trusted to have that discretion to check all those.”

• Director ‘“We have a lot of onboarding, but it’s all over the place. It’s very, watch a video, take a, take a call, like, you know, take a test and then it’s like, it’s helpful, but it’s not, it’s not real world, like information. They only get really onboarded [onto the important things’ once they get thrown into deals and have to ask, which is like I feel like the worst thing to do.”

Most teams have some sort of source of truth that goes out of date

• Director - “I’d love if we could share our learnings a bit more across the team. ie everything going in Confluence. But people forget to update it and then the information isn’t surfaced when needed”

• Director - “Our learnings are fragmented and everywhere. In slack, some recorded team calls. Someone takes on a project to consolidate it every year in Confluence. But bythe time we look at it, the produt doesn’t even look like this any more”

• Manager - ‘There is an effort to use Confluence for situational types of... knowledge transfer. Somebody will go through and put some super detailed thing together... and then that person never touches it again. Six months down the road like half of it is irrelevant now. Then nobody goes back and updates it. Everybody's just learning off this crap information from a year ago.”

• Director ‘We record calls, we put them in a confluence, we put pages together… all that stuff lives in places, but nobody ever goes and reads it.”

And mistakes get repeated:

• Director - “When larger deals go wrong, we try to do a post-mortem. How could we do it better. Its then shared out on Slack to the wider team. But sometimes you still see another SE will make that literally the exact same mistake, despite the fact that you've shared what not to do. So that's kind of part of the headache.”

• Sr Manager - ‘The info in our Confluence is rarely surfaced when needed. I need to rely on people going & proactively reading it’

• Manager ‘But because there were zoom recordings, because it was probably long content, it wasn't digestible enough quickly. Most of the scenarios like where SEs need that, I have a demo tomorrow, I need that. Unless someone really finds a time that I might do some training today, self learning today, I don't feel like it ever, ever happened or they’e ever really used it.”

Some things that are (kind of) working

Some people solved partly with either project managers or sales enablement.

• Manager - “We had a program manager who was running the learning sessions on a weekly basis and she was documenting it as a part of that Confluence repository. That became the go-to place. [..] This was an improvement, but we still repeated some mistakes that were contained in that knowledge base even though it was up to date’

• IC - ‘“So we have some meetings where we do knowledge sharing and also we’re doing sessions where sales enablement will do a deepdive on a certain use case to share learnings. But I basically the best knowledge I’ve got was just by like asking colleagues, not by expecting there to be a session on this use case.”⁠

A few teams use learning management systems

• Director - “we use an LMS to hold some learnings, which especially new hires go through, but it has to be generic and not tied to any deals so limits its usefulness.”

Some teams have implemented an AI search across their calls and Slack

• Director “We’ve implemented Glean with Slaesforce, Slack & email - yesterday I asked enablement for a report on loss reasons and they summarised the info over the past 30 days. It doesn’t solve with solving things on future deals, but helps with extracting insights across deals”

Some teams build out lists of question to ask, embedding learnings in these (but only applicable for simpler or single-product companies):

• SE Lead - “There is in the, in the list of questions that we ask the our customers and that should prompt say oh, if you’re asking this question then as you know that the answer if it’s no whatever, then there’s a problem there.””

• Manager “We use a workflow template that’s got all our usual red and orange flags built in—stuff that’s tripped us up before or caused churn down the line. So when we’re scoping a deal, we’re not just ticking boxes; we’re making sure we talk through those risk areas with the customer. If it’s an orange flag, we let them know and discuss it. If it’s red, we get them to acknowledge the risk and document it before we go any further. That way, what we’ve learned from past deals actually shapes how we approach new ones.”

Smaller teams focus on sharing learnings regularly on team meetings:

• IC ‘There’s just seven of us on the team. We get together or 30 minutes every week and discuss these things face to face.”