Design of a Strategic Knowledge Management Model to Evaluate Sales Growth in SMEs

Introduction

The increasing importance of knowledge as an intangible asset or intellectual capital (CI) for companies, has encouraged managers to pay greater attention to knowledge management (KM) strategies (Hansen, Nohria & Tierney, 1999; Earl, 2001), allowing companies to capture, conserve, organize and manage the knowledge and experiences that are generated, for further dissemination and maintenance of sustainable development, through the use of the acquired IC (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; Pasternack & Viscio,1998; Pfeffer & Sutton, 1999; Ruggles & Holtshouse, 1999).

Although there is evidence that large companies have invested in initiatives and information systems for KM, which enables them acquiring and improving the use of IC (Sarvary, 1999). However, previous studies have shown that in many SMEs there is an absence of systematic KM (McAdam & Reid, 2001: Wong & Aspinwall, 2005). This fact is supported on some other studies that have identified some factors leading to this absence, such as SME managers assume a central position (Bridge, O’Neill & Cromie, 2003), thus limiting the planning and decision-making processes to a single person (Culkin & Smith, 2000). Therefore, it is shown that some SMEs fail to identify knowledge as an intangible business asset. Which like any other asset, must be valued, processed and be systematically organized, since only people (such as competitors, customers, suppliers, vendors, etc.) are the only agents capable of learning and creating knowledge in an organization, through their individual and collective experience.

Therefore it could be inferred that companies, whether large or small must have continuous learning as a process for the organization to identify its best practices, in order to avoid repeating errors and producing a decrease in entropy (Sharma et al., 2007). Senge (1990) states that organizational learning occurs when people frequently increase their ability to create in order to achieve objectives, designing new patterns for distributing thought and also, where people are continuously learning observing the whole process. In addition to that, Senge affirms that when an organization learns, it can be defined as groups of people that collaborate with each other, to collectively strengthen their capacities and achieve truly important results. According to this, the learning process must start from management, identifying knowledge as a critical element in business strategies. Fernández, Junquera & Del Brio (2009) pointed out that the competitive advantage is not within the individual as a generator and a possessor of knowledge, but in the ability of the company to transfer personal knowledge to different contexts, integrating it into the routines and foundations of the organization, in order to improve its innovative capacity, to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Consequently, the success of business learning is based on the transformation of the knowledge related to human and relational capital (tacit knowledge) into knowledge of structural capital (explicit knowledge) (Sharma et al., 2007).

Consequently, being business success directly related to growth, especially to sales growth, this responsibility is in general delegated to the marketing department, which is responsible for developing and implementing strategies necessary to achieve the company's objectives; but: Is it possible to measure the level of growth in sales of an SME through the implementation of a KM strategy? The objective of this paper is to answer this question, through the study of the variables that intervene in the generation of knowledge in the marketing area, specifically in the internal KM between the sellers and the management personnel, proposing a KM model that can be implemented by the management personnel.