However, there is substantial progress toward KM in sales and marketing, Marcus says. In marketing, sophisticated business intelligence and other knowledge-intensive processes are fundamental requirements in campaign creation and support. Collaborative processes for knowledge dissemination are rapidly emerging in sales and support, and e-learning is becoming an essential part of sales team support, according to Marcus.

Marcus also states that sales and marketing is a hotbed for KM systems, since customer data, as well as e-learning initiatives, rely on integral data that needs to be well-managed.

Over time CRM should integrate sophisticated KM across all the CRM domains: marketing, sales, and service. These knowledge-intensive investments can return both tangible and intangible business value. "In marketing, KM will enable more effective reuse of internal knowledge, around and within high-value marketing resource management processes, and is key to driving broad marketing user adoption and ongoing utilization," Marcus says.

Companies looking to begin a KM project, according to Marcus, need to first assess their infrastructure and personnel to find out where the important date and process knowledge is kept. "Important knowledge is still in heads and hard drives a lot of the time," Marcus says.

The next steps, according to Marcus, are doing gap analysis to discover where the company wants to be KM-wise, and to see what technology and process gaps need to be filled. "At this time, some effective moves like creating who-to-call lists and forming a directory of experts for certain business processes is helpful," he says. Finally, companies should look to integrate KM applications into the CRM system and create a self-repeating system of positive data flow throughout the company, Marcus says.