INBOX INSIGHTS: The Case for Knowledge Blocks, Making Events Valuable (2025-10-29) - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

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INBOX INSIGHTS: The Case for Knowledge Blocks, Making Events Valuable (2025-10-29)

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The Case for Knowledge Blocks

Last week, I spent several hours having a conversation with myself, downloading everything I know about software development, project management, quality assurance, stakeholder management, and requirements gathering.

Yep, you read that right. I literally sat there and brain-dumped two decades of SDLC knowledge, best practices, hard-won lessons about database architecture, UI design principles, QA testing protocols, and every agile vs. waterfall battle scar I’ve collected. Then I gave that raw transcript to generative AI, tested the heck out of it—asking questions, challenging responses, refining instructions—until I had what basically amounts to a virtual version of me as a Business Analyst that the team could access 24/7.

Why would I do this? Because while those focus areas are my expertise, it’s not my current role. And I kept watching team members get stuck waiting for answers that I used to provide. Classic knowledge bottleneck.

The result? Chris loves it. (I’m also fairly certain he’s created a Katie-CEO stand-in that’s significantly meaner than I actually am, but that’s a different conversation.)

What the Heck Are Knowledge Blocks?

Knowledge blocks are structured downloads of everything someone knows about a specific topic, captured in a way that can be turned into a custom AI assistant.

You don’t have to create an interactive virtual version right away. Knowledge blocks work as standalone documentation too. But when you’re ready, they transform into specialized consultants who:

Never sleep or take vacation
Remember every conversation
Respond instantly
Cost nothing after the initial setup

But unlike generic AI, these custom gems or GPTs are trained on YOUR specific expertise, YOUR company’s methodologies, YOUR industry context.

Why This Actually Matters (Especially Now)

Most organizations are sitting on massive knowledge gaps they don’t even realize they have.

What happens when your senior developer is out for two weeks? Your project manager leaves suddenly? Your newest team member needs to ramp up but everyone’s slammed? You’re scaling and can’t afford to hire another expert yet?

Traditionally, we’ve tried to solve this with documentation. And look, I love good documentation. But documentation is static, hard to search, rarely updated, and let’s be honest—nobody reads it.

Knowledge blocks are different because they can be interactive. They answer specific questions. They walk people through processes. They explain the “why” behind the “what.”

The Real Value Isn’t What You Think

When I first mentioned this to clients, most jumped to: “Oh, so it’s about replacing people?”

No. Hard stop.

This is about:

1. Knowledge preservation – What happens to your institutional knowledge when people leave? Usually it walks out the door with them. Now it doesn’t have to.

2. Scaling expertise – I can only talk to one person at a time. My BA gem? It can handle the entire team simultaneously.

3. Reducing bottlenecks – How many hours are wasted waiting for Subject Matter Experts to respond to emails? How many decisions are delayed?

4. Consistent quality – Everyone gets the same level of expertise, not whatever version they receive depending on how busy you are when they ask.

5. Empowering autonomy – People can self-serve answers and move forward without waiting, which builds confidence and speeds up delivery.

The Foundation: Knowledge Blocks Every Company Needs

Before you start creating specialized role-based knowledge blocks, there are foundational ones that every company should build first. Think of these as your organizational operating system.

Your Company Knowledge Block: This isn’t your generic “About Us” page. This is the deep version—your origin story, why you exist, what problems you solve, your values and how you actually live them (not just what’s on the wall), how decisions get made, your company culture, and the unwritten rules that make your organization work. New hires should be able to read this and understand not just what you do, but how and why you do it.

Your Products/Services Knowledge Block: Everything about what you sell. Features, benefits, use cases, pricing structures, common objections, and how to address them, success stories, what makes you different from competitors, and crucially—what you DON’T do. This eliminates the game of telephone that happens when someone three degrees removed from the product team tries to explain your offering.

Your Sales Approach Knowledge Block: How you actually sell. Your sales process, qualification criteria, typical sales cycle length, common deal structures, when to discount (and when not to), how to handle specific objections, your CRM process, follow-up cadence, and the questions you ask prospects. This standardizes your approach while preserving what works.

Your Marketing Approach Knowledge Block: Your brand voice, messaging frameworks, content strategy, channel mix, what’s worked (and what hasn’t), campaign processes, approval workflows, design guidelines, and how marketing and sales work together. This keeps your brand consistent even as team members come and go.

Your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) Knowledge Block: Who you serve, who you don’t serve, the characteristics of your best customers, their pain points, how they make decisions, what success looks like for them, and red flags that indicate a bad fit. This helps everyone from sales to customer success to product development stay aligned on who you’re building for.

Your Operations Knowledge Block: How stuff actually gets done. Project management methodology, communication protocols, meeting structures, decision-making frameworks, tool stack and why you chose each tool, vendor relationships, and the processes that keep things running. This is the stuff people usually have to learn through osmosis—which is wildly inefficient.

Here’s why these matter more than you think: every single question a new hire asks in their first 90 days? It’s probably answered in one of these blocks. Every time someone gives a prospect inconsistent information? It’s because these blocks don’t exist or aren’t accessible. Every “let me check with someone” moment is time wasted that could be spent moving forward.

Plus, when you build these foundational blocks first, creating specialized role-based ones becomes easier because you’re not re-explaining company basics every time.

The Process I Use

Creating effective knowledge blocks isn’t just dumping information into AI and hoping for the best. Here’s my approach:

Start with a specific domain – Don’t try to capture everything someone knows. Pick one area. For me, it was specifically Business Analysis in software development—not marketing analytics, not general business strategy, not CEO decision-making.

Structure the knowledge dump – I organized mine around core concepts and definitions, methodologies and frameworks, common scenarios and how to handle them, decision-making criteria, red flags and what to avoid, and tools and templates.

Layer in research and best practices – Your personal knowledge + established industry standards = comprehensive resource. I supplemented my experience with current SDLC best practices to make sure I wasn’t just creating an echo chamber of my own biases.

Test ruthlessly – This is where most people stop too soon. I asked that gem probably 50+ questions, from basic to complex, including edge cases and scenarios I knew were tricky. Every time the response was off, I refined the instructions.

Get real users involved – I didn’t just declare it done and walk away. I rolled it out to the team, asked for feedback, watched how they used it, and made adjustments.

Handling the Objections

“Won’t this make people lazy?” Having access to expertise doesn’t make people lazy. Having to wait three days for a simple answer makes people frustrated. There’s a difference.

“What about confidential information?” Valid concern. Don’t put confidential info in there. These blocks should contain methodologies, frameworks, and general expertise—not proprietary data or trade secrets.

“Isn’t this just fancy documentation?” Documentation tells you what something is. These blocks can have conversations, ask clarifying questions, and adapt their responses based on context. That’s not documentation; that’s consultation.

“What if the AI gives wrong information?” That’s why you test extensively. It’s why you frame these as tools that augment human decision-making, not replace it. The block can guide someone through a process, but a human still needs to apply judgment.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Since rolling out the BA gem, here’s what’s changed:

The team asks it questions about requirements gathering, user story formatting, and when to push back on scope creep. They get immediate, consistent responses based on how I’d actually handle those situations.

Does it answer everything perfectly? Nope. Sometimes they still need to pull me in. But now they come to me with more specific questions, having already worked through the basics. That’s more efficient for everyone.

The Bottom Line

You’re going to lose people. They’ll leave your company, retire, get promoted, move to different roles. That’s inevitable.

What’s not inevitable is losing everything they know when they go.

Knowledge blocks aren’t about replacing humans. They’re about multiplying expertise, breaking bottlenecks, and building institutional knowledge that sticks around.

Start with the foundational blocks—company, products, sales, marketing, ICPs, operations. These alone will transform your onboarding and eliminate countless “who knows how to do this?” moments.

Then identify one critical knowledge gap. One area where people are constantly waiting for answers. One role where expertise is concentrated in too few people.

Create a knowledge block. Test it. Refine it. Deploy it.

Then watch what happens when your team can move forward instead of waiting.

What knowledge in your organization is trapped in someone’s head right now? That’s your starting point. Reply to this email or join our free Slack group, Analytics for Marketers.

– Katie Robbert, CEO

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In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss creating reports that tell a story and drive action using user stories and frameworks.

You will understand why data dumping onto a stakeholder’s desk fails and how to gather precise reporting requirements immediately. You will discover powerful frameworks, including the SAINT model, that help you move from basic analysis to crucial, actionable decisions. You will gain strategies for anticipating executive questions and delivering a clear, consistent narrative throughout your entire report. You will explore innovative ways to use artificial intelligence as a thought partner to refine your analysis and structure perfect reports. Stop wasting time and start creating reports that generate real business results. Watch now!

Watch/listen to this episode of In-Ear Insights here »

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In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s talk about a follow-up to last week’s column – what are the things that we do to make sessions valuable for attendees at conferences?

Since it is still conference season, by the time you’re reading this, I’ve been in London and I’ve conducted our first full-day Trust Insights event – Agenda AI for B2B Marketing – spending time with 25 people in a room. How do we make this valuable? How do we make any conference session valuable?

Last week we talked about the Marketing AI Conference, MAICON, and how we design and structure our workshops and sessions to be valuable for attendees. People need to learn in the moment, but they also need opportunities to network, have real conversations, and experience as much as possible. Reading teaches, listening teaches, but nothing compares to learning by doing. Whenever possible, foster hands-on learning experiences. Learning by doing with others is even more powerful because collaboration and group problem-solving trigger positive neurotransmitters in our brains – we’re fundamentally social creatures who learn best together.

So how do you do this? We start, of course, with the 5P framework. We figure out what is the purpose of the session or workshop or keynote. Who are the people involved? Who’s in the audience? We build detailed ideal customer profiles. We construct these profiles for the very best audiences and the highest-value attendees. We gather data from social media, conference registrations, and past interactions. We gather data from in-person conversations and networking. We talk directly to people about their interests. We look carefully at who wants follow-ups from us and what they’re interested in. We use all that data to build rich ideal customer profiles because someone who wants a follow-up from us clearly sees value in what we do, and they naturally become part of an ideal customer profile for the conference. That understanding informs our people strategy.

Our process is to identify the specific content that people need the most based on their unique ideal customer profile and their stated interests. We want to present information and tools that people will find genuinely valuable and immediately useful. Ideal customer profiles based on real people and real data are incredibly helpful for this, allowing us to say with confidence, “This is what this person probably needs because this is what they’ve told us they care about.”

Then the platforms – what tools do you need to create something valuable? And the performance – how do you know it was valuable? Immediate feedback is telling: “That was a great session, I learned a lot,” “I love all the takeaways.” That information shows us how well a session resonated. Longer-term performance metrics matter too: did we generate business from it? For us as a company, that’s ultimately the purpose. The audience’s purpose is to skill up. Our purpose is to generate new business – beyond the fun, there’s real business value.

Our big focus has always been teaching, and teaching very information-dense sessions. There’s a reason for this. One of the tenets of good presentation is to not overload your audience. Expert public speaking instructors like Tamsen Webster and Michael Port emphasize the “one big idea” TED Talk approach. That works for certain talks. For workshops or applied AI sessions, that approach doesn’t fit.

We teach the way I learned from my martial arts instructors: present as many techniques as possible in a short time, since students may not return for another year or two. With sufficient material to practice, they can develop skills independently. This isn’t best practice for a “one big idea” approach, but it’s ideal for maximizing value for students.

Obviously, this approach causes information overload. After a certain point, people can’t consume much more. That’s why we reassure people at the start: “This talk is being recorded. You’ll get the audio, slides, transcript, and all the materials.” But people are busy. In the session, you think, “Yes, I’ll use this. I’ll invest the time.” Back at the office, your to-do list explodes. Those passive takeaways collect dust. They become shelfware. This is human nature in our information-overloaded world.

This brings us to what additional active learning tools we can provide to maximize your conference experience. Because we’re already creating all the information products anyway – the transcript, the audio, the video, the screen share, all those materials – we realized generative AI can help us create even more value for you.

There are two different avenues to provide even more value.

First, if a conference talk covers a high-value process, we can turn it into a GPT or Gem. For example, creating a great Gemini 2.0 Flash prompt for video generation is perfect for this approach. We build a GPT that takes your initial prompt, asks follow-up questions, and generates a high-quality 2.0 Flash prompt. This turns learning into action—instead of trying to remember how to do it, you have a practical tool.

The second aspect is the professional development piece, where we take all the conference proceedings from our session and upload them into Notebook LM. We pre-generate an audio overview for you, pre-generate a video overview of the key concepts, and pre-generate an interactive mind map of the material structure. This gives you multiple ways to consume the content initially. But then comes the real power: you can take that notebook and ask it specific questions. Because it’s drawing directly on the conference transcript, the slides, and all the materials from our session, you can ask it questions as though you were sitting in the room with us having a conversation. If we covered the information in the session, it’s your way to get at the specific piece of information exactly as we originally delivered it.

You can say, “what did Katie say about how to set your purpose”? Or “what did Katie say about how to use an ideal customer profile in this”? That becomes very easy for you to ask follow-up questions, or to ask questions specific to your situation to say, you know what, we didn’t have time in the session to answer this question, but if you want to upload your own document into a copy of the notebook, you could. Or copy and paste stuff from a document into a prompt and say, “hey Chris and Katie, how would you have handled this particular instance”?

That’s how we provide value. It’s no longer a passive product collecting dust. It’s an endless QA session. With Notebook LM, if the information isn’t there, it can’t provide an answer. That’s fine. But if you attended and thought of a follow-up question, wanted us to explain something again, or needed advice tailored to your situation – that’s what these notebooks are for. They’re designed so the session never ends. The QA never ends. You can return anytime to extract exceptional value from it.

That’s the essence of how we approach teaching and designing our sessions, workshops, and keynotes. We want you to walk away with tactical, practical tools that genuinely help you do your job better—tools so valuable that you can’t help but say, “I need to return to this event to see Trust Insights again. I need to bring them in to do this type of training with my team.” That’s our goal as educators and practitioners. We’re direct about it: we want you to hire us to consult, teach, and develop processes that are specific to your organization’s unique needs.

We provide this value so when you pitch your leadership, you can say, “No other conference session gave me this much.” We also want to help the conference. We boost the conference’s reputation wherever we speak. We want attendees walking away thinking, “I have to return to this conference. That Trust Insights session was so good, I can’t miss this event next year.”

It’s mutually beneficial: when Trust Insights provides exceptional value and you return to the conference, it’s clear that our presence elevates the event. Conferences continue to bring us back because we deliver value that attendees don’t want to miss.

The key takeaway here: conference sessions, keynotes, and workshops are fundamentally about providing information in multiple different formats. Package content in as many ways as possible so you can enjoy and access it however you learn best. With generative AI tools at our disposal, we have essentially infinite ways to repackage information to match your unique learning style.

Almost every AI course is the same, conceptually. They show you how to prompt, how to set things up – the cooking equivalents of how to use a blender or how to cook a dish. These are foundation skills, and while they’re good and important, you know what’s missing from all of them? How to run a restaurant successfully. That’s the big miss. We’re so focused on the how that we completely lose sight of the why and the what.

This is why our new course, the AI-Ready Strategist, is different. It’s not a collection of prompting techniques or a set of recipes; it’s about why we do things with AI. AI strategy has nothing to do with prompting or the shiny object of the day — it has everything to do with extracting value from AI and avoiding preventable disasters. This course is for everyone in a decision-making capacity because it answers the questions almost every AI hype artist ignores: Why are you even considering AI in the first place? What will you do with it? If your AI strategy is the equivalent of obsessing over blenders while your steakhouse goes out of business, this is the course to get you back on course.

👉 Take this course now to become an AI leader

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Where can you find Trust Insights face-to-face?

Generative AI for B2B Marketers, London, October 2025
MarketingProfs B2B Forum, Boston, November 2025
MASFAA, Southbridge, November 2025
Social Media Marketing World, Anaheim, April 2026

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Imagine a world where your marketing strategies are supercharged by the most cutting-edge technology available – Generative AI. Generative AI has the potential to save you incredible amounts of time and money, and you have the opportunity to be at the forefront. Get up to speed on using generative AI in your business in a thoughtful way with our workshop offering, Generative AI for Marketers.

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