Sales enablement involves helping your salespeople sell more by providing them with the tools and resources they need to reach out to their prospects and close deals effectively. A key element in this scheme of things is–sales and marketing assets. For years, since the inception of the concept of sales enablement, industry experts have been stressing the need for sales and marketing alignment. Seamless integration of sales and marketing functions has been recognized as a must-have for successful sales enablement. This blogpost discusses how Asset Management Software resolves 2 major marketing challenges-
Challenge #1- Brand distortion
Lack of personalized sales materials often leads to salespeople personalizing them –unauthorized– in a bid to add a personal touch to their interaction with prospects. When salespeople don’t have access to the kind of content they want, they end up creating their own content or editing the one provided to them by the corporate marketing team to suit their requirements. End result: different salespeople, each with ‘self-customized’ with pitches, presentations and sales materials which disrupt the uniform message and tone of the company, leading to incorrect brand portrayal.
Solution- An asset management software can reduce incorrect messaging and branding errors
Using an asset management software, the corporate marketing department can restrict the salespeople from making edits to the collateral provided to them. They can also limit access to older versions of assets thus ensuring only the most recent, up-to-date assets are accessed and shared by salespeople. This also ensures a single voice for the brand.
Challenge #2- Asset usage and performance visibility-the ultimate black hole
When content is shared via cloud-based drives or emails, corporate marketing team and sales managers have no visibility into usage of assets. They don’t know if the assets created by them were actually used by the sales team and if yes, then what was the response to them. As a result, corporate marketing department churns out asset after asset based on their understanding of what the sales team needs, while they may just be piling up somewhere, untouched by sales.
Unlike shared drives and emails, asset management software has the capability to constantly track asset usage and procure direct and indirect feedback on asset usefulness from salespeople and the end audience. By offering tools to procure feedback from salespeople on the assets provided to them, asset management software can improve the quality and relevance of assets provided by marketing to sales.
A solid asset management software is the backbone of sales, channel and marketing enablement because at the end of the day it is what keeps your brand safe. An asset management software works hard to ensure your branding and messaging stays intact, no matter how widespread your sales networks are. It plays a key role in aligning your marketing and sales departments and helps them understand each other’s expectations and meet them correctly.
