At a recent sales-marketing meeting, one of our sales reps pointed out that he chose to create his own sales collateral. On being asked why, he simply said, “ ’Cause I don’t want to use collateral that doesn’t agree with my pitch and the client’s needs. What’s worse, it takes ages to find the right collateral. It’s difficult to find what I’m looking for.”
Did we let him create his own collateral after that?
As a matter of fact, we did.
However, before making this decision, we asked whether all our reps agreed with this observation. After a collective “yes” from the rest of the team, we knew we had to get to the bottom of the issue and do something about it.
This is what we found out
A majority of the sales reps avoid using the collateral provided by marketing
The reasons varied from lack of personalization to the irrelevancy of the messaging. While marketing is usually concerned with the overall look and feel of the sales assets, sales teams are generally more concerned about how the content of the brochure appeals to the specific prospect. When they see that the existing collateral doesn’t necessarily meet this requirement, they just brush it aside and go on to create their own sales collateral.
When doing this, there is a good chance that the sales rep will go bit too far with the customization and the collateral won’t match the rest of your assets.
Sales people cannot find collateral
That’s right. Your reps cannot find assets when they need them. Usually marketing and sales assets pass through a lot of hands and end up being duplicated. As a result, you have quite a few versions of any given asset. Also, since most people save their assets on individual drives, others may not have access to these assets when required. This can lead to a frustrated sales rep who decides to go ahead and create new ones.
Sales assets aren’t adequately customized
Sales people expect their assets to be personalized for their prospects at every stage of the buying cycle. Unlike marketing collateral, where customization can be limited to certain elements of the collateral, sales assets go far beyond that.
How to stop it?
For starters, you need to fix these collateral issues by intelligently managing your sales and marketing assets. Get your team to tag the assets with keywords or use meta-tags so that it is easy to find a specific collateral within the system. Describing your sales assets appropriately simplifies the process of searching and saves a lot of time for the finder.
Ensure that each piece of marketing or sales collateral is maintained within a central repository with suitable tagging, not on individual drives and hardware. This method is proven to have reduced the possibilities of asset duplication, and avoids errors and un-approved messaging.
Though you can do this on Google drive, for example, the difference between saving it on Google drive and in an asset management system is that the latter does more than just save it. In an asset management system, you can create collateral that’s word-based, image-based or a video. Furthermore, once you have used these assets to interact with your prospects, you can track how each of these assets perform and how your prospects responded to each one. This gives you a deeper insight into prospect behavior.
And lastly, give sales reps the freedom to customize. They know what their client’s needs are and want their collateral to reflect that. A smart sales enablement system that doubles as an asset manager can let your reps customize without altering your branding standards.
Combined, these prospect insight, asset performance and customization features give your reps the much needed freedom to create their own collateral without worrying the marketing team. Also, with a smart system it is much easier to find your collateral when you need it.
Implementing these procedures has aligned our sales-marketing teams, enabled sales to operate on their own (thus making them happier) and made the collateral creation procedure less messy and time consuming.
Maybe you should try the same and let us know how it worked for you?
