Your top salesperson is on the road, ready to meet with a high-value prospect. They walk in, shake hands, start chatting. Everything is going great! Until… They open up their briefcase and find a pile of outdated product brochures with only a limited selection of sales content. In the heat of the moment, they struggle to tailor their pitch to the prospect’s specific needs, and the conversation that started out with so much promise falls completely flat.
This is a scenario that plays out all too often for field sales teams. Your sellers already face a multitude of daily challenges trying to close deals while on the road. Unfortunately, managing sales content becomes another uphill battle as they lug around bulky materials, scramble for relevant content updates, and try to maintain brand consistency all while presenting on the go.
Today’s buying landscape demands more from sellers than a few outdated pamphlets. Field sellers must be able to adapt to the needs of each client they meet if they want to bring home deals consistently. A sales content management solution is the answer to these problems, catapulting your field teams into the modern age of sales and empowering them to succeed.
How Sales Content Chaos Hampers Field Teams
Sales content chaos thwarts your field teams in 3 big ways: outdated information, inconsistent branding, and lack of visibility. First up, let’s talk about those dusty old pamphlets. Many field sellers rely on printed materials to distribute content to buyers, but these materials often go out of date as soon as the ink dries. Not to mention, they’re an absolute pain to carry around. Some sellers might think they’ve solved the issue by converting them to digital assets instead. However, these become outdated just as quickly as their physical counterparts.
Depending on your industry, there can be real consequences to using outdated materials. Regulated industries like healthcare or food and beverages require up to date sales content. Outdated content could get you a big fine, so sending your sellers out with old materials isn’t a risk you should be willing to take.
Chaotic content also leads to inconsistent messaging and branding. If sellers can’t find what they need when they need it, they’ll create it on their own (and who can blame them). This is how you end up with Frankenstein sales decks, old graphics, and, for lack of a better phrase, downright lousy branding. Part of a seller’s job is to communicate the message of your brand, and they can’t do that efficiently if they’re fumbling to make up their own content on the spot.
But all this isn’t just bad for the sellers — it’s bad for the marketing teams too. As the old saying goes, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. When marketing and enablement teams can’t see what content is being used and, most importantly, what content is actually helping to close deals, they cannot develop new content or adapt marketing strategies to help sellers be more successful. This information is vital to enabling sellers to do their best whether they’re at the office or in the field.
Benefits of a Sales Content Management System for Field Sellers
So, how does a sales content management system solve these problems for field sellers and their enablement teams? Perhaps the most foundational benefit is that it acts as a single source of truth for all sales content. In this one centralized repository, sellers can access any piece of content they could possibly need at any time and from anywhere, enabling them to close deals faster. And you can rest assured that they’re using only on-brand, up-to-date content to do it. Some more advanced platforms even enable sellers to retrieve content while offline, which is important for field sellers who don’t always have access to Wi-Fi on-the-go.
Speaking of these on-the-go problems, are your field sellers responsible for representing hundreds of different products or product lines? As you might expect, it’s nearly impossible for even the most successful sellers to memorize and recite every detail about every offering during pitches. Sales content management systems eliminate the issue of information overload by allowing your field sellers to become product experts in an instant and be the trusted advisor every buyer deserves on their team.
And marketing teams stand to benefit too. With a sales content management system, marketers and sales leadership can have greater control over each potential buyer’s content experience. Say goodbye to rumpled brochures and typo-ridden presentations. Now, the content you worked hard to create can be delivered in a personalized, branded environment tailored to the buyer’s needs for a consistent and professional experience.
And, of course, one of the most important benefits of a sales content management system is its ability to provide data. Sellers and sales leadership can track content usage analytics such as:
- Whether buyers have opened or engaged with the content
- How long buyers spent reading the content
- Which pieces of content sellers are using and how they impact deals.
Tracking these metrics allows teams to create data-driven content strategies. In other words, they can identify the high-performing sales materials that resonate with customers and optimize future content based on actual field performance, empowering enablement teams to set more sellers up to match the success of the best reps.
Learn more about Mediafly’s Sales Content Management capabilities or schedule a demo to see it for yourself.
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