Samantha had been working tirelessly to close a deal with a promising customer. As she was about to send a crucial report to the prospect, she realized she couldn’t find it anywhere.Frantically, she searched through the company’s sales content library, her computer files, and her email inbox, but to no avail. The report seemed to have disappeared into thin air.

As the prospect waited impatiently, Samantha’s anxiety grew, and she could feel the deal slipping away from her. Despite her best efforts, she was unable to find the report, and the deal stalled.

While the prospect waited, Kate from a competing company contacted them—with all sales materials, reports, and documents at her fingertips to share. Kate’s sales team had a sales content management system filled with easy-to-find and helpful content.

The prospect eventually lost confidence in Samantha and continued the buying journey with Kate.

The Biggest Sales Content Management Problems

If you or one of your sales reps has ever been in Samantha’s shoes, you aren’t alone. Everyday salespeople at companies in all industries struggle to find new content when they need it.

Not only that, but often:

• Sellers don’t know there is new content and keep using old familiar pieces.
• Sellers don’t like the content and think it’s irrelevant, too long, too short, etc.
• Sellers don’t know how to use the content or understand its value in the sales process.

As a result, 66% of marketing content goes unused, according to Sirius Decisions research.

Making matters worse, 55% of marketers don’t know which assets sales reps use the most and 33% of sales and marketing teams don’t talk, research from Kapost found.

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5 Steps to Fix the Sales Content Management Problem—and Boost Sales

To fix the sales content management problem, you must organize and distribute the resources, materials, and content your sellers use every day—so they’re always equipped to solve every customer’s challenges. Follow these five steps to implement a sales content management system that benefits your sales, marketing, and enablement teams.

1. Create a central location for your assets

Centralizing all your assets is valuable in and of itself. That’s why “single source of truth” is an industry term. And when this repository is organized with a clear taxonomy, you reap the benefits of efficiency, scalability, and visibility that strategic content management brings to your business.

Storing content with a logical structure makes it easier for you to maintain, update, and remove pieces and ensures sellers have an easier time finding what they need at just the right time.

2. Align your content with your sales strategy

Content must be aligned with your go-to-market and sales funnel, and it must be contextualized with best practices, marketing explainers, and field examples from recorded call footage.

You should understand how your buyers flow from being prospects to happy customers. That means looking at each step they face in the sales process. The more you understand the reasons they stall, the more you learn what content should be built to support the customer journey.

3. Make sales content easy to find and access

Your salespeople don’t have a lot of time, and you don’t want them to spend hours looking for content when they could be selling. That means sales enablement and marketing must make access to content as intuitive and helpful as possible.

If you can give sellers an easy way to search and browse—by use case, asset type, vertical, or product—you’re much more likely to get consistent adoption of sales content.

Don’t overlook the tech: Sellers live on their phones and laptops. Make sure they can find relevant content whether they’re in a browser, email, CRM, or on their mobile device.

4. Automate content recommendations

Salespeople look for content to solve specific use cases. They’re trying to advance a deal and solve a prospect’s particular need. Why not give them prescriptive recommendations for the “best bet” asset?

Using AI that mines deal outcomes can help you understand which content works best for different scenarios. And when you can recommend content within the apps your sales reps use every day—CRM, collaboration tools, and social selling sites—you take the guesswork out of figuring out the right content for every stage of the deal.

5. Measure content usage

Your sales content management system should provide insight into how content is used. How many people have viewed it? How many times has a piece of content been shared externally? You shouldn’t have to guess or conduct subjective polls of the sales team.

The analytics will show you which content is shared most frequently, with whom, and in what context. That detailed data will let you quickly spot gaps in your sales content and help you make better decisions about your overall content program.

Sales Content Management Success Story

Baxter, a healthcare company that produces products, therapies, and digital health solutions, needed a solution to house and manage the company’s sales content. It also wanted an automated process to recommend content to sellers.

Using Allego, Baxter created a centralized, easy-to-search content library that reps can access before, during and after customer interactions.

By integrating their core content with Salesforce.com, Baxter makes it easier for sales reps to find and share content with customers, said Tim Kingsford, Senior Manager for Learning Innovation and Operations.

“When a sales rep gets to a particular stage in the sales process, I can trigger certain pieces of content that may guide them through a challenging process or help them to close” the deal, Kingsford said.

Baxter’s sales content management system now allows Kingsford to “produce content and get it in the hands of the seller at the point we need them to engage with it—whether it’s on demand, in their daily workflow in Salesforce, or [because] their manager has noticed or is encouraging something [about their performance].”

What’s Your Sales Content Management Story?

As you can see, companies need to do more than simply house their sales content and collateral. They must create content that aligns with their sales strategy, make it easy for sales reps to find content in their moment of need, automate content recommendations, and analyze content usage data.

As you look at your sales content management system and your sales team’s performance, are your sellers like Samantha—losing deals because they don’t have or can’t find content? Or are they like Kate—getting content to prospects quickly and seamlessly moving them through the buying process?

Learn More:

Download the All-in-One Sales Content Management Kit and get everything you need to organize, manage, and activate content that helps your sales team sell more and close deals faster.