Here is a scenario: you managed to get a sales meeting with a company who you know not only needs your product but has their complete faith in you that you can convince the rest of their team they need it to. All that you need to do is put together a good sales presentation, answer some questions, and show nothing but confidence.
While those are simple things, these tasks can become needlessly harder to achieve in certain circumstances. You may have only had to talk with one person face to face.
But now you have to dig through your company’s database to get all the necessary slides or a certain presentation that is needed for that presentation.
And that task can become much harder when you have to deal with scattered content – to succeed in sales now requires more marketing than ever before.
We know scattered content is a big issue amongst organizations. Studies have shown that 65% of sales reps struggle to find relevant content and one of those causes will be scattered content. Here is how it can all take shape within an organization.
As a sales person you know there are some content that you haven’t even touched for years or for months. You discourage people to use it but you also don’t bother trying to remove it, so people avoid using it.
Whatever the case may be, there is way too much content that sales teams have at their fingertips that it can be difficult to determine what is relevant or appropriate to use in a sales meeting.
While this can occur with too much content, even businesses that routinely clean out old content and replace it with newer can fall into this pitfall too. There are simply some pieces of content that other teams put together that are never used.
Sales leaders and their teams have their own sales tactics and know what slides or presentations are effective. They’ll stick to them and avoid other certain pieces of content. It still creates a feeling of scattered content though even if you continuously refresh your content.
Maybe you’re more proactive with organization than others and created a file folder system. This is a good step but it can still lead to scattered content and people now have to spend a lot of time clicking on specific file folders in order to get to where they need to go.
This can create so much confusion and loss of time that could have been allocated to other tasks if people constantly click on the wrong file folder or are confused with the labelling system of those file folders.
Falling into those pitfalls isn’t good for a whole variety of reasons. Your organization should provide easily accessible content for presentations, sharing, and training for new sales reps. This will lead to better sales meetings and closing more sales. This can lead to problems that will affect your business negatively in the long run.
Or worse, misaligned sales teams. Even though a sales team is designed to generate revenue, it doesn’t mean that everyone on the team is going to be using the exact same tactics and strategies. It also means that the sales reps aren’t going to rely on the content that is put together as well.
All of this leads to sales reps guessing and building their information off of what other people are saying. It can only lead to disaster and this is only the tip of the iceberg.
If your content is scattered across the businesses, some sales reps are going to be using information that is likely updated to adjust for the times or had glaring issues with it. The problem is some sales reps may still be holding onto that old and irrelevant content and use it to train or to inform other sales members.
All of this contributes to the cycle of confusion and time loss if you are not constantly updating content, replacing older pieces of information, and not communicating to sales reps about these changes.
From a customer's standpoint, you don’t want one source telling a customer one thing and another source saying something completely different. Scattered content increases the chances of that happening by a wide margin and it can create a terrible user experience for the person that you’re trying to sell to. This increases the odds of you not making a sale.
In the case of sales meetings, there are times where you need to access your sales team database in order to share certain pieces of information. If you’re dealing with scattered content, the whole database is going to be a mess and will take time to find the relevant information.
All of this creates an impression to prospects that the organization you work for is disorganized and has flawed systems and processes. All of this contributes to chances where a prospect won’t buy what you’re selling.
Sales teams do have large turnovers and part of it can stem from dealing with too many rejections or having to work with a system that hinders their work and confidence. You can avoid unnecessarily hindering your sales teams and their confidence by putting in place better systems to handle scattered content.
In some cases, some sales reps stick around and consider some disorganization issues as a challenge that they have to overcome. While this can be seen as good it often leads to sales improvisations - where one member or a group of sales reps come up with all kinds of tactics in order to get sales.
This can cause an incredible amount of chaos and can cause a lot of damage to a business if their improvisation goes terribly wrong.
Fixing this issue comes down to regularly updating and organizing your content while also communicating the changes that are made. You’ll want to maintain close contact with your sales reps to get an understanding of what content is relevant to them as well.
Alternatively, you can consider our own services. Showell is a sales enablement tool that allows companies to centralize their sales collateral in an easy to use software, permitting large and dislocated sales teams to access content even offline and present it with ease, offering prospects a seamless and professional user experience during sales meetings. Showell also allows marketing and sales professionals to track content consumption and make data-based decisions about content strategy, training needs and prospect interest.
To find out more, you can request a demo or get it for free.