Sales collateral development

It takes targeted marketing and sales support collateral to create positive first impressions and win business. Streamlining collateral management can increase win rates and revenue realization. While most organizations acknowledge this, the problem usually is in the details.

• Marketing teams often create compelling communication and messaging for their clients and prospects. However, they fail miserably when it comes to customizing boilerplate collateral to meet the needs of specific customers. Decentralization of resources and managing collateral versions on personal computers also makes it difficult for salespersons to locate the current versions of collateral and close a sale on time. Inaccurate information is communicated to clients or prospects due to the circulation of outdated collateral documents.
• Often, key individuals in the Marketing or Sales teams are the ones that maintain the latest versions of collateral. When such individuals exit the organization, they take with them the valuable knowledge. This seriously impacts the Marketing/Sales teams’ ability to respond to customer requirements.

How Qontext Helps

Qontext is designed to enable salespersons to respond quickly to selling opportunities.

• Create a Marketing/Sales Collateral group. Invite all the Marketing and Sales executives to the group. Group members receive feeds when members post content, communicate using short messages or discussions and can alert specific individuals as necessary.
• Marketing team members use wiki pages to create draft collaterals for products and services. They then invite select individuals to review and edit the pages. Qontext captures the changes as versions. Use the “compare” feature to identify the differences between any two versions.
• Team members may also use the edit-in-place feature to edit documents inside Qontext (without downloading them to your system) and annotate comments or consent on the documents.
• Creating customer-specific collateral is as simple as creating a customer-specific group and making changes to collateral boilerplates. When customizing the boilerplate for a client, each member works on the assigned sections and uploads the documents (Qontext saves them as versions). Updates are notified to the group members as alerts. The person assigned to compile the final version goes through the versions, compiles the document, and invites the group to view and approve it. Once approved, tag the collateral with specific metadata to associate it with an industry, customer, business requirement, or other details to make the information easily searchable.
• Once finalized, post all product collateral – sell sheets, product slicks, reseller kits, promotional flyers, and demo CD files on to a closed Collateral Library group that includes channel partners. This ensures that the most current information is available to Marketing/Sales and the channel partner groups. If appropriate, feature content on the availability of the new collateral and details on accessing it.
• Easily induct new Marketing/Sales executives and Channel Partners by providing them access to all the relevant information, collateral documents, and conversations at one location. This enables new team members to easily carry forward the selling process.