Marketing teams are usually tasked with creating sales collateral that helps move prospects along the funnel and helps sales teams win deals against competitors.

From brochures & case studies to ROI calculators, sales collateral takes time, effort and budget. The most frustrating part about it? Without clarity on sales teams' needs, they probably won’t use half the collateral you generate! So what are you doing wrong?

It’s not enough to just make content. You have to make content that’s directly applicable to the sales people’s needs and find ways to easily get that content into their hands.

Here are 5 steps to getting sales teams using your collateral:

1. Collaborate on sales collateral ideas

This may seem like an obvious one, but you’d be surprised by how many teams skip this step. The easiest way to get sales using your collateral is to ask them what they want and need. Specifically, you need to know what their leads are asking for, and what they don’t already have.

Whether it’s quarterly, monthly or weekly, schedule regular meetings with the sales team to touch base and get updates on what’s needed. This way, you can prioritize projects and have a steady flow of collateral that will actually help with sales enablement.

Using a software to collaborate will allow both revenue generating and marketing teams to clearly understand what's needed, and when it can be completed. A digital asset management (DAM) system facilitates an easy, intuitive collaborative process.

2. Make finding collateral easy and intuitive

It is essential to provide salespeople with a reliable source of information. This source should be accurate and up-to-date to ensure potential customers are not receiving outdated information.

It’s not enough to keep all your collateral organized on hard drives or other hard-to-reach locations – if the process to get the collateral is too complicated, salespeople will likely choose to use old versions of brochures that they already have saved to their desktop.

Adding all your sales collateral into a DAM solution or content hub can streamline sales processes. It also allows you to organize and manage your sales enablement materials to ultimately drive better sales results.

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DAM-powered asset access enabled Air North to improve sales and marketing productivity and sell more effectively.

Learn more here!

3. Categorize your collateral in a meaningful way

Once all your collateral is in a central library, you want to make sure it’s as easy as possible for your sales team to find the resource they need. While getting your collateral in the library is important, if your sales team is spending hours hunting, it’s only a matter of time before they give up altogether.

To make the process easier, you need to add intuitive categories that make logical sense to your sales team. Should you categorize it by stages in the buyer journey? What about by collateral type? The choice is ultimately up to you and your sales team, but a smart category structure is necessary to get sales finding and using your sales collateral.

A DAM system facilitates a structured library that makes sense for your organization. Teams can quickly find and use the approved assets they need.

4. Use metadata to add keywords and tags

If your sales team is looking for a specific piece of content, intuitive search capabilities can be very useful. Searching should go so much further than just the title of the document. Who is really going to remember the title of your brochure as "Summer_2023_MVBrchr_V3"?

This is where metadata comes in. Make it easier for your sales team to find and use their preferred content. Include relevant keywords and tags in each piece of collateral.

You can choose a system with more advanced search options like filtering by date, file type, and photographer. Digital asset management platforms often have AI-powered metadata and enhanced search capabilities. This can make it easier to store and find sales collateral. By leveraging these features, you can improve the discoverability of your content and boost your team's productivity.

5. Integrate with their existing tools

While we can do everything to get our sales collateral into a DAM system or other repository and can tag and categorize all day long, let’s face it, it can be a pain to actually go and get the collateral from a separate system.

From logging in to downloading PDFs & PPTs to your own files, the system can be long and dreary. Integrating your asset library with systems already in use, is the most important step in getting your sales team to use your collateral.

Giving salespeople direct access to these tools will reduce any resistance they may have to using your corporate-approved materials and requires minimal changes to their behaviour.

Digital Asset Management systems (DAMs) can be integrated with productivity solutions, like Office 365. This integration allows salespeople to insert videos, documents, and photos without leaving the platform. It can also allow them to easily draft media-rich presentations and send product information over their email expediting the sales cycle.

Bringing sales and marketing teams together, throughout the creative process and the content lifecycle, is essential for creating relevant sales collateral. But ensuring easy access to approved materials, is crucial to ensuring sales teams actually use the right assets!

Implementing a digital asset management platform can help to break down siloes between revenue and marketing teams. Building better content creation processes, and accessibility can ultimately lead to more opportunities and sales.

MediaValet is a leader in cloud-based digital asset management that helps organizations manage, organize and share their digital assets, improving productivity and increasing ROI.