Let’s continue our practical series around how a sales team can prepare great sales proposals to deliver to the market. In the last post, I took a look at using KnowledgeTree to start the process. But now let’s get down to some details.
Reuse Great Content
If your sales team is like most, you have vast quantities of great content already in existence. The new sales proposal document you are working on is not the first proposal ever written for your company. It’s probably not the first written for a particular product, or geography, or even industry. And what that means is that you already have content pre-built that can be a great resource to build on.
Many teams forget that they have these documents managed already. They forget the effort and thought that went into them. They simply must reuse the millions of dollars in intellectual property that has already been invested in these documents.
Can’t Use Documents You Can’t Find
The main reason that people don’t reuse the great content out there -- that your company has already built and stored internally -- is often the challenge of finding it. You either need to know what you’re looking for and hope that your search turns up the document you want. Or you don’t know what you’re looking for and need to hope that you randomly come across a useful document. Plus, you need to hope that people with useful documents made them accessible to you and your other colleagues in the first place.
This is actually more of a challenge than it may seem. Teams often don’t share their great content. And tools often get in the way of searching or discovering great documents. The result is that documents get forgotten and disappear into your document management solution.
Content Insights Helps You Reuse Great Documents
So, we want to discover the great sales proposal documents and reuse them for our own. How do we find them? The most common vehicle is via searching and browsing. That’s what users are most accustomed to. That requires that documents are marked correctly. Obviously searching within content helps to surface relevant documents, but when metadata is easily applied to existing documents, your sales proposal can be surfaced faster. Tools that make it easy to mark documents with metadata make it easier to standardize how documents are organized.
You also want to make it easier to find documents that you didn’t know you needed. Activity feeds surface what your colleagues are viewing, commenting on, and liking in real time. Plus, recommendation engines behind the scene must identify documents that look like they’d be interesting to you. That is, show me the content that my colleagues find valuable so I can take advantage of it.
KnowledgeTree provides powerful recommendation tools to identify content that is useful to you and your team. When you can spot that a sales proposal was written for the product you are working on. Or you can learn about a new template proposal for the geography you are targeting. Content Insights means finding the most relevant documents your company has built, and taking advantage of it.
When you surface not just content you want, but content that you didn’t know would help you. That’s Content Insights -- try it yourself. And that’s what makes sales teams incredibly more effective with their documents.
