Happy New Year! We made it to 2013 without the world coming to an end. Since it's the beginning of a new year, it's tradition to make a New Year's Resolution. Maybe you've made a personal resolution to improve your life in some way. What about a business resolution? Are you planning on making an resolutions this year that makes it easier to do your job?
We have a New Year's Resolution for you. This year, resolve to get insight out of your sales and marketing collateral. It's not difficult. And the results? You simplify the creation of a great new sales presentation. You can start surfacing collateral that works. And you make it easier to continually improve the quality of your sales proposals.
Like most resolutions, you will have to make a change. But in this case, change is so good. It's time to change from that consumer storage solution that doesn't help you make the most intelligent and educated decisions about your content. Maybe you're not a consumer-grade type of person and you're stuck in an enterprise-grade document management solution, a complicated piece of software that everyone hates. Do these "solutions" actually help you leverage and improve your best content?
Try KnowledgeTree free for 14 days and resolve to get insight out of your sales and marketing collateral.
Getting Sales and Marketing teams to share information on what works can be a challenge for large organizations. Sales teams communicate most effectively when they share the right information with prospects. We also know that when Marketing is more effective when they gather input into what marketing collateral works best. But how many times have you heard of a sales person using old, ineffective, or inaccurate collateral on a new prospect? This problem can be avoided or even eliminated.
But here's the dilemma, do you take the time to invest in a solution or continue with business as usual? Any reasonable person would want to find a solution but too many times they choose the status quo. Either they're too busy and won't justify spending the time to find a solution or they're unaware of the problem and have no idea of the intensity of pain they're experiencing.
If you are reading this blog post, you've probably experienced the pain of managing and reusing the right marketing documents and sales collateral. And you know what happens if that pain goes unmanaged. You can recall the inefficiencies of internal workflows used to get a sales proposal or sales contract approved. You know how common it is for a sales executive to send a prospect the wrong marketing collateral because it was on their hard drive and failed to update it.
Over the past two weeks we’ve been looking at how sales and marketing teams can work together efficiently to create a great sales proposal. Last week, we saw how the first step shouldn’t be to blindly pull together a document. Rather, the team should look to the existing datasheets and other sales documents that can be mined for useful information that can be reused.
This week, we’ll take a look at the next step. Collaborating across the sales and marketing team to add and edit content to our sales proposal document. Management of this process is not easy if you are emailing content between co-workers and waiting on feedback to come from 10 sources. A more managed approach to your documents is better.
Feedback Improves our Document
KnowledgeTree allows marketing to quickly create new material and share it for feedback. Let’s say the proposal we are working on is for a new technology product. The marketing team prepares differentiation, feature lists, and general value. They put this information in a draft datasheet document. Then, they can upload it to KnowledgeTree and a single, always-current version is immediately available for colleagues.
Then, rather than asking the team to look in their inboxes for an attachment, they have a single place to go to for the most current version. No hoping to find the latest version of the document in an email, only to discover that it already has been modified.
Reflecting the Changing Needs of Business Users, SaaS and Mobile Technology
This week VentureBeat published an article from Daniel Chalef, KnowledgeTree’s CEO. The article looked at “10 Commitments” that enterprise software vendors must make to their customers and partners. These commitments reflect the changing – and pressing – needs of business users and the new technological reality that has emerged over the past 10 years with the rise of SaaS and mobile.
We see that across lines of business – from the project office to the finance group. And we especially see the issue in sales and marketing teams. These organizations struggle with tight proposal deadlines, high volumes of demands from customers, and the challenge of managing collateral, contracts, and other critical marketing and sales documents. So, they need tools to automate as much as possible. Are older enterprise software tools up for the challenge?
Let’s take a look at Daniel’s 10 commitments in the light of sales and marketing teams.
1. Focus on What’s Driving Sales and Marketing. Customer facing teams buy salesforce and marketing automation tools to address specific pains – like supporting campaigns or tracking opportunities. But enterprise software suites have become too ungainly, with features on top of features. New enterprise software focuses on the pain a customer is facing, not every problem under the sun.
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.
You can’t send a sales proposal to a client if it hasn’t been approved by management. And you can’t release marketing collateral that hasn’t been reviewed by the right teams. But documents and supporting content are generally reviewed via processes that are either inflexible or just plain inefficient.
Setting up review processes for your documents is often a challenge. For many tools, it requires a complex set of business process management tools or developer coding in order to customize it. Plus, because needs change so fast, processes themselves must adjust quickly. But if processes can only be tailored by developers, not business users, then they’ll be forever lagging behind the needs of business teams.
A survey we conducted of 1,400 professionals found that the vast majority used email to review and approve documents. That is a management nightmare. Teams struggle to look through emails to find OKs from managers. They’re uncertain about which version is the correct one to review. No wonder it takes 1/3 longer to approve a document when email is the approval mechanism.
Your business content has a tremendous impact on your business results. Think of presentations, datasheets, and other pieces of content that are put in front of customers on a daily basis. This content, and other documents, represents one of the primary lenses through which customers view your company. So, it is critical to put your best foot forward.
One major piece of content that has an especially important role to play is the sales proposal. A sales proposal is the highly customized document that is sent to prospects detailing the advantages of your products and services, and why your company should win. Sales teams should always ensure that they reuse ‘winning’ content for their proposals, get input from colleagues, and have their proposals reviewed and approved by the right people in the organization.
The most efficient way to produce great sales proposals is to reuse great content. But how do you discover what should be reused. Getting insight into your content is a great way to do so. KnowledgeTree gives tools that help do that. Teams can be quickly discover, reuse, and action their great content. In this series, we’ll walk through how you can make the process of creating a new sales proposal a snap.
How do you start? If you have an account, login -- see the video below. If you don’t have an account, sign-up for a free trial.
Sales proposals, marketing presentations, and project documents are more than just business content, they’re business assets. And that means that the right people in the organization need to discover, reuse, and action that content.
But if those assets are difficult to access and it is difficult to control rights for users, then the value of your content is unnecessarily locked up. IT often finds it a challenge to manage authorizations across many applications. They need to add and remove access to employees as they move in the company. And they need to create rules for multi-factor authentication and password strength.
LDAP and Active Directory are often used to manage these authorizations and user identities. By taking advantage of these existing investments, IT can reduce the administrative burden of managing users.
Today KnowledgeTree made it simple to control who has access to your business content with the launch of Single Sign-On support. This, combined with a free integration with identity management leader OneLogin, makes managing users and their access to your KnowledgeTree vault a breeze.
Now, IT can establish password policies on their corporate networks that will also be in effect for KnowledgeTree. That makes it even easier for IT to secure an organization's critical content. It also reduces the frustration users feel from having to manage large numbers of passwords for different accounts.
A common scenario we hear from prospects relates to marketing content. Companies have vast repositories of materials to support the sales process – proposals, presentations, and related collateral. But the right content never seems to be easy to find. Sales people struggle to locate a good set of content, and they’re left using the same material they've always relied on.
That means that sales teams often use out-of-date, inaccurate, or just sub-optimal documents. Sales asks marketing why it’s so tough to find the content they need. And marketing is left wondering why sales isn't using their great marketing documents.
In a mini-series of posts that I’ll run, I’ll take a look at how sales and marketing teams can work more effectively around their marketing documents. In this first post, let’s look at how a new function from KnowledgeTree can help identify the starting point for addressing the challenge by getting insight into your content.
I enjoy shopping in the evening. There are fewer people in the stores, and lines are always shorter. When you do shop at night, you'll notice the inventory teams out. They catalog their inventory, restock missing items, and move misplaced items back to their rightful homes. That means shoppers arriving the next day can find what they need, the store can more efficiently sell its wares, and the store knows what's truly missing and hence what to order.
The same holds true in your organization. As organizations grow, they accumulate large volumes of intellectual property. But these documents and content are stored in the wrong locations. They are forgotten by team members. They are not taken advantage of. If you knew where documents were stored, it would be like an inventorying of your content. You can find exactly where the content you need right now is located. And you'd know what content is missing and ought to be created.
KnowledgeTree makes that easy with Folder Tree Reporting. Administrators can report on document usage and user activity based on your unique folder structure. You can instantly generate summary reports on all activity within a particular folder or folder tree, then drill down to gain detailed insights into how documents are used and by whom. That makes it easy to report on document utilization within a specific geography, business unit, product line, or other folder structure.
Happy New Year! We made it to 2013 without the world coming to an end. Since it's the beginning of a new year, it's tradition to make a New Year's Resolution. Maybe you've made a personal resolution to improve your life in some way. What about a business resolution? Are you planning on making an resolutions this year that makes it easier to do your job?
Getting Sales and Marketing teams to share information on what works can be a challenge for large organizations. Sales teams communicate most effectively when they share the right information with prospects. We also know that when Marketing is more effective when they gather input into what marketing collateral works best. But how many times have you heard of a sales person using old, ineffective, or inaccurate collateral on a new prospect? This problem can be avoided or even eliminated.
