For years, since the inception of the concept of sales enablement, industry experts have been stressing the need for sales and marketing alignment. Seamless integration of sales and marketing functions has been recognized as a must-have for successful sales enablement. This whitepaper explores another, probably less talked about, yet equally important aspect of sales enablement--asset management.

1. ASSET MANAGEMENT
THE BACKBONE OF SALES ENABLEMENT

2. Sales enablement involves helping your salespeople sell more by providing
them with the tools and resources they need to reach out to their prospects
and close deals effectively. A key element in this scheme of things is--sales
and marketing assets, Your sales and marketing assets are what help your
salespeople to strike up a conversation with their prospects and also play a
major role in keeping the conversation going until lead closure. No matter
how well-trained or skilled your sales team is, they can’t do much without
engaging, relevant content backing them. This makes asset management an
indispensable part of sales enablement.
For years, since the inception of the concept of sales
enablement, industry experts have been stressing the need for
sales and marketing alignment. Seamless integration of sales and
marketing functions has been recognized as a must-have for
successful sales enablement. This whitepaper explores another,
probably less talked about, yet equally important aspect of sales
enablement--asset management.
MARKETINGTOOLS
SALES TOOLS

3. Personalized emails that
include the recipient's first
name in the subject line have
higher open rates
Did you know?
Source- Retention Science

4. To understand the role of asset management and where
exactly it fits into the sales enablement puzzle, we must first
understand the key challenges faced by sales teams and their
corporate marketing counterparts and how asset management
tools can typically resolve those.
ASSET
M
ANAGEM
ENT
The need to personalize sales communications
The benefits of personalized sales communication have been long proved.
Personalization, today, has many facets such as
Companies and salespeople alike agree that personalized sales messaging plays a key
role in buyer engagement. However, for a corporate marketing division to cater to the
sales team’s demand for individualized sales and marketing materials on every front
becomes challenging.
Seller based personalization: Personalizing the sales/marketing asset to add the
salesperson’s personal touch
Buyer based personalization: Customizing the sales/marketing collateral to reflect the
recipient’s interest and need. This kind of personalization encompasses text and
graphics

5. 95% of buyers chose a solution
provider that “provided them
with ample content to help
navigate through each stage of
the buying process”
Source- DemandGen Report
Did you know?

6. Usage of wrong assets
Another challenge that salespeople face is the incorrect usage of assets. Salespeople
have so many assets dumped on them from the corporate marketing department that
often they are too confused to use them correctly. A product video? Is that pre-demo
or post? That brochure with product benefits, should it be sent to the prospects at the
start of the conversation or towards the end of the buyer’s journey to stress on the
benefits they get by signing up? Where does that one pager fit in? Salespeople
grapple with questions like these on a daily basis. And often end up using the assets to
the best of their understanding, which may not be accurate. Also, in this process, a lot
of assets get ignored by the salespeople who don’t know where to place them in the
buyer’s journey.
Typically, it is decided at the corporate
level what sales collateral will be
needed. While the C-level sales execs
may be consulted, it is highly unlikely
that sales input level is high in the
decision making process. Often,
salespeople’s needs for specific
collateral may be met with delay or
inability to follow through at all.

7. 90% of B2B salespeople don’t
use the content provided to
them by marketing because
they find it outdated, irrelevant
or difficult to customize
Source- Forrester
Did you know?

8. Inability to find the asset on-demand
Another challenge faced by salespeople that an asset management software can help
resolve is the inability to find the asset they need when they need it. Salespeople should
be focusing on selling. They should be talking to prospects, pitching to them, building
relationship with clients, following up with them, and not spending their time looking for
that presentation or brochure. But, the reality seems to be different.
An asset management tool will bring some order to this chaos and make marketing and
sales assets easily accessible to salespeople.
Inconvenience of having to switch between multiple platforms
One of the reasons why the assets provided are not used as often is because salespeople
rely on and are more comfortable with their CRM platforms and don’t like switching from
one platform to another. They are more likely to use the assets provided to them if the
assets are available in the CRM itself.
25% of an employee’s workday is consumed by information
search--Infocentric Research

9. Source- C5 Insight
Did you know?
30-60% of CRM and SharePoint
projects fail

10. Now, the BIG question, “Why cloud and shared storage
drives don’t really work?”
While using the cloud or shared drives to store sales and marketing content alleviates
certain challenges, this option does not entirely resolve all the issues. Corporate
marketing and sales teams alike face multiple challenges from the asset management
perspective when using the cloud/shared storage drives. These include
Lack of personalization
Sharing assets via the drive or email doesn't support automated asset personalization. A
whitepaper shared by salesperson Sally will be the same as the one shared by Peter or
Tom or Alice.
Brand distortion
As an offshoot of what we discussed above, lack of personalized sales materials often
leads to salespeople personalizing them --unauthorized-- in a bid to add a personal
touch to their interaction with prospects. When salespeople don’t have access to the
kind of content they want, they end up creating their own content or editing the one
provided to them by the corporate marketing team to suit their requirements. End result:
different salespeople, each with ‘self-customized’ with pitches, presentations and sales
materials which disrupt the uniform message and tone of the company, leading to
incorrect brand portrayal.

11. Source- SiriusDecisions
Did you know?
Between 60 and 70 percent of B2B
created content is never used
Source- CSO Insight
93% of organizations fail to track
content usage by sales rep

12. Asset usage and performance visibility-the ultimate black hole:
When content is shared via cloud-based drives or emails, corporate marketing team and
sales managers have no visibility into usage of assets. They don’t know if the assets
created by them were actually used by the sales team and if yes, then what was the
response to them. As a result, corporate marketing department churns out asset after
asset based on their understanding of what the sales team needs, while they may just be
piling up somewhere, untouched by sales.
How an asset management software can help
Automated, intelligent, sales and marketing asset personalization
A strong asset management system will have the capability to personalize assets
automatically, allowing the corporate marketing team to create standardized assets,
which will be automatically customized to suit the salesperson and the end audience at
the time of actual usage.
Helping the salespeople reach out to prospects with the right assets, at the right time
An asset management software has the capability to gauge the prospect’s position in the
sales cycle based on their online behavior and can prompt the salespeople on the assets
to be used for each lead based on their interest level/sales cycle position.

13. 33% of all unsuccessful client
deals could have been won, if
the seller had been better
informed and had acted more
client-oriented
Source- IDC Study
Did you know?

14. Asset management tools offer a way to procure feedback and also understand which
assets are working and which ones are not effective
Unlike shared drives and emails, asset management tools have the capability to
constantly track asset usage and procure direct and indirect feedback on asset usefulness
from salespeople and the end audience. By offering tools to procure feedback from
salespeople on the assets provided to them, asset management systems can can improve
the quality and relevance of assets provided by marketing to sales.
Asset management software makes salespeople more efficient and productive by
helping them find what they want, when they want it
An asset management tool brings a lot of order to this chaos by making it easy for
salespeople to look for and find the right asset at the right time. With an asset
management system in place, salespeople don’t have to spend hours looking for an
attachment in their email conversations for search of them randomly on their computer or
the drive. Asset management software ensures all the assets have the right tags and filters
and are easily retrievable when needed.
The average rep spends about 35 percent of the time selling
-AMA
65% Reps spend too much time on non-sales activities, which
limits the time required to fully understand the needs of the
client.--Sirius Decisions

15. An asset management system can reduce incorrect messaging and branding errors
Using an asset management system, the corporate marketing department can restrict the
salespeople from making edits to the collateral provided to them. They can also limit
access to older versions of assets thus ensuring only the most recent, up-to-date assets
are accessed and shared by salespeople. This also ensures a single voice for the brand.
Making it easy for salespeople to access the assets they need, when they need it and
wherever they need it
When your salespeople are on the move, they don’t have to wait until they get back to
office to send that asset to the prospect they just met with. Asset management systems
often allow salespeople to access the assets they need using their mobile devices such as
a smartphone or a tablet. This helps your salespeople to be responsive to prospect’s
interests no matter where they are or what they are doing. Moreover, asset management
systems that integrate with CRMs ensure that your salespeople have access to the assets
they need even from the CRM portal that they are using. Your salespeople are more likely
to use the assets provided to them if the assets are available in the CRM itself, as they
won’t have to switch back and forth between the two platforms and of course, nothing can
beat the convenience of having the sales collateral in their beloved CRM.

16. 70% of businesses enabling
their sales staff through
mobile technology enjoyed
significant ROI
Source- Sales Management Association
Did you know?

17. B2B companies’ inability to align sales and
marketing teams around the right processes
and technologies has cost them upwards of 10%
or more of revenue per year, or $100 million for
a billion-dollar company.
Source: bizsphere
A solid asset management system is the
backbone of sales, channel and marketing
enablement because at the end of the day it is
what keeps your brand safe. An asset
management software works hard to ensure
your branding and messaging stays intact, no
matter how widespread your sales networks
are. It plays a key core in aligning your
marketing and sales departments and helps
them understand each other’s expectations and
meet them correctly. Features such as
personalized collateral creation, asset
recommendation, etc., simplify the otherwise
complex sales process to a large extent helping
sales networks sell more, faster

18. Mindmatrix Inc.,
2403 Sidney Street, Suite 150,
Pittsburgh, PA 15203
Phone: 412-381-0230
Fax: 412-235-0477
www.mindmatrix.net
Learn more about Mindmatrix's Asset
Management Software
CONTACT US TODAY!