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As the late, great George Carlin once said, we’re all just trying to find a place for our stuff. Any enterprise organization is going to run into the problem of having to decide where they’re going to store and manage all their stuff. Most of the time this boils down to content being stored in a handful of different repositories and becoming increasingly difficult to navigate. So how does a large organization tackle this problem? A sales enablement platform is the perfect document management system.
Before we get into explaining why that statement above is true (and believe me, it’s absolutely true) let’s explore why an organization would even care about this problem. For a long time, the idea of content management boiled down to ‘set it and forget it.’ Marketing would pump out a ton of different content, throw it into some sort of unsophisticated document management system and leave Sales to hunt on their own.
Basic Document Management Systems Don’t Fit the Bill
At a basic level, that reasoning seems to track. If Sales has a ton of content options to search through, then surely something must fit their needs, right? What more could a document management system do than simply provide users with a way to store and retrieve content?
Well, this is the 21st century so there’s plenty more than a document management system can do for sellers and marketers alike! No longer should we be beholden to the idea of simply creating as much content as possible and seeing what sticks. No, we have the technology now to actually dictate smart content strategies that speak directly to buyers’ needs, give Sales exactly what they want, and demonstrably drive revenue.
How do we have this technology? Was it gifted to us by a species of extraterrestrials in the form of a meteorite that crash-landed in the middle of a field in Kansas? I wish! No, sales enablement platforms have revolutionized the way sellers and marketers approach a document management system.
Salesforce has found that “85% of marketing’s content is never used because reps can’t find it, don’t know what content to use when, or lack the confidence that it will help advance their deals.” That means there’s a lot of wasted time and resources being poured into content that never sees the light of day. Boiling it down into hours makes this problem look even worse. RingDNA has found that sellers waste 30 hours each month looking for or creating their own content.
So it’s clear that this is a problem right? If everyone is in agreement let’s move on to how we solve this problem. If you’re not quite ready to move on yet, just turn off the lights and close the door behind you when you’ve finished. Thanks.
A Sales Enablement Platform is the Best Document Management System
Enter a sales enablement platform to save the day (as it often does around these parts). A smart sales enablement solution is one of the most powerful tools that an organization can leverage. It rolls many different capabilities into one easy-to-use, intuitively designed platform.
But because this is merely a short blog and not my magnus opus on sales enablement (find that here), we will stick to talking about it’s capability as a document management system. An intelligent sales enablement streamlines the process of document management by giving Marketing tools to properly, and deeply, tag content so that it only shows up in relevant ways. Marketing can rest easy that content is being surfaced solely to people for whom it’s relevant.
For Sales, a sales enablement platform that is powered by artificial intelligence will benefit sellers in two ways. First, sellers can search for content based on anything they remember about a piece of content. If they remember the full, exact title? Great, no problem. But if they only remember that someone spoke about a red balloon in a video, they can search for that term they remember, and it will pop right up.
The second way is by having content find them. Your generic document management system is a static, unliving thing. But a smart sales enablement solution will alert sellers when a certain piece of content is trending, has been successful in the past, or is even contextually relevant to the deal they are currently working. And the content finds them wherever they are: CRM, email, or on the road.
A sales enablement platform has many uses, but these content situations present some of the quickest and most time-saving benefits there are. Here is where I’m supposed to close with a thought-provoking and resounding kicker sentence. Instead I already wrote the perfect summation for my thesis in the title, so here it is again: a sales enablement platform is the perfect document management system.
