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
www.mindmatrix.net

2. ASSET MANAGEMENT
THE BACKBONE OF
SALES ENABLEMENT
Asset Management the backbone of Sales Enablement 02
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.

3. The need to personalize
sales communications
The benefits of personalized sales
communication have been long
proved.
Personalization, today, has many
facets such as
 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.
Personalized emails that include
the recipient’s first name in the
subject line have higher open rates
95% of buyers chose a solution
provider that “provided them with
ample content to help navigate
through each stage of the buying
process”
Source : Retention Science
Source : DemandGen Report
DID YOU KNOW ?
DID YOU KNOW ?
03
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.
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.
Asset Management the backbone of Sales Enablement

4. 04
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.
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.
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 ?
25% of an employee’s
workday is consumed
by information search-
Infocentric Research
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.
Asset Management the backbone of Sales Enablement

5. 30-60% of CRM and SharePoint
projects fail
Between 60 and
70 percent of B2B
created content is
never used
93% of
organizations fail
to track content
usage by sales rep
Source : C5 Insight
Source : SiriusDecisions
Source : CSO Insight
DID YOU KNOW ?
DID YOU KNOW ?
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NOW, THE BIG QUESTION,
“WHY CLOUD AND SHARED STORAGE DRIVES
DON’T REALLY WORK?”
04
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.
Asset Management the backbone of Sales Enablement

6. 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.
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.
06
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.
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.
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 ?
Asset Management the backbone of Sales Enablement

7. 07
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.
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
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
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.
70% of businesses
enabling their
sales staff through
mobile technology
enjoyed significant
ROI
Source : Sales Management
Association
DID YOU KNOW ?
Asset Management the backbone of Sales Enablement

8. 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.
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
Mindmatrix offers Channel & Sales Enablement software for direct and indirect sales
channels. Mindmatrix is the only provider of a Single Unified Platform that combines
PRM software, Direct Sales and Channel Enablement, Channel Marketing Software,
Marketing Automation software and Marketing Asset Management. Mindmatrix takes you
through every step in the sales process from lead to revenue, enabling your salespeople
and channel partners to sell more, faster.
2403 Sidney Street, Suite 150, Pittsburgh, PA 15203
Phone: 412-381-0230, Fax: 412-774-1992
www.mindmatirx.net