Marketing executives face
a consistent challenge to provide selling teams better access
to relevant content, such as sales collateral, product demos,
case studies, sales battle cards, and industry news. This
information delivery initiative is complicated by the technical
nature of products, large product portfolios, industry specialization
and customer segmentation. For salespeople, aligning the
right product for the right customer can be a tremendous
challenge. Without the “latest & greatest” collateral, to
provide valuable insight for clients and prospects, selling
today’s complex offerings is nearly impossible.
KMA has found that a well-organized
sales portal provides selling teams a “single source” for
all valuable content. Today’s content-rich portal sites
can be designed to offer selling teams a wide range of materials,
including document-based sales collateral, audio & video
streaming, flash demonstrations, event calendars, sales
proposals, discussions, RSS feeds to industry newswire services
and more!
Ensuring sales portal
success
Portal
success relies on precise content organization, requiring
that information technology teams work closely with marketing
managers to understand the overall business process.
Examining “real life” scenarios about how salespeople access
and use these materials provides the basis for effective
content taxonomy. Through this exercise, you will
understand how portal design can best support the needs
of your sales people. For example, at any given time,
a sales manager may need access to technical product specifications
for a current customer, a presentation to a specific industry
audience, or a positioning white paper in a competitive
selling situation. Providing information in a format
that is easy to navigate, search and re-use will increase
individual productivity and drive overall value of the portal
to the organization.
Through specialized portal
permission privileges, an organization can even offer some
or all of this content to business partners. In today’s
competitive technology industry, your channel partners are
looking for those companies that are easiest to do business
with. Access to collateral, presentations and technical
materials reduces the selling cycle for partners, who otherwise
spend much of their time simply gathering information from
multiple industry sources. Offering portal content to partners
also allows your company to present consistent messages
to the marketplace. Simply stated, loyal partners sell more
of your products. Partner loyalty can be dramatically increased
with better information and better access through a portal.
Improving the collateral
creation process
Marketing teams use a portal
for content creation, organization and maintenance. The
portal offers marketing teams a single, easy interface to
update collateral, revise content or delete outdated materials.
Business owners can be authorized to add content directly,
reducing cycle time and offloading the IT and Web designer
burden. Portal collaboration features like version control,
alerts, team workspaces and instant messaging reduce redundant
emails, voicemails and meetings for marketing teams. Marketing
teams can leverage document “metatags”, or categories, to
publish documents through customized business views. And
through the use of “dynamic pages”, content can be filtered
for specific audiences - allowing users one-click access
to materials delivered by sales role, business audience,
industry segment, product type, etc. This dramatically reduces
search requirements, while offering business users a “one
stop shop” for information critical to their role.
Successful organizations
rely on the portal as a single interface for all sales &
marketing collateral creation, notification, approval, categorization
and enterprise delivery.
Conclusion
Sales portal business benefits
include obvious productivity gains for sales contributors
and management. Successful sales portals can be easily scaled
to meet the information needs of the enterprise. For example,
a product development manager across the street, or across
the globe, can access technical documentation now available
on the portal. Marketing teams can use the portal to reduce
delivery expense and cycle times – from content creation,
through edits and alerts, to required approvals and content
delivery – by using the
portal as a single content delivery vehicle. Further, organizations
can increase partner loyalty and sales, by offering partner
selling teams access to the same up-to-date materials as
internal staff through an easy browser interface.
Finally, as the portal becomes entrenched in the sales and
marketing organization, applications such as performance
management and executive dashboards can be easily delivered
through the same interface.
