3 Reasons Your Sales Collateral Is Going Unused – and How to Fix It

Sales collateral – it’s the pieces that can really help your sales team secure a win. However, at many companies, sales teams aren’t using collateral to its full advantage.

If you’re busy trying to support sales with new collateral, but find that they’re not using it, here’s three reasons why (and how to fix it!):

1. Your sales team is not convinced your sales collateral will impress its prospects.

Are your salespeople consistently creating their own collateral or adding their own slides to a pre-created deck? This is a sign that the current collateral isn’t meeting their needs. Sales needs to feel confident in the messaging and design of the collateral, otherwise they’re unlikely to utilize it. After all, sales collateral has a big influence on how buyers approach decision-making. The key to unified messaging throughout starts with aligning your sales and marketing teams.

2. Your sales team doesn’t know how to use the sales collateral to its advantage.

Has your company been introduced to its buyer persona or ideal customer? If so, your sales team needs collateral that is going to support your buyers at all stages in their journey. Otherwise, it will be tricky for a salesperson to know how to interact with a customer, let alone when they should pull out different pieces of content.

Developing new content on a consistent basis can help your sales team feel better supported to connect with buyers confidently at any stage. But this could lead to having so much information that it’s challenging to tell whether a piece of content is new or outdated. To avoid this, organize your content in a way that’s digestible and easy to find. Content should have a clear, directive title that helps explain how and at what stage in the buyer’s journey it can be used.

3. Your sales team simply can’t find your sales collateral.

Maintaining organized, easy-to-find content is a pain point for many companies. When you’re trying to share documents and materials across multiple teams, it’s easy for things to quickly get lost. If a sales rep must send an email to find what they need, they’re probably going to give up before they even start (and create their own content instead!). According to HubSpot, sales reps spend about 15% of their day responding to emails and looking for necessary documents. If these items are organized in a way that’s easy to find, sales reps can devote more time to building relationships with buyers and winning accounts in the process.

Sales collateral is an important way to provide consistent messaging to buyers throughout their entire buyer’s journey. If you can identify any of these problems happening within your organization, it’s time to sit down with your sales team and listen to their concerns to make progress toward being on the same page.

Standing Partnership has helped many organizations realign sales teams and create more effective sales collateral. To learn more about the benefits of sales enablement, download this free resource: Growing B2B Sales with Sales Enablement: 5 Key Strategies.