The modern sales and marketing process is content-driven. From websites to articles, from brochures to presentations, businesses of all types rely on a wealth of informative and persuasive content to back up their sales approach and increase conversion rates.
Fully compliant content is crucial
Well-produced content is particularly important in sectors selling high-value or highly complex products and services. And for these companies, a crucial concern is ensuring that the content they produce and distribute not only meets the highest standards of quality but that it is fully compliant with their regulatory or legal obligations.
Even minor mistakes such as a factual error, an out-of-date document, or a missing footnote can result in reputational damage or financial penalties. To mitigate against this risk, many organizations rely on a dedicated content team to manage their entire output, from content creation to review and distribution.
According to a 2021 study by Altimeter, 50% of businesses surveyed centralize all content production, with a further 22% creating some content at a departmental level, overseen by a central team.
Centralized content causes delays
The key issue with this model is that it can cause delays or bottlenecks in approving new content and distributing it to front-line sales staff. And field sales reps may have to waste time emailing the central office to ensure they are using the correct version of each piece of collateral. This is an issue for as many as 39% of companies according to Altimeter, who, “are still getting content approved the old-fashioned way, by sending each piece individually through a cycle of review from multiple stakeholders (e.g. executives or legal teams.)”
These delays can significantly reduce the agility and responsiveness of sales teams, and make it difficult for them to supply the supporting content prospective customers are looking for on the spot. Ultimately, this impacts total sales.
Pitcher allows for instantly available up-to-date content
So how can businesses both ensure high levels of compliance and quality while minimizing the time taken to push new or updated content out to sales reps. Many companies are looking to sales enablement solutions, such as Pitcher, to help bridge this gap.
Pitcher connects the content creation and review teams with sales and marketing departments through a single secure interface. This allows content to be published to the platform as soon as the sign-off process has been completed, where it is immediately available to sales reps, even those working in the field, via a tablet or smartphone app.
Sales teams can be totally confident that the collateral they share with the prospective client is the most recent and up-to-date version, and from the client’s point of view, there’s no delay in receiving the information they need, leading to an enhanced customer experience.
The result is a best-of-both-worlds scenario, where overall control of output remains with the central content team, new content is distributed rapidly and accessible immediately by reps and clients, but there’s no compromise on quality assurance or compliance.