Your sales content is dying in SharePoint
Somewhere in your SharePoint sits a folder called “Sales Material”. Inside: 14 subfolders, three of them named “Old”, “Archive”, and “FINAL”. The case study your best rep needed last week is in one of them. He did not find it.
What he did instead is what every rep does in that situation: he wrote the email freehand, from memory, with whatever arguments came to mind. Next time, the same again, only different. Your carefully aligned messaging exists in the marketing folder, but what reaches the customer is an improvisation every single time, and no two are alike.
The reflex answer to this problem is: more content. Another battlecard project, another one-pager, another folder. That only makes it worse. The problem was never quantity, if anything you have too much. The problem is the distance between the content and the moment it is needed.
The math behind this is banal and gets ignored anyway. A rep who wants to write an email gives the search maybe two minutes. If he finds nothing in two minutes, he writes freehand, always, without exception, and rightly so, because his deal is not waiting on your folder structure. Every minute of search distance costs you usage, and past a certain distance usage is zero, no matter how good the material is.
Findability in the workflow means, concretely: the content shows up where the rep works, which is in the CRM, on the deal, matched to stage and segment. On a deal in negotiation against competitor X, the battlecard for competitor X appears, without anyone searching. That does not require an enablement tool at 40,000 euros a year. A well-maintained content object in the CRM, linked by stage, industry, and competitor, plus a component on the deal layout: that is a manageable build, not a license purchase.
And then the part nobody likes doing. Deleting. Of your 200 assets, 30 get used. The rest is noise clogging the search for the 30. Any asset with no usage in two quarters gets cut, or gets an owner who justifies why it stays.
How many of your sales assets were actually sent to a customer this quarter? If you cannot measure that, by the way, that is already your answer.
