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Time and again, your sales reps try to look for the right content to share with their prospects, only to be hit with the wrong—or worse—no assets. The time they spend looking for these assets could be better spent doing more productive things like closing the deal.
On the other hand, marketing teams struggle to tag or track their content assets using a single database, as most content library software is not made for this purpose.
Ultimately, marketing and sales struggle to collaborate efficiently due to the lack of a consolidated system—leading to a lose-lose situation.
To avoid this, you need a sales enablement tool that can give sales reps the access they need and allow you to monitor how they leverage internal collaterals to speed up the sales cycle.
In this article, we’ll discuss the common challenges of choosing the right content library tool, how marketers typically organize their content library, and what you need to look for while choosing such a tool for your business.
Managing content is a tricky process because most content teams lack the right tool to manage it. Typically, they use a project management software to create a customizable workflow that tends to slow them down as they grow.
Most marketers use software like Notion, Monday, Airtable, Bambu, or even a good old spreadsheet to manage their content workflow. The biggest draw is customization, link storage and tagging capabilities. However, while it might work for 50 assets, what do you do when you’ve published 500 content pieces?
Plus, sales reps and marketers might use different keywords resulting in no-hit searches, and you have no data on who is looking for what. Both teams land up requesting assets even though they’ve been created—resulting in duplicate content, no way to monitor its usage, and a complete waste of time and resources..
Moreover, sales reps often lack the knowledge of how the tools work and the bandwidth to learn how to use them. Ultimately, they can’t access the right piece in time—leaving it to collect dust.
Gabriella Payne, Founder and CEO of the Boss Blueprint Agency, says, “It took me a very long time to find a tool that works for me and I still have yet to find a tool that is all-encompassing. At the same time, I believe it is like finding a home. You never find a perfect one, but you make it work.”
There’s only one reason why you’re struggling with this. You’re using a tool not meant to be used for this purpose—at least, not at this scale.
Currently, these are the approaches that marketers are using to manage their company’s marketing content library:
Shared drives like Google Drive or Dropbox allow marketers to store and organize their content assets. These content assets can include images, video files, documents, web pages, and other content.
You can upload these files to the drive and organize them into folders, providing easy retrieval of content. Additionally, it allows multiple users to collaborate on projects and share files with team members and stakeholders.
However, the search feature on these drives is inefficient, and organizing them can depend on how specific team members prefer it.
Marketers also use internal wikis like Notion, Airtable, or Monday to organize their content library.
You can create pages for each topic and document, organize and store related content, and link content from other resources. You can also add comments, and tags to organize content, which provides a more effective way to search for and find content.
However, once the library scales, it can become challenging to catalog or find the content. Plus, you can’t monitor the performance or usage of the content over its entire lifecycle.
DAM allows marketers to store, organize, and manage their content assets in a centralized location. It acts as a single source of truth for a company’s assets like a marketing resource center or a sales content resource center.
Moreover, some solutions include automated features such as asset tagging, version tracking, and asset governance, which can help marketers to ensure their content is well-managed and up-to-date.
But these tools can be expensive—running to thousands of dollars—making it a hefty investment.
Brand folder is another kind of DAM, but they only target enterprises. Enterprise needs are quite different from those of startup or mid-market companies. The most crucial difference is the scale of the organization.
They offer a single database to manage all your assets, but it’s focused on branding assets rather than content pieces. As it’s aimed at enterprises, some features might not be what you need.
Israel Gaudette, CEO of Flawless SEO, says, “I’m not looking for something with every single feature under the sun—in fact, if you’re trying to cram everything into one tool, it usually ends up being too complicated for anyone to use.” This can often happen with brand folders—which may not work for you.
Plus, the costs add up over time and can result in a hefty bill that you didn’t expect.
Sales enablement software is of many kinds—and one of them includes content management tools. They’re specifically used to store, categorize, tag, and monitor content usage across the entire sales cycle.
Tools like Content Camel allow you to share content with sales reps quickly and easily, ensuring that sales reps always have access to the latest content.
It also allows marketers to track and monitor the usage and performance of content shared with sales reps—enabling continuous improvement of your content strategy. These tools bridge the gap between content and sales teams, ensuring they’re leveraging content during sales calls.
Before choosing a tool to manage your content, you need to consider several aspects. Simran Doshi, Founder and CEO of WRDS, emphasizes that you should look for features like ease of use & understanding, UI/UX, cloud backup, accessibility over different devices (laptop, phone), and templates.
Similarly, below we’ve included features that every content management tool needs to have for robust management capabilities:
Content management tools should include a robust search feature to allow sales reps to quickly find relevant content. The search feature should consist of basic and advanced capabilities, allowing sales reps to search by keyword, content type, author, date, and other criteria.
Moreover, if the tool has tagging capabilities, it becomes easier to integrate it into existing workflows based on current tagging systems.
Sales reps should also be able to save their searches, quickly accessing content they have used before or creating microsites from them.
Tom Bourlet, Marketing Manager at Fizzbox, says, “One aspect we look for is a complete tool, which can host all forms of content, whether text, video or slides. I also love it when the content can be edited by more than one party at once, so changes can be made by more than one party without overwriting each other when saving.”
When you can add documents in different file formats like PDFs, MS Word files, Excel sheets, images, videos, or even links—managing your marketing library becomes easier. Plus, if your team members can make changes as needed with version tracking, you know how the content is being modified before sharing them with prospects.
These tools should include a linking feature that allows sales reps to tag links with UTM-like parameters, enabling them to track the click-through rate, source, and other analytics.
It helps sales reps measure and track the effectiveness of the content they send to prospects and make adjustments as needed. It also allows them to categorize content based on their internal categorization systems.
This feature enables marketers to understand how their content is being used, shared, and received by prospects, helping them to measure the effectiveness of their content better.
Additionally, the ability to monitor content usage across channels helps you spot trends and adjust your content strategy accordingly.
You should be able to track clicks, downloads, and other usage statistics. Additionally, if the tool has relevance-based monitoring, you can measure content performance using customer engagement metrics such as views and shares.
Tom explains his frustrations with using tools like Google Drive, which lacks analytics features. He says, “Another frustrating factor until we move onto a full content management tool is the lack of success metrics and tracking. Too many brands create content and then move on, but it is important to constantly assess content, whether it’s a sales message to a customer or an article being posted on the website. Observe what engagement metrics came back, how is it ranking on google, anything like this we should be monitoring, then looking at how we could improve it.”
No matter how powerful a sales enablement platform may be, it won’t do your business any good if your team finds it too difficult or time-consuming. Ronnie Higgins, Director of Content at OpenPhone, says, “It’s all about alignment with existing workflows and systems. If you expect sales to adhere to a totally different process to discover and access your content, they won’t know it exists.”
Look for tools that offer user-friendly interfaces and easy integration with other platforms, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Also, when you choose well-designed software, the learning curve is not too high. Sales and marketing teams can get started immediately—instead of waiting days to get onboarded.
The cost of a sales enablement tool can vary significantly depending on its features and capabilities. If budget is an issue, try to find a product that offers only the features your business requires without breaking the bank.
You also need to factor in additional costs like licensing, training, and hidden costs. For example, some companies have set up fees and annual contracts that may not be the best use of your investment. While you might assume that the rollout is immediate, your vendor might onboard you in batches—resulting in several months of wasted licenses.
Finally, ask vendors about the level of customer support and training they offer before selecting a tool for sales enablement. Ensure the vendor offers comprehensive customer service with trained executives willing to answer questions and provide assistance.
Also, consider whether or not they offer training programs or webinars that can help users get up-to-speed quickly on how to use the product effectively. Having hands-on support can impact your learning curve and onboarding process.
You don’t need the best sales enablement tool, but the right one. It’s best to dig into what your company and team need before looking for the right one. Once you have set criteria in place, then look for tools that offer features that would serve those needs.
You also need to consider customer service and user training before making your decision so that all users can get up-to-speed quickly on how to use the product effectively. Essentially, the faster your sales reps can hit the ground running—the better for your team.
Tools like Content Camel help you do exactly that. With an easy-to-use system, you reduce the need for training and onboarding. Plus, you can access features like analytics, link tracking, categorization, etc.
Sounds interesting? Start a free trial of Content Camel today and explore its benefits before committing to it!
Get the most out of your content and deliver trackable results
Content Camel is a sales enablement tool used for sales content management. High-growth sales teams use our system to quickly find and share the right content for each specific sales situation and measure content use and effectiveness.