Lost city of Content and beginning of Rivlray.

Sometimes they will get lost inside the google drive to find the relevant content!

Sometimes, they will be lost while waiting for a reply from the marketing team to get relevant content!

Sometimes they will lose a deal by sharing old and off-branded content from the personal drive!

This is the confession of a Sales Manager from a SaaS company, we can Call him Mr. Brad. We had this conversation when we interviewed salespeople, managers, and leaders to determine whether the problem we are trying to solve is a pain in the ass or nice to have.

Mr. Brad was an early recruit in the sales team as an Account Executive, which now reached a 19-member team. In the beginning, the sales motion followed a founder-led sales approach, but when the team started growing, new sales methodologies and tools were introduced slowly.

"In the early stage, as I loved writing content, I was the one creating case studies and pitch decks for my 3 teammates. Not up to par, but it was good enough compared with other content created by my CEO. We use Google Drive to store and manage content. And it was easy to spot those content by others on the team.

After raising an excellent early-stage investment, content marketers and product marketers are onboarded into the ship and start creating some amazing content. Slowly our sales team started to grow, and newcomers started asking me regularly where to find specific content to share with a prospect at a particular stage. As a veteran, I understood the responsibility to help them spot the right content.

With an exclusive team to create content for branding, demand gen, and enable salespeople, I saw,

• Whitepaper started piling up,

• New Case studies are being created,

• Older case studies are being updated,

• New pitch decks and the everchanging latest version,

• Security compliant docs and updated versions,

• Product videos,

• G2 Crowd reviews,

• Blogs, Articles, Podcast, etc.

100+ contents of different variants😟

Oh! Even for me, it was overwhelming and became a struggle to find which content was new, which was old, and which one was right for a particular opportunity. And no wonder new sales recruits become super anxious.

When the deal got stuck, we started blaming the marketing team for not providing the right content on the plate. And Marketing team hit a sixer by saying, "dears, it's already in the drive🤨."

Fuck you, marketing team; why can't you share an email with all of us?

Rivalry slowly started building up between the two functions. A hero must arise. Our Product marketer, we can call him Mr. Alex, made a workaround by creating an excel sheet to map the content's location in the drive. Oh! It's a short-term fix. For a permanent fix, I searched for a content management system and found a few, like Highspot and Seismic. It's a little heavy to implement and pricy. But great platforms. Not only it will help salespeople find content easily, but it will also track the content engagement by buyers. I tried introducing it to the sales leader to add this tool to our sales tech stack. He was uncertain as we had already allocated a reasonable budget for Salesforce CRM, Outplay, Gong, and Linkedin Sales Navigator. For him, the easy decision was, "let's move with that workaround made by our Product Marketer."

Hmmm😕!

A customer can ask for a piece of information,

• over email,

• over a Linkedin message,

• over a call,

• over a zoom call.

At that time, going to that "workaround-excel sheet content mapper,"

locating the folder,

finding the right piece of content,

downloading, attaching, and sharing

it with a prospect was still a challenge. For a 19-member sales team, is it's okay😶?

But eventually, I saw among my team that they started downloading the content (which they feel will help close a deal) and keeping it in their personal drivel. But in a few weeks or months, the marketing team makes the latest version of that content and shares an email notification with us all.

Who will take that notification seriously in the middle of closing deals?

When it comes to that particular content, they forget about that email notification and keep sending old ones. Lack of updated and relevant information delayed the purchase decision, and deal stalls started to happen. Back to square one😏.

So a solution is needed even at this stage. Sharing the right information at the right time is the key to closing deals faster and effectively. If we are behind in that, competitors will be closing those customers."

Do you think this use case faced by Mr. Brad resonates with your organization?

If yes, please let us know your feedback. We can give you access to a technology that will work like a "Grammarly-like" browser plugin, enabling salespeople to share the latest and relevant content "always" with the buyer with a single click over email, Linkedin, or from anywhere the salesperson is communicating with the customer. That too free until we reduce your current sales cycle by 15%(our pricing model works like that way).