Sales Force
Marketing Collateral and Literature Fulfillment
Sales teams rely on literature as marketing collateral for use in one-on-one meetings, to hand out at trade shows and seminars, and for mailings. The traditional problem is that requesting materials from the home office is error-prone and time-consuming. Worse yet, salespeople in the field (and sometimes even at headquarters!) don't know all the marketing materials that are available to them, and don't know when an item is discontinued, out-of-stock, or revised.
Consequently, sales people often adopt a couple of predictable behaviors - they stockpile marketing collateral through large quantities of marketing literature ("I don't want to get caught short!") or they learn to rely on only a few items that they know work for them ("Why is Ralph still using that old brochure?"). It's a daily source of frustration, excess cost, and lost opportunity.
A marketing collateral library tackles these problems and more. All of the available print marketing collateral is on-line, for easy searching and ordering. Salespeople can see when items are updated, the minimum/maximum order quantities, how many are in stock, etc. - all from a web browser. They can place orders on-line, using a visual shopping cart that cuts errors and cycle time. Plus, with an integrated subscription facility, they can see notices of new materials that address topics of interest to them.
Orders are routed directly to the correct literature fulfillment facility via either e-mail or electronic data interchange - eliminating manual faxing or keying of orders. Plus, the marketing department typically can reduce the number of hardcopy "FYI" marketing collateral samples distributed to salespeople, saving even more money.
