At a Glance

Numerous stakeholders were creating an ever-expanding number and variety of sales materials to support the ongoing collateral needs of field and partner sales teams at a global software company.

Challenge

Over time, critical resources for selling the company’s cloud-computing services devolved into an assortment of presentations without adherence to brand standards and a mismatched look and feel. Additionally, the time for managers to review and correct these materials continued to increase, requiring more resources to ensure not only approval for use, but effectiveness in the sales process. The client reached out to RedCloud in need of help creating a consistent set of templates for sales materials, as well as an easy-to-use guide for anyone creating content across the organization.

Solution

After an initial in-depth audit of the existing process for collateral creation, RedCloud developed a series of templates to be used across the organization’s sales teams. RedCloud considered key aspects of the most desired and effective sales tools and worked within the company’s brand guidelines to create a succinct set of templates with input from sales, product marketing, and engineering. This new process would ensure the materials resonated with a wide cross-section of audiences for future use.
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As a critical piece of the template creation, RedCloud ensured the delivery of a clear set of guidelines for authors of any sales content including content requirements and recommended length, as well as the company’s style and branding guidelines including colors, fonts, sizing, iconography, and imagery.
This creator’s guide also outlined a specific process on how authors could submit new and/or updated content, name changes, or request a new solution or technology currently outside of the templates.

Results

Upon implementation of the new templates and processes for content creation, a rapid transition from a disjunct set of sales materials to a streamlined and consistent portfolio of presentations occurred. Beyond brand consistency, the organization saw a deep reduction in the time (and related resources) to review and correct content between creator and manager.

The project ultimately enabled a new level of consistency across sales tools, and a significant reduction of time in the creation and editing process. This sped up the sales cycle, allowing the team to readily and directly target potential leads.

A standardized process has led to stronger collateral for our field sales teams to use with customers."
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-- Client Representative