The Digital Selling Crash Course
Chapter 3: Creating Digital Sales Collateral
Transition from traditional sales collateral to digital sales collateral
Increase your sales performance by learning how to create immersive, engaging, and jaw dropping digital brochures, catalogs, lookbooks, and more.
In the last chapter we learned how to overcome sales challenges by transitioning from traditional selling to Digital Selling. In this chapter, we are going to continue to increase your sales performance by transitioning your traditional sales collateral to digital sales collateral.
What is Sales Collateral?
Sales collateral is any content you use to engage or nurture a prospect. Common traditional sales collateral include (but are not limited to) presentations, brochures, catalogs, lookbooks, and whitepapers.
Traditional Sales Collateral Was Never Designed to Engage in a Digital World
Traditional sales collateral is still created using desktop publishing tools that were developed for creating print material. Shockingly, the only digital innovation in this space introduced in the last two decades is replacing printed paper with downloadable PDFs. But PDFs don’t engage anymore than print artifacts. In fact, this trend continues to expose many sales challenges.
Sales Challenges Caused By Traditional Sales Collateral
Print-oriented text heavy static content fails to engage viewers
Are you familiar with the notorious 7 by 7 rule in PowerPoint? Studies have shown that if you have more than 49 words on a slide (7 lines with 7 words each) audiences will consider the slide to be “text heavy”, lose interest, and choose to not read the content on the slide. Text heavy content is not engaging. In fact, it is likely to disengage your audience before it engages them.
Personalizing Traditional Sales Collateral For Every Engagement is Hard
Sales teams love to deliver personalized content to their customers. Unfortunately, marketing and sales teams have difficulty personalizing content and making relevant content when content is distributed using PDF or created in content specific design tools (like InDesign). With print centered desktop publishing tools, the cost to customize is exponentially higher than the cost to standardize.
Managing the Distribution and Quality of Traditional Sales Collateral is Even Harder
Presentation decks stored on an individual’s personal device are difficult to manage. Each sales person can make uncontrolled changes that dilute messaging and branding as well as increases regulatory compliance risks. It is almost impossible for marketing services teams to ensure that each sales person is using the latest and most relevant content.
Digital Sales Collateral Is Designed to Make Your Content Truly Engaging
Instead of describing what digital sales collateral is, let’s start by seeing an example. Below is a brochure created using a digital sales collateral editor. See if you can spot all the differences between this brochure and a printed brochure.
See if you can spot all the differences between this brochure and a normal printed brochure.
Navigation help: you can navigate between the pages of the brochure by clicking on the right and left side of the screen or by using the arrows at the bottom. Slide 4 contains 360 Panoramas. Simply click and drag your mouse on the images to look around the room.
For starters, the brochure above presents and delivers rich content that gives the viewer a better feel of the offering. High definition video, slideshow style photos, animations, and branded text make this entire brochure feel professional, yet very consumable.
Now that you can see the difference, let’s understand how digital sales collateral will improve your sales performance.
The Benefits of Digital Sales Collateral
Everyone Prefers Highly Engaging Rich Media Content
Consider the following trend. While the amount of time we spend reading on a daily basis has decreased by ~7% in the last 15 years, the amount of time we spend watching video has increased almost 32% in the last 5 years! So wouldn’t it make sense to engage our prospects with the kind of content they spend more time viewing? We are at a pivotal point in history where we can view high definition videos, animations, high resolution images, 3D graphics and custom fonts all on our mobile devices. Leverage this unique opportunity to deliver unique brand experience and engage your audience.
Fully Utilize the Flexibility and Power of the Browser
No one wants to download another app to create content. Instead, people prefer to use web based tools that they can access from any browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc). Using a web based tool comes with many advantages. For one, it’s easier to design and distribute HTML5 compatible content. Second, since all the content is created in a browser, your sales team will be enabled to easily personalize content to make it relevant for each sales engagement when they are on the go. And finally, since the tool is highly accessible, your marketing and sales teams can also collaborate on content development, reviews, and approvals.
Seamlessly Manage Slide Libraries
Cloud based presentation design solutions enable you to create and manage slide libraries. This enables automatic version updates and ensures that every salesperson is delivering the most up to date and relevant message. It will also enable your marketing team to control what parts of the content can be modified. This ensures consistent messaging, brand control and regulatory compliance.
Check out this video. It illustrate how fullfeel’s CustomShow enables you to design rich media digital sales collateral that can grab and retain your audience’s attention.
Creating Digital Sales Collateral
Also, check out this video. It shows how CustomShow enables multiple users to collaborate on the content as well as review and approve the content.
Create binge-worthy sales collateral today and supercharge your sales and marketing teams.
Now that you can create jaw-dropping sales collateral, learn how to share it with maximum impact!
Explore the Chapters...
What is it, and who needs it?
Learn what Digital Selling is, why it matters, and whether you are suffering from the adverse effects of outdated traditional selling practices.
Let’s skip the theory and put Digital Selling techniques into practice.
Your time is valuable. We promise in 30 minutes you will know exactly what to do to start helping your business close more deals, faster.
Transition from traditional sales collateral to digital sales collateral
Increase your sales performance by learning how to create immersive, engaging, and jaw dropping digital brochures, catalogs, lookbooks, and more.
3 rules that will improve the relevance of your sales content when engaging a prospect
Maximize your sales engagements by developing relevant content that addresses your prospect’s problems and presents the right information at every stage of the sales cycle.
Automate and accelerate your sales teams ability to engage
Learn how autonomous customer engagements and customer journey maps will enable your sales team to best utilize their time and energy.
The three phased approach to get your business to adopt Digital Selling
Transform how your business sells using the phased approach described in this chapter.