How to Manage your Marketing and Sales Collateral

If you’re a marketer or working in sales you are either creating or using marketing or sales collateral.

You need to attract people to what you have to offer, you need to engage them, educate them and convert them into a deal. Marketing and Sales collaterals are not just important for Inbound Marketing, they have many more use cases.

When creating a lot of quality content, the question arises of how you should manage all your marketing and sales collateral.

In this post, we’ll try to go over a couple of best practices.

Make sure your Marketing and Sales collaterals are on-brand

Because marketing and sales collaterals are used throughout the funnel, you really don’t want your prospects to receive a white paper with the latest branding and a brochure with old-dated branding.

The first thing you should do when creating collateral is to have a QA (Quality Audit) in place.

• Who is allowed to create marketing collateral?
• Who is allowed to create sales collateral?
• After how many months do you check if all your collateral is still up to date and on-brand? (Note that for instance if you have stated that your company is ‘trusted by 1200 companies’ this will change over time. You don’t want to have three different numbers in three different assets. On-brand is not just the visual aspect, it’s also the messaging.

Define a clear owner for your marketing and sales collaterals

The best way to keep track of what we’ve discussed above and to be sure there is ownership is to appoint someone to be the owner of the management of all your assets. They don’t per se need to create all the assets but they need to be the gatekeeper, set rules, and check regularly. It can be someone on the Brand or Communications team for instance.

Define how your assets can be used

Which assets are free to use anywhere (Website, LinkedIn, Sales calls, etc.) and which ones are only for internal use or sales calls? The owner needs to define this, communicate clearly with all employees and enforce the rules. You don’t want to find collateral that is meant for internal use to be out in the open for instance.

Version control

The main problem with marketing and sales assets is that they are often created in a PDF, which is not optimal for version control. If you have 10 employees downloading an asset, and you update that asset, you basically lose all control of who is using what.

Create assets as often as possible online so there can be no conflicting versions.