It’s a Challenging Time for Sales Leaders 

The ever-changing customer expectations, increased competition, and a growing product portfolio can pose challenges to sales leaders in achieving their ultimate goal of driving revenue and closing more deals.  The key to success is efficiency, and that’s where a sales enablement platform makes all the difference. 

How can a Sales Enablement Platform Help?

Streamline the Sales Process: A sales enablement platform provides sales teams with the right content at the right time, allowing them to quickly and efficiently respond to potential customer needs. Repetitive tasks can also be automated, freeing up more time for selling.

Improve Customer Engagement: With a sales enablement platform, sales teams can create custom presentations, proposals, and demos tailored to each customer's unique needs. Collaboration with other departments such as marketing and product teams can also ensure messaging consistency and relevance to target audiences.

Measure Performance and Improve Training: The platform allows sales leaders to track sales team performance and behavior in real-time, identify trends, and pinpoint areas that need additional training or coaching. Data-driven decisions can be made to improve the sales process, forecast better, and sell more effectively.

Enable Remote Selling: A sales enablement platform bridges the gap between remote sales reps and provides a centralized platform where they can access training, content, and customer data. This ensures everyone on the sales team is on the same page regardless of location.

Increase Sales Productivity: By providing sales reps with the right information, tools, and resources, a sales enablement platform can increase productivity and reduce time spent on administrative tasks.

Centralize Your Content: All sales materials are centralized on a sales enablement platform, providing sales representatives with immediate access to the correct content. This eliminates time spent searching for material and allows them to be more efficient and better prepared for sales meetings.

Customizable and Trackable: Sales reps can create custom presentations, mailers, and catalogs in minutes, and sales managers can track the effectiveness of the content. The platform can separate the right collateral from the irrelevant, improving the team's overall performance.

Lead Nurturing: A sales enablement platform nurtures leads by providing prospects with a variety of tailored content, pushing them further down the sales funnel until they are ready to purchase. This approach can improve conversion rates and increase sales efficiency.

Collaboration: The platform enhances collaboration between sales and marketing teams, allowing for feedback and refinement of content for maximum impact. Effective communication between sales and marketing teams results in more efficient marketing strategies that boost the bottom line.

The Bottom Line 

Investing in a sales enablement platform can revolutionize your sales process, increase sales efficiency, and drive revenue. Streamlining the sales process, improving customer engagement, measuring performance and improving training, enabling remote selling, and increasing sales productivity are all benefits of implementing a sales enablement platform. It's time to give your sales team the tools they need to succeed in today's competitive marketplace.

If you’re ready to talk about how a sales enablement can help boost your team’s efficiency, book a discovery call or schedule a demo of the Brand Wings sales enablement platform at Schedule a Demo | Brand Wings

Next, go in to the Admin Roles and also enable permissions for any roles you want to empower.

Customer Spaces are based on templates that you, as an administrator, first define.  A template is a defined set of assets along with default notes and explanations you create.  Think of this as providing a quick and easy starting point for your sellers.  When you create a template, you will be able to define whether the seller can modify the list of assets you have selected and change the default text.  In this way you can either tightly control how Customer Spaces are used or provide flexibility to your sellers.

To create a Customer Space template in the admin, go to Sales Tools-->Customer Spaces.  Next, click the Create Template button.  You'll be prompted to provide a name for the template and then be brought into the template administration page:

On the Details tab, you have a number of options:

• Primary Image: Upload an image that will represent the Customer Space template.  The check box below it indicates if the seller can change this image you have provided.
• Name: The name of the Customer Space template
• Description: This description will be made available to your sellers, but will not be seen by customers
• Default Sales User Note to Customer: A Customer Space includes a note from the seller.  You can provide some default content here.  You can also indicate if the seller is able to edit this note.
• Allow Sales User to Add and Remove Items: On the next tab you will select which assets should be assigned to this Customer Space template.  This checkbox indicates if the seller can change this list of assets you are defining.
• Labels: Like other sales tools in Brand Wings, you can set Labels that will be associated with this template.

In this tab, you can find Assets on the left, and drag them into the Customer Space box on the right.  Note that you can rearrange the assets in the Customer Space box by clicking and dragging.

Now click the Permissions tab:

Like other Sales Tools in Brand Wings, you can define which sellers will have access to this Customer Space template.  You can select Roles and/or Sales Teams.  Just remember that if both areas have selections, both must be true for the sales user to have access.

Remember to click Save when finished!

Now that you have defined a Customer Space, the next step is to make sure the sales portal is properly configured.  First, you may want to add a navigation menu item that points to a list of all available Customer Space templates.  Click and drag the Customer Space List from the General Items into the appropriate location on your menu:

Two other potential updates to make in the admin are:

• On the Inside Pages tab of the Portal Theme area, be sure to map a layout to the Customer Space type.
• Since customers can be notified about the customer space via email, you can also define a notification template.  Be sure to use the {{Link}} Merge Tag in the template so that a URL to the Customer Space can be added to the email.

Now that we have created a Customer Space template in the admin, let's review the seller experience.  After your seller has logged into the portal, there are a few different ways they see and use the Customer Space templates you have created.  If you added the Customer Spaces List menu item to a navigation menu, the seller can click (or tap) this link to see the templates:

Next, your seller can click on "See Details" for the desired template.  This opens a detail page:

After reviewing the details, the seller can click the "Create New Customer Space" button to get started.  This next screen allows the seller to customize the space (if needed) and share it with contacts:

Depending on the permissions you set in the template, your seller has a number of options:

• Update the Customer Space name
• Update the image
• Update the note to the customer
• Add, remove, or re-order assets.

The seller can also select one or more contacts to send the customer space to (if desired) as well as an expiration date.  When finished, your seller should click the Save button.  Next, your seller is prompted to either send an email to the contacts or generate a link to the Customer Space:

The seller can access this Customer Space through the Activity Stream.  By clicking on the detail icon on the right of the activity stream item opens a detail screen:

Note the tabs on this screen that include additional information:

• Items: List of assets in the Customer Space
• Contacts: The Contacts that have access to the Customer Space
• Activity History: Key events such as when Contacts visit the Customer Space

We hope you find this new feature useful for further enabling your sales teams!

Sales and marketing teams know that high-quality content takes buyers through a journey that ideally results in winning new sales opportunities. 

But where do reps get the high-quality content they need? 

Are your reps getting timely and relevant content from marketing, or are they creating content on their own?

If the reps are developing the content themselves it takes time away from selling and pursuing new opportunities.  Besides, content developed by your reps may not be on brand or consistent with the brand voice.  The content may not be up-to-date, or may not present the right image or value of your product or service.  Worst case the information developed by your reps could be inaccurate. 

If your reps are searching for content, and the content is stored across five or six different content platforms, reps will sometimes waste a lot of time looking for what they need.  There are market studies and surveys that indicate that as much as 1/3 of reps time is spent searching for or creating content. 

The challenge of providing relevant content to sales teams, while minimizing or eliminating the time reps spend creating or finding content is widespread.  In a recent survey, 84% of respondents indicated that content search and utilization was the number one area that could improve sales productivity, yet only 35% of companies are actively working on ways to improve how reps find and utilize content to drive new sales. 

So what is the best way forward?

Ideally, marketing teams work closely with the sales team to create compelling content that drives sales.  Marketing then organizes the content into a sales enablement content library and makes it easy for reps to access the content.  The salesperson accesses the system and searches for relevant assets based on specific criteria such as the buyers current stage in the buying journey. 

What type of assets resonates most with buyers?

That depends on the person who is receiving the content, their role in the organization, and the stage of the buying journey.  In the early stages content that is informational and educational helps prospects to become aware of better ways to get jobs done.  As the buying journey advances, prospects are trying to determine the solution that’s right for them.  At this stage, buyers are looking for details to understand how your product or service solves their problem, and how it compares to alternatives.  In the later stages content that helps justify the investment and case studies validating the outcomes help prospects make decisions to go ahead.

Having a sales enablement content management system offers functionality that can help you determine when it’s time to refresh or replace content.  When a specific piece of content is no longer used, or no longer helping sales professionals move customers forward on their buying journey path, that’s a good sign that the asset has outlived its usefulness.  Replacing or refreshing old content, such as an out-of-date case study, improves sales productivity because sales professionals will be using up-to-date content.  It also gives them a higher level of confidence in the quality of the materials in the system.

Sales teams need actionable content that's centralized and trackable. The Brand Wings content management system provides a single point of access that saves time for reps before and after every sales call and helps improve the productivity of every interaction with prospects. 

West Chicago, IL — January 3rd, 2022 —Brand Wings today announced the launch of Email Campaign Builder, a powerful new feature included in the Brand Wings sales enablement platform. Email Campaign Builder makes it easy for sales representatives to send highly personalized brand-compliant emails to their contacts in any volume and receive analytics on the campaign’s effectiveness. 

“While there are many email marketing software platforms in the market, one feature that most lack is brand control,” said Jason Kammes, Chief Revenue Officer of Brand Wings. “Those other programs allow users to upload nearly any logo, image, or digital asset into the email template, regardless of whether those assets are brand compliant. Brand Wings, with its Email Campaign Builder feature, solves those problems for brands.”

Previously, sales and marketing teams often became frustrated in managing email campaigns that require both content customization and brand compliance. “Effectively, there was a trade-off between user flexibility and brand control,” Kammes added. “Brand Wings changes that by allowing only brand compliant assets to be used in email campaigns while also allowing content customization.” 

How Email Campaign Builder works

Using the intuitive Brand Wings portal, the brand’s portal administrator can design and edit an email campaign by simply building a template that automatically loads the brand’s correct logo and other digital assets. The administrator can then customize the email content and maintain multiple versions of the campaign.

Sales teams can access the template and send their email campaigns to their contacts. The template contains merge tags that automatically personalize the content using brand guidelines. 

Plus, both the brand manager and the sales teams can view real-time analytics about the effectiveness of the email campaign. The Brand Wings activity stream shows when the sales rep sent out a particular email campaign and other details such as clicks, downloads, bounces, or unsubscribe actions. 

In addition to the feature of Email Campaign Builder, the Brand Wings sales enablement platform offers sales teams many other benefits, including: 

• Brand asset management in one central location for all brand marketing content such as presentations, case studies, documents, images, and videos.  Sales teams can easily locate, download, or distribute the assets they need, when they need them.

• One-to-one asset personalization allows brands to define templates (PDF, PowerPoint, or Word) that can be customized or co-branded according to the business rules defined.  Sales teams are empowered to easily create on-brand, personalized content for their customers and leads.

• Brand Wings Analytics provides real-time business intelligence into sales operations and marketing effectiveness. Easy-to-understand dashboards provide dynamic targets and KPI’s.

Email Campaign Builder feature is now generally available to all current and prospective Brand Wings portal customers.

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About Brand Wings: West Chicago, Illinois-based Brand Wings is a SaaS-based marketing automation platform provider with a goal to simplify brand marketing and enable sales teams. Its vision is to enable brands and their channel partners to achieve limitless success through greater communication, information, and knowledge. By deploying Brand Wings through their channel partners, brands can grow their channel efficiency, knowledge, and mindshare, while improving their brand consistency. For more information about Brand Wings or to schedule a demo, visit www.brandwings.com.