Maybe this scenario sounds familiar to you. Your seller is face-to-face with a buyer—but they don’t have easy or intuitive access to the marketing content they need to close that deal.
It’s a challenge most businesses must overcome.
Marketing teams (and their companies) succeed when they can get the most relevant, client-facing content to their sellers. The challenge is making sure the necessary content is available on-demand, with offline access across all devices, to support every feasible buyer conversation.
In a hosted webinar our customer, Toro discussed how they tackled some of these same issues—and described how they addressed the biggest challenges they encountered across their global seller networks.
The global manufacturer optimized their enablement strategy to supercharge their worldwide network of 16 brands, 5,500 products, and 125 countries. They identified three key challenges that were hindering their indirect sellers—and in turn, their revenue:
- Sales could not find the right content.
- There were too many complex systems.
- New product info was delivered too slowly.
We’ll detail each challenge below, and highlight how Toro was able to successfully solve them.
Solution #1:
Deliver New Product Info Fast & Effectively
The best marketing content lives at the intersection of relevance and timeliness. Getting new product information front-and-center with sellers, at the right time and right place, is the key to increasing mindshare and influencing future buyer conversations. Here are a few issues to consider:
- Marketers must deliver content that reps can’t miss: It’s easy for dealer reps to miss traditional emails, so consider solutions that offer automated mobile alerts to keep reps connected to the latest and greatest content. For example, marketers can use a content enablement and digital sales platform to automate notifications for new product PDFs, updated marketing narratives, or recently uploaded video demos.
- Marketers must educate their dealer’s reps on new products: Sellers naturally focus on products that are easier to sell. So if marketers want indirect reps to sell more of their products (and less from competitors), they must deliver content that reps can use to articulate product benefits to customers. Microlearning is an emerging strategy brands can use to help educate channel reps on new products with just-in-time learning, whether online or offline, from the convenience of a mobile device.
- Marketers need to capture content insights from the field. To optimize new product launches, channel marketers need access to content usage analytics so they can see which assets sellers are sharing with buyers, which training courses they’ve taken, and which content materials are best at driving closed deals across product lines.
To deploy new product content fast and effectively, more organizations are turning to a modern content enablement and digital sales platform to gain insights into content performance and rep engagement.
Solution #2:
One System to Learn and Navigate
As marketers, we’re focused on building strategies that can empower sales reps working across complex sales channels. That means creating relevant and timely content that is easy for sellers to access. It also means finding the right mix of technology to connect sellers to useful content without exhausting them in their pursuit to engage buyers.
The average seller faces an overwhelming number of sales solutions they must access each day. This means your sales rep is forced to log in and out of different systems constantly—and waste precious time navigating between fragmented systems.
Mastering an entire marketing tech stack is not realistic for channel reps. It’s too time-consuming, and it’s too much of a barrier between reps and the tools they need. According to Toro:
"It was an issue of not having sales reps go through hoops to get what they needed."
Faced with an overabundance of choices, indirect sellers will simply settle into using the content assets and processes they’ve always used, not necessarily those that are best for increasing mindshare or closing deals.
Toro wanted to give their sales reps a seamless selling experience that would benefit customers too. That meant organizing all their day-to-day tools (from sales readiness, to content management, to interactive selling) in one place for friction-free access.
Solution #3:
Simplify How Sales Finds the Right Content
Many organizations have already created valuable content for their reps, but it is too painstakingly tedious for sellers to track down.
Without a simple way to locate the content they need (when they need it!), sellers have a few options that are less than ideal:
❌ Reps can reach out to marketing with constant content requests.
❌ They can build content on their own as needed.
❌ They can skip using content and risk losing deals they otherwise would have won.
These options cost your sellers time, create confusion, and make it harder to get deals done.
When reps are interacting with buyers, they need to be confident the content they share is the most relevant to the conversation. They also need flexible access to all their selling tools on-demand (both offline and online), and across all devices. This versatility empowers reps to capitalize across every scenario—wherever buyer conversations lead them.
Karine Watne, Sr. Manager, Marketing Communications & Projects at Toro, found her team was great at creating content but needed to do more to connect reps around the world with the tools and marketing they needed.
"The key goal was that the content was reaching the intended audience."
Investing in revenue enablement technology helps brands connect reps to a single-source of truth for all their content needs, reducing time spent searching for content and increasing time engaging buyers.
Toro equipped channel reps with an intuitive and centralized revenue enablement platform, offering total access to all the content and tools a sales rep could need, 24/7, across all devices.
The results speak for themselves.
Toro increased buyer engagement by 20%, with 90% of reps saying access to this tool made selling easier.
Toro relies on sales enablement insights to optimize strategy across more than a dozen brands and thousands of products that are simultaneously connected to their network of global sellers.
“My team and I rely on Modus analytics to make better decisions with our marketing content budget."
Better Indirect Sales with a Digital Sales Platform
When Toro was looking for ways to improve channel performance, they were already a world-class brand with a successful portfolio of high-revenue products. But they knew they could do more.
If you haven’t watched it already, see how Toro revolutionized their sales channels in a recent on-demand webinar. Karine Watne explains how her team conquered these three challenges (and more) across their sales channels.
Curious about how the right platform could help your organization? Contact the Modus team for a custom demo to see the Modus in action.
