Boosting Sales Meeting Success: Ensuring Brand Consistency and Up-to-Date Sales Materials
03.04.2024
This is part one of our five-part series exploring the critical challenges in sales meetings and how to address them effectively. Starting off by emphasizing the importance of brand consistency and the need for up-to-date sales materials.
Why Should You Care About Brand Consistency
The Marq study found that 68% of companies focusing on brand consistency experienced a revenue boost of about 10-20%. This is especially relevant in sales meetings, where up-to-date materials and a unified brand image directly impact client trust and the perception of reliability.
To put it bluntly: Your bottom line can get a nice boost if your sales material upkeep processes are in good shape!
The Challenges (and How to Overcome them)
Sales is an interactive role-play game where anything can happen – the only thing you should worry about? Preparing the best you can.
Let’s dive right into the most common challenges that might conjure up during sales meetings:
Outdated materials
You’re in the middle of presenting to a client and come across a slide with old numbers, and you hit them with the; “Sorry, that information is actually outdated.”
A moment of silence for your lost credibility…
Mitigating Risks with Synchronized Updates
To avoid using outdated materials, consider embracing a platform that allows synchronized updates. By updating one central document, all your materials reflect the latest data and insights, ensuring you’re always presentation-ready.
This way whenever new information rolls in or even if you notice an inconsistency, you can have all your sales materials be up-to-date in an instant.
This instills confidence in your clients, showcasing your brand as a reliable force.
No more awkward apologies.
Inconsistent Brand Identity & Outdated Brand Elements
You’re aiming for consistency across all platforms, but your sales presentations don’t always match the quality of your polished website for example.
This mismatch can disappoint customers who expect uniformity.
And despite implementing templates, team members still tweak their own presentations, sometimes using the wrong fonts and colors.
These errors then get copied into multiple presentations, creating an even bigger mess..
How can you regain control and learn to maintain consistency?
Enhancing Brand Consistency: Implementing CMS and Strategic Controls
You can implement a centralized cloud-based content management system (CMS) as the definitive source for all brand materials, including templates, fonts, and color palettes, for upkeeping consistency.
Automatic updates in the CMS should reflect across all materials.
You should also seek to find solutions that allow access level settings to limit the editing capabilities to authorized personnel only (perhaps it’s wise if some team members are kept away from the creative controls).
Additionally, if possible, enforce brand settings so only approved fonts and colors are used in material creation.
Weak Visuals: The Untapped Potential
In the midst of building your new sales deck, you notice your materials are informative but not visually engaging, making them less effective.
What to do – you don’t have enough time to start crafting good looking slides from scratch and you don’t feel confident about presenting what you have.
How do you balance the need for speed with the desire for impactful visuals?
Enhancing Visual Appeal with Dynamic Content and Strategic Oversight
Prioritize solutions that simplify your workflow while maximizing visual impact.
Seek a platform with a rich library of visual elements—like videos, animations, 3D images, and interactive tools—that can be easily added into your presentations to create a strong visual narrative.
The availability of versatile and customizable slide templates is crucial.
These should enable you to easily mix and match designs, so that each presentation can be tailored to its specific audience.
Lastly, consider appointing a brand manager who ensures adherence to brand guidelines and settings, and also maintains the visual quality and freshness of your element libraries and templates.
Outdated Language Versions
You’re targeting a specific market but the language versions haven’t been kept up-to-date as new information has been added to all other materials.
Ouch.
This is due to poor team collaboration—updates aren’t shared across all departments.
As a result, you’re now faced with the overwhelming task of updating all language versions, adding a significant project to your workload.
Ensuring Version Relevance with Better Team Collaboration
Use a collaborative platform that allows real-time co-editing, with role-based access to ensure that the right department members are responsible for updating their respective language versions.
This helps improve how updates are shared across departments, making it simpler to keep all content versions up-to-date and reducing extra work.
You should also implement feedback loops for instant sharing and receiving of updates, so that all departments are in sync. If the platform doesn’t have this feature, use regular meetings, shared documents, or communication tools to keep everyone informed about changes.
The Challenge of Multiple Formats
As you gear up for an important sales meeting, you’re faced with materials being scattered across too many different formats and locations.
This disorganization now has you spending precious time hunting for the right files, significantly cutting into your preparation time.
Enhanced Accessibility and Efficiency
To combat this, you should utilize a system that not only centralizes content but also enhances its accessibility.
We’re talking about good management.
This involves not only smartly categorizing, tagging, and appropriately naming your content but also ensuring that the chosen system enables these processes seamlessly. By doing so, you’ll be empowered to swiftly navigate through various formats using simple search words or a few clicks, finding exactly what you need with minimal effort.
Besides bringing different formats together; it’s about making them readily accessible and usable, reducing the time and complexity that it takes to prepare for sales meetings.
Is It Possible to Solve These Challenges All At Once?
You bet!
How Do We Solve These Challenges for Our Clients?
After years of rigorous coding, development, integration set-ups and automation building we’re able to do this smoothly.
Seidat makes it easy to keep your brand and sales info up-to-date and consistent. The collaborative platform combines Brand Settings, Cloud Storage, Smart Slides and Tags, and Link Sharing all in one place.
This means any changes you make update everywhere instantly, even in presentations you’ve already sent out, whether it was a week or several months ago.
Everything—your slides, media, and the look of your brand—is managed together, making everything look the same and easy to find. This helps make your sales work smoother and keeps your communications looking professional.
That said, there’s much more Seidat can offer for your material upkeep and sales processes.
Take Your Sales Strategy Further
Contact Us – to get to know more – and let’s discuss together how our solutions can tailor-fit your needs, ensuring your brand stands out in every pitch, so you can leave outdated materials in the past!
Keywords: International sales Creating Presenting Sharing Collaboration
Webinar | 07.05.2024
