It’s not about the Quantity of the Content you provide, it’s all about the QUALITY!

Is your organization drowning in content or collateral that your sales or marketing departments have created? If so, you’re not alone.
I’ve spoken to numerous organizations who have confessed that they spend about as much time searching for the right content within their own organization as they do in front of a prospect selling!
There are a couple of reasons for this. One reason is that a lot of marketing departments believe that it is their job to crank out new material on a consistent basis. They feel that it is part of their job security and justification for being. Another reason for this is that most organizations don’t have a way in which they can determine what content is no longer being used or no longer of value, so they continue to pile on more and don’t delete or remove out-of-date content. A third reason for this is that often times the content is scattered about the organization and isn’t housed in an easy-to- find location and if it is in one location, trying to decipher which is the right piece of content they are looking for is a real problem for people. So, what happens is that sales people waste an inordinate amount of their time trying to find the right piece of content or collateral to fit their needs.
Don’t be surprised if this looks and sounds all too familiar. So, how can organizations deal with this issue? Well one way would be to have a process in which feedback loops could be in place so that the people who create the content, i.e., marketing, sales support, training, etc., could actually get feedback from the people it was meant to help and as to whether or not it did so. You might even want to consider implementing a rating function in which users can give you a numeric value on the quality of the content. After all, it’s all about the quality of the content that is created and not about the quantity. Often times less is more! If your sales people only need a couple of pieces of collateral to do their job, then don’t overload them with more information or content than they need, but the only way in which you will know what they need is to provide feedback loops so they can tell you.
Another thing organizations can do is consolidate all of their content and collateral into a single repository, so that everyone knows exactly where they need to go to get what they want. I would also create a way in which the users could tag that content so they can search for it the way they look for things and find it faster and waste less time.
Last but not least, organizations need to have a way in which they can analyze what is being looked at, how often and when it has reached the end of its life cycle and should be updated, removed or replaced. You should constantly cull your library of content to make sure that it is up-to-date and relevant; otherwise it becomes too much to control and loses its value.
That’s the way I see it, what say you?