Can’t find what you’re looking for?

Have you ever gotten so frustrated that you just wanted to pull your hair out because you couldn’t find what you needed and you knew it was there somewhere? Well you’re not alone. One of the most frustrating things that plague sales people today is finding what they need, when they need it to help them do their job. According to a study by Qvidian®, “sales people waste as much as 50% of their time every day, trying to find the resources and content needed to do their job.”

I’ve seen other studies and research stating that people spend as much as 9 hours per week doing the same thing. No matter which study you accept, that’s still way too much time wasted. Wouldn’t you agree?

So, why is this a problem for a lot of organizations? Well, according to a white paper written by Docurated called “State of Document Management Report, July 2014”, they said that “68% of organizations have 5 or more storage repositories and companies are actually increasing the number of silos they manage.” So, no wonder people pull their hair out in complete frustration because they can’t find what they need. They went on to say that “77% of the people who responded to their survey still use file servers as their primary repository.” Also, a lot of organizations simply don’t see this as a problem and recognize that it is stealing from them.

If you’re anything like me, then you have difficulty remembering where you put your last Word document and what you called it. So, can you imagine how much it costs organizations on a daily basis in lost selling time and productivity, because people can’t get what they want quickly? It’s got to be in the thousands of dollars per day; depending on the size of the organization, it could be even more than that.

So, how should organizations deal with this issue? Well for one, they should try and consolidate their sales and marketing assets into one central repository where everyone can go to find what they need. They will need to establish company protocols that ensure this is the way things are done.

Second, they will need to provide a structured, logical approach to capture and store those assets. They should use a platform that is divided into sections like: Marketing Collateral, Training Materials, Competition, Proposals, References, etc. This way people will be able to know where to go to find what they need in a more logical and organized fashion.

Third, allow your users to tag their content so they can find things the way they search for them.

Fourth, allow them to provide feedback as to the quality and value of what you provide, so you will be able to track what’s working and what isn’t and eliminate old unused content or assets, thereby cutting down on the amount of content they have to wade through to find what they need.

Helping your sales people get what they need, when they need it, with the quality and value they need, will increase their productivity and amount of time they can spend selling and reduce the amount of stress they have trying to find what they need. At least that’s the way I see it what say you?