Create Marketing Materials With Your Salespeople in Mind

Whether you have one salesperson or 10, outfitting your front line with the right tools is critical to your company's success. Production of collateral materials often falls to marketing staffs that design in a vacuum, without true insight into the day-to-day operational requirements--and just plain hands-on, grab-and-run nature--of salespeople. The result? Some recent studies suggest that as much as 80 percent of materials created by marketing staffs for the use of salespeople go unused, while salespeople often create their own less-than-stellar tools on the fly. Meanwhile, important branding and selling messages can fall by the wayside, and sales may decline or stagnate.

So how can you create tools your salespeople will love--and actually want to use? It all comes down to these three essential steps.