Canto as a sales enablement tool

Sales enablement is a major focus for many marketing teams – and with good reason. Sales reps armed with compelling collateral have the tools they need to win customers over. But without the right systems in place to deliver that content, disorganized collections of collateral can slow sales teams down. Salespeople get bogged down sifting through folders, or lose track of what sales tools they have at their disposal.

That’s why many organizations have turned to Canto, a digital asset management platform that offers companies a single source of truth for all of their flyers, images, price lists and other digital content. Sales teams get on-demand access to everything they need, and marketers and content creators can easily curate and manage large collections of marketing collateral.

So what should brands using Canto for sales enablement keep in mind? We’ve rounded up some of the most impactful ways Canto helps empower sales teams to get compelling collateral in front of customers.

Give sales teams dedicated portals with everything they need

All too often, teams have content scattered all over the place – Google Drive, old Slack messages, individual devices. When they can’t find what they’re looking for, sales reps either lose precious minutes searching, or have to ask for assistance and wait for a response.

With a dedicated portal for sales collateral in Canto, sales reps always know exactly where to find current, relevant content that’s approved to share with customers. Because Canto Portals can be custom configured and accessed anywhere, they’re an especially ideal solution for large, complex sales organizations.

The marketing team at Oceaneering, a multinational provider of offshore engineering expertise, knows the challenge of complex sales enablement first-hand. They deliver collateral for a remarkably diverse range of products and services to hundreds of sales representatives around the world. “We exist to enable our sales team, to make selling easier, to help them outperform the competition,” explains Omeid Rahimian, a project manager for global marketing and communications at Oceaneering. “Canto helps us achieve these objectives and is a huge boon to the marketing team.”

Custom settings and filters help sales reps find content in seconds

Sales reps need to react to changing customer needs at the speed of business. With customizable tags and filters, you can make it easy to search Canto according to criteria that make sense to your sales team.

To make everything searchable, Canto tags new content automatically with image recognition, facial recognition and text search capabilities. You can also add custom metadata categories tailored to your business – product groups, seasons, project sites and more. When sales reps can filter and search according to the criteria that matter most to customers, they can pinpoint the perfect piece of collateral in just a few clicks.

This tailored experience is key for brands like Shuttercraft, one of the UK’s leading providers of shutters and blinds. Shuttercraft sales reps meet with customers in stores and on-site in their homes. They’re constantly showcasing photos on the fly, so they need to be able to find specific images and collections without interrupting the flow of conversation.

“Customers having shutters done in their bedroom want to see examples of bedroom shutters – and maybe even a specific type of install in a bedroom,” explains franchise marketing manager Clarissa Hearn. Because Shuttercraft’s images are tagged by room, product style and even season in Canto, sales reps can instantly filter for photos of the right product in the right context.

“We put in a lot of work to be able to deliver the service that the franchise network expects from us,” says Clarissa, who’s responsible for ensuring Shuttercraft sales reps have access to the images they need. “Success is all about delivery. Canto is a tool that’s helping us do that much more efficiently.”

Take outdated content out of circulation with version controls and expiration dates

Still seeing flyers with your old logo floating around? When sales reps store and manage sales collateral on their own devices, it can be hard to ensure outdated content stops going out to potential customers.

In Canto, sales reps have easy access to approved content – and approved content only. Activate and deactivate seasonal assets automatically with expiration dates, or use version controls to hide previous versions from view when you upload updated collateral.

Before switching to Canto, Limor Baruch of SolarEdge struggled to take outdated content out of circulation, “Everybody kept assets on their own local drives and just kept re-using them,” she explains. SolarEdge now has division-specific portals in Canto. Because she can update content in the portals whenever there’s a change, Limor can now be confident that her colleagues have the correct version.

“I wouldn’t use the word lifesaving, but it feels like it is,” says Limor. “We have completely changed the way we are working. SolarEdge personnel can now access digital assets at any time without having to go through me.”

Learn more about Canto as a sales enablement tool

Ultimately, sales enablement is about marketing and sales teams working together towards a common goal. When sales teams can easily access the right collateral on demand, everybody wins.

Every team has unique sales enablement needs, and Canto is designed to adapt to the specifics of your business and industry. To learn more about how Canto can help your business with sales enablement, book a free, personalized consultation with a digital asset management expert.