On average, salespeople spend 2 out of 5 days a week customizing presentations, proposals, brochures, and emails for customers. This personalization is a necessary part of a solution selling model, but:

• Salespeople spend too much time tinkering with PowerPoint, Word, Acrobat, and HTML authoring tools to make changes.
• Many times brochures and sell sheets are in a format that cannot be customized by salespeople, so marketing is overwhelmed with requests to create custom content.
• Salespeople are reusing previous materials that have been customized and personalized for a specific situation; however, these materials may not be brand-compliant or up to date.
• Marketing organizations have a difficult time enforcing consistency in message and brand identity because salespeople are customizing content.
• Marketing can’t ensure that salespeople are customizing communications consistently to take advantage of cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

Salespeople need to be able to make necessary changes to personalize assets without worrying about being an expert in Word, PowerPoint, Acrobat, and HTML editors. Marketing needs to be able to allow this personalization without worrying about salespeople creating materials that aren’t brand-compliant.

With SAVO, salespeople and marketers have a number of options available to support personalized content needs. SAVO can automatically assemble the best subset of slides, document pages or other content based on information provided during a simple (i.e., “check box”) user interview. Salespeople can also (if allowed) enter personalized information (e.g., customer name, date, agenda, etc.) within the asset as well. This permits the salesperson to target the message even further, while complying with corporate standards for quality and consistency.

Marketing can use this same capability to maintain information—like number of customers, the latest revenue figures, and other company statistics—that changes often across vast numbers of assets. Marketing can change the information once and all assets in the system are updated with the new information, drastically reducing the amount of time marketers spend pulling content offline for updates.