One thing I've noticed lately in work with clients is that the content they put on their website is often the content they use for everything else. To put this in context with your sales portal, why is it that you think your salespeople want to read the same content on the sales portal that's on the website? What does it do for them, other than show them what their propects are seeing? And what makes you think they can't go there to read it?
I'll back off a bit and say that if you're doing lead generation with your white papers that, yes, it's nice to put that type of content on your sales portal so your team can get at it with no hassles. But, here's my question: What supporting content do you use to show them how to leverage and extend the white paper's information with prospects and customers?
Are there key takeaways they can make sure a prospect understands in relation to how it will impact them? Is there a cool feature on a data sheet that delivers more than is obvious that a salesperson can reinforce or disclose?
In order to provide actionable knowledge, you nedd to reach deeper and provide more depth of understanding in ways that serve your sales team and help them create better conversations wtih their prospects and customers. Give them something valuable to use that helps them build relationships.
David Meerman Scott has a great post, Think like a publisher, today that talks about knowing your reader and planning your content strategy accordingly. Go read it.
To make your sales portal more productive, think about context. If you feature a white paper, what other content is associated with it that gives the sales person a better conversation? Your marketing collateral is about messaging, emotion and calls to action. Your sales conversations need to be about enriching the value that the prospect or customer is already reaching for.
Is your content written for the right audience?
