Why should you use Salesforce Content?
Posted by Jay Rivard on Thu, Feb 18, 2010
Salesforce Content is a useful feature of Salesforce CRM and often over-looked. Content is an on-demand content management system that is handy for both Sales and Marketing folks.
- FOR SALES
How many times have you spent looking for a presentation, fact sheet or other sales document and then found out it was an old version? Or have you ever wished that you could see what presentations other sales reps at your company are using successfully?
With Salesforce Content, you can search for a relevant sales document much like doing a Google search. It will pull up matching documents, show you how people within your company rated the document, any comments that were made and how often it was downloaded. And outdated documents? You can subscribe to the document and be notified when a newer version is uploaded.
- FOR MARKETING
What's more annoying than spending weeks developing what you think is terrific content only to find out that the content doesn't exactly hit on what the marketplace is demanding.
With Content, marketers can see the comments that reps make on a sales document it and how they rate it and make the appropriate changes in a timely fashion rather than weeks or worse -- never.
Recently, we started using Salesforce.com Content which quickly turned into a question of how we will use it. In addition to the traditional use of Content, what value will it lend to our organization and will users adopt it? Like most organizations we create a lot of documents and send them out the typical way -- attached to an e-mail. Proposals in particular fly out of here on a daily basis. We decided to try content for proposal delivery which has worked quite well. It is solved two issues for us: (1) it circumvents file size limitations on mail servers and (2) it tells us if they've read the proposal and downloaded it.
Although setup of the product is fairly straightforward, we do recommend that you read the documentation or take the pre-recorded training sessions. There are settings in several areas within the application of which you should be aware.
We continue to look for new ways to take advantage of Content and would welcome any feedback you might have and how you use it.