For many organizations, not following compliance standards can be costly, resulting in financial consequences and reputational damage. Highly regulated industries, such as financial services and healthcare, need to be especially careful about the content they share with customers and prospects, making it critical that content meets both industry and company compliance standards. However, constant changes to these requirements exacerbate the compliance challenge. 

Manual approval workflows complicate compliance for marketers, especially in organizations that manage hundreds or thousands of content assets. Fielding ad-hoc requests for personalized content or content approval from sellers is also time-consuming and difficult to manage at scale. What’s clear is that manual processes are no longer sufficient for maintaining compliant content, and mistakes open up organizations to risk. Marketers need a tool that can handle the complexity of compliance. 

The solution: Sales content management software

Sales content management systems help mitigate compliance challenges. This software enables organizations to deliver collateral to sellers that is updated, on-brand, and compliant with industry or company regulations. With this technology, sellers can personalize content for their prospects, with guardrails in place to ensure that assets remain compliant. 

Here’s how sales content management software ensures that sellers share compliant materials:

1. Establish a library of relevant and compliant content 

With sales content management software, marketing departments can curate a library of compliant content for sellers. Content enablement makes it easy for sellers to search for and locate relevant, pre-approved sales materials. Compared to sellers creating their own—possibly non-compliant—content, this is a much safer option for organizations. An added benefit of a sales content management system is that marketers can provide sales support materials and other sales enablement collateral to help reps utilize content resources more effectively and close more deals.

Establishing a single source of truth for content not only reduces risk and saves reps time, but it also helps marketers realize the maximum value for their investment in creating content. A study by the Content Marketing Institute and LinkedIn revealed that a whopping 80% of content typically goes unused by sales. By ensuring that content is accessible to sellers, marketers often see increased adoption of their approved, compliant assets.

2. Provide flexible content personalization 

Of course, reusing the same content for every prospect is not an effective way to go to market. Sales content management software gives marketing teams and leaders the opportunity to create templates and other content that feature areas sellers can customize based on their prospects while ensuring that other content is consistent with compliance standards. 

For example, a healthcare company might create a template for a sales one-pager about a new drug, with sections that can be personalized for each prospect. This ensures that the content is compliant while also giving sellers the flexibility to insert relevant information for each individual customer or prospect. 

Instead of spending hours creating new content, sellers can personalize existing, approved content in a way that’s engaging and relevant to their prospects. This reduces the administrative burden on the rep, enabling them to spend more time selling and driving revenue. 

3. Create custom user groups and permissions 

Another way a sales content management system promotes compliance is by giving organizations the ability to create specific user groups and apply different permission settings within the tool. This way, admins can control access, ensuring that only those who are authorized to view and use the content have access to it. For instance, a company might restrict certain assets, like pricing sheets, to sellers who have completed the necessary training to prevent information from being shared incorrectly. 

For highly regulated industries, permission controls can be especially useful. Marketers have the flexibility to give reps as much or as little editing control as they’d like, preventing materials from being changed in a way that violates compliance guidelines. 

The new way to manage compliance

Adhering to compliance standards is essential for any company, especially those in highly regulated industries. Failure to do so can result in hefty fines, reputational damage, and lost customers. Seismic’s sales content management system eliminates manual, error-prone tracking and enables marketing teams to deliver a centralized library of relevant content. Reps can enjoy flexible personalization controls, and marketers can customize user groups and permissions to ensure that only appropriate people have access to the information. 

To learn more about our sales enablement tools and how we deliver sales content management, get a demo today!