Tip #218: Sales Literature vs. SharePoint

So you have implemented Dynamics CRM with SharePoint document integration. The mindset of many companies with SharePoint is that SharePoint is where all documents should live, and that is a good idea, as SharePoint provides document collaboration features not found in CRM.

However, Microsoft Dynamics CRM includes Sales Literature functionality. The value of sales literature is that it makes product brochures available to sales reps from where they work—sending emails in Outlook. It also allows related documents to be grouped together, so if a product has 5 documents that have to be sent when someone emails a customer with a quote for that product, sales literature can be a big time saver. I refer to sales literature as “email attachment templates” because it pre-groups related attachments that are frequently sent and makes life much easier. By inserting one sales literature record into an email, the sales rep gets all of the related attachments that are part of the sales literature record. It is much more accurate than sales reps sending a copy of the literature from their hard drive that may be outdated or incorrect. Documents only stored in SharePoint are not going to be as easily accessible to salespeople as they send emails to clients, nor are they going to be connected to products and campaigns like they are with Sales Literature.

It doesn’t have to be either/or. Many companies use SharePoint for marketing to collaborate on the documents as they design them and store the master copies in SP, but also use sales literature to group and expose these documents to sales.

It can be a win-win—marketing collaborating on the document in SharePoint, exposing it to sales via sales literature, and sales representatives saving time when sending product brochures and other marketing collateral to customers..