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Microsoft SharePoint is a collaboration and document management system that allows businesses to store, organize, access, and share information. According to Microsoft, over 200,000 organizations use SharePoint, with more than 200 million monthly active users in the cloud.
A large part of SharePoint's ubiquity is due to its inclusion in the Office 365 bundle. Despite its popularity, SharePoint has several shortcomings as a sales enablement tool. And given the demanding and dynamic nature of buyers today, it can quickly eat into your rep’s productivity and win rates.
Here are seven ways that Microsoft Sharepoint can reduce the effectiveness of your sales team. In addition, we'll share how modern revenue enablement platforms like GTM Buddy can help your reps close deals faster by delivering engaging customer experiences.
1. Finding the right content is hit-or-miss
A common SharePoint challenge is that users cannot find what they are looking for. As this customer points out, “SharePoint is very clunky and old school in terms of use. It is hard to search for documents, as anything and everything will come up.”
SharePoint can be helpful for small organizations with a few assets and a clear understanding of what they need. If you have more than fifty reps and a lot of content, things can quickly get out of hand. The search results may overwhelm you, with files, contacts, images, or other SharePoint sites to sort through. It's either that or you may get no results.
As a result, reps can spend a lot of time on search and discovery missions. Forrester has found reps in high-performing sales teams spend 12% less time looking for sales content. Instead of searching for content, reps should be interacting with prospects or upselling to existing customers.
<div class="info-block__parent"><p class="info-block__title">What can GTM Buddy do for you?</p><p class="info-block__text">Your sales reps don't have to spend time ‘searching’ for content. GTM Buddy's smart search helps your reps find what they need when they need it. After your sales content is uploaded to GTM Buddy, each asset is automatically indexed with your organizational vocabulary, so that reps are not swamped by irrelevant results. Therefore, sellers can get the most relevant information directly in their workflow based on the context of their opportunity.</p></div>
2. Using outdated content undermines customer trust
To save time, reps often store commonly used sales materials on their laptops or in cloud solutions like OneDrive. Then, when engaging with a prospect, they quickly send this locally stored content via email.
This workflow is problematic as reps may use outdated content without being aware of newer assets with updated messaging. Forrester reports that 51% of B2B buyers consider most information shared by reps to be useless.
Additionally, reps have no idea how their prospects interact with their materials if they use OneDrive to send it out. Understanding how prospects engage with their content allows reps to tailor their approach and provide information that moves them closer to making a decision.
<div class="info-block__parent"><p class="info-block__title">What can GTM Buddy do for you?</p><p class="info-block__text">By surfacing the most current information in their flow of work, GTM Buddy prevents reps from using stale content. Since reps don't have to rely on SharePoint’s underwhelming search results, they can use GTM Buddy’s content recommendations to find and share relevant information.</p></div>
3. A library of unused content
Imagine spending months creating sales enablement materials, only to discover that reps still use two-year-old sales decks. Forrester estimates that 65 percent of B2B marketing content never gets used by revenue teams.
Reps may not realize how much content you’ve created for them. Sellers have difficulty finding new content on SharePoint if they don't know what to search for. The result can be a graveyard of unused assets buried in some corner of your SharePoint content repository.
<div class="info-block__parent"><p class="info-block__title">What can GTM Buddy do for you?</p><p class="info-block__text">'Search-and-discovery' missions on legacy platforms, such as SharePoint, can lead to good content sitting dormant inside labyrinthine folders. GTM Buddy brings enablement content into your reps’ daily routines – including content that they didn’t know existed – so they can stay on top of every conversation.</p></div>
4. Limited visibility on content usage
What assets does your sales team use regularly? Which content is most frequently shared by a sales rep and at which stage of the buyer’s journey? SharePoint is limited in its ability to show what matters to the sales team.
Because enablers don’t know how content is being adopted, they continue to create content seldom used by sales reps. Switching to an enablement platform with robust analytics can help inform the content strategy and focus resources on creating collateral that sales reps care about.
<div class="info-block__parent"><p class="info-block__title">What can GTM Buddy do for you?</p><p class="info-block__text">Enablement and marketing teams spend a lot of time and effort building content, but they have no idea if reps will find it or use it. GTM Buddy solves this challenge by providing detailed reports on how reps are using (or not using) enablement content. These insights can help enablers and marketers evaluate, prioritize, and refine their content creation processes.</p></div>
5. No way to measure prospect engagement or revenue impact
The average B2B buyer consumes 13 pieces of content before making a purchase decision. As a result, revenue teams must have a clear understanding of the importance of content in the buying journey.
SharePoint offers little insight into how prospects and customers engage with your content, leaving your sales reps in the dark. Additionally, enablement teams need to know what content is being shared at different stages of the sales funnel as well as how buyers are interacting with it.
<div class="info-block__parent"><p class="info-block__title">What can GTM Buddy do for you?</p><p class="info-block__text">With GTM Buddy, you can track content consumption across different opportunities or gain insight into deal-specific content engagement. Additionally, you can link specific content assets to closed-won opportunities to measure revenue impact.</p></div>
6. Ignoring the seller's workflow
The strongest argument against SharePoint as a sales enablement tool is its complexity and disconnect with a seller's workflow. Sellers live in their email, calendar, CRM, LinkedIn, and Slack/Teams. While SharePoint does offer some integrations, like with Salesforce, it is not built into a seller's workflow.
Every time a seller uses SharePoint to find content, they are context-switching. This results in sub-optimal rep productivity. Research shows that it can take up to 9.5 minutes to regain focus when switching between digital apps.
<div class="info-block__parent"><p class="info-block__title">What can GTM Buddy do for you?</p><p class="info-block__text">Rep adoption of your tools stack plays a critical role in measuring the impact of revenue enablement initiatives. Sales reps face a steep learning curve when adopting new sales tech. GTM Buddy ensures that reps can find the information they need within the tools they use every day – without learning new tech.</p></div>
7. Ever-increasing complexity to operate and maintain
SharePoint can be challenging to set up and manage, especially for larger organizations with dispersed revenue teams. Maintaining a successful SharePoint instance requires dedicated staff and specialized expertise.
As organisations grow and their needs evolve, SharePoint customization becomes increasingly complex. Even after spending a lot of time configuring SharePoint for different use cases, adoption may still be low. Agile revenue teams might eventually find SharePoint too unwieldy to manage and use.
<div class="info-block__parent"><p class="info-block__title">What can GTM Buddy do for you?</p><p class="info-block__text">Regardless of the size of your team or organization, or how much content you have, GTM Buddy is intuitive to use and easy to manage. By connecting your content authoring platforms such as SharePoint, you can import your existing sales collateral into GTM Buddy in hours (not weeks). With GTM Buddy, you'll spend less time managing content and more time driving commercial impact.</p></div>
Stop crippling your sales teams
Sales enablement technology has changed dramatically in the two decades since Microsoft SharePoint was launched. Today, using SharePoint document management system as your primary sales enablement tool is like riding a bicycle on a Grand Prix circuit.
Modern enablement platforms are trying to fill the void left by legacy platforms like SharePoint. GTM Buddy is a revenue enablement solution that delivers relevant the most relevant content directly to your rep's inbox, calendar, CRM, or LinkedIn. As a result, sellers can respond to prospects faster with compelling content that builds customer trust and drives revenue.
