Sales collaterals i.e. brochures, company and sales presentations, whitepapers, videos etc is understood as the most traditional type of understanding that companies have about the marketing function.
Indeed sales collaterals are important: first impressions matter, and the company needs to show to prospect clients that it has high standards and that it knows what it is doing. Therefore, even though we are in an age where analytics and intelligence reign, the usual "sales support" type of materials are still relevant.
Most companies get this, and invest considerable amount of resources (budgets and people resources) in composing either internally or externally top-notch presentations, videos, etc. What happens often is a true waste of hard and good work: videos get uploaded into Youtube, presentations and white papers into shared folders... and then... they are forgotten. I sometimes watch truly amazing company advertisement videos on Youtube, and I know how much work and money is involved in producing a 1 minute long piece of work, just to see the counter at the bottom-right part of the screen showing a couple of dozens or hundreds of clicks. This happens both with B2C as well as B2B collateral, but even more so with B2B.
So what can marketers do against this waste of resources and sweat? First of all, I think it is important to recognise the issue. In any solution to a problem, the first step is to recognise and evaluate the issue. The next step is to take concrete measures to make sure that the material is used: a "sine qua non" type of duty is to train recurrently the sales team regarding the new material, either face-to-face or in virtual e.g. Webex sessions. But it does not stop there: there are a multitude of new technologies which have been recently introduced into the market to enable collateral usage. One of the most popular ones is called Showpad: even though quite pricey in my opinion, it enables users to leverage during sales pitches (i.e. "live") the collateral available, as well as share it with prospects. Even better, the application allows tracking of assets e.g. if a customer watched a video, for how long, etc.
To summarise, it is increasingly important for marketeers not only to produce great assets in the form of collateral to the company, but also to make sure they are used.
Fernando
Disclaimer: I receive no incentives and I am not associated with the company Showpad