“Aut inveniam viam aut faciam”
The title of the blog post is a quote that was presented in my company meeting earlier this week. I realized that this quote perfectly describes the approach I take towards the projects I embark on. If you’re like me and can’t read Latin, the quote translates to: “I shall either find a way or make one.” and is often associated with Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps.
One of the first things I noticed when I started at my new company was that they suffered, like many other companies, especially startups, with all of their great content and assets spread across different platforms and even laptop hard drives in some cases. “Was that marketing one-pager on Slack or shared with me on GDrive or emailed as a PDF?” Or worse yet, “Is this asset still relevant and up-to-date?” Content and assets, both internal and external facing, can be pumped out quickly by the great minds across a company, but unless it’s housed in a central location where customer-facing teams can quickly locate it, it will likely go unused and become out-dated before it sees the light of day.
Enter the Content Management System. There are some truly amazing products on the market today and if you’re in the market for such a system, I highly recommend doing your due-diligence and checking them out, which is exactly what I started doing when I began at my new company. We are a young enough company that we don’t have a lotof assets just yet, but I could foresee it becoming an unmanageable beast quickly if it wasn’t addressed. Along that same wavelength, being a young company you will often have competing priorities which will force you to evaluate what you can and should spend budget on to get the most bang for your buck. I determined that a content management system was a nice to have at this early stage and not necessarily vital to the success of the Enablement function I was building a foundation and framework for. But that still didn’t solve the very real problem of having content living all over the place, so I began to reach out to my network of Enablement superstars to get their ideas and input on how they solve for this very common problem. One of my connections told me that they had built their own content management system by leveraging Google Sites which ended up suiting their needs perfectly for the time being.
“I shall either find a way or make one” – so, I made one.
That same day, I opened up a blank Google Sites page and began to poke around and build out a framework for my very own content management system. It’s not as sexy or sleek, and it doesn’t have all the sweet technology as the big Enablement platforms on the market, but it’s EXACTLYwhat my teams needed. A central location where they can find all of the latest internal and external facing content, assets, and links. They no longer have to waste time sifting through pinned Slack posts or searching GDrive for the right information and better yet they can feel confident that my team and I have done the leg work for them to confirm with the correct departments that the content living on our site is up-to-date. This provides instant productivity time savings back to the reps.
When my department budget can afford it and/or our Google Site becomes too big to manage, I will absolutely be looking into one of those awesome Enablement platforms (don’t start prospecting to me now though, folks! 😉). But my reason for this post is to encourage whomever might read this to think outside of the box and don’t necessarily put off a project or initiative just because your budget might not support it. Get creative with your approaches and lean on other folks in your field to crowdsource ideas.
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Author, Stephanie Middaugh is Sr. Sales Enablement Manger at Divvy, Inc.
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