In a recent post I wrote about some of the lessons marketing can learn from sales. Now, moving once more into the breach, the Sales Executive Council has posted a list of the seven principals to bear in mind when developing any sales tool.

Sales is often supported by tools that help them, but sometimes there are so many that these tools doesn’t always take off. Because the same practical challenges are faced in most marketing projects, maybe there’s something we can learn from these too:

1. Make sure you keep your focus on your end goal right the way through the development.
2. Prioritize and feature requests and focus on those you think will impact success most.
3. Early in the scoping, collect as much feedback as you can to base your decisions on.
4. Communicate during the build why the tool will make a difference to the user.
5. Ensure it’s easy to use. There’s nothing worse that thousands of features no-one can use.
6. Conduct pilots prior to launch so if there is any feedback to react to you can
7. Make sure everyone can get to the tool and use it when they need to.

See the link for more detail, but to say these rules are limited only to sales tools is pretty blinkered. Most of them are just common sense for just about everything we do. It never hurts to repeat good ideas, though.

We recently launched a set of four new propositions for one client, to be taken out by sales teams across EMEA. Eventually, as much effort and thought has gone into communicating how the sales teams could use the resources as in creating the resources themselves: bringing to life different sales scenarios; selling the value of the collateral; explaining how some of the newer presentation techniques can be used. And if all else fails, communicate directly with the market and create a demand for the sales team to meet…