The Challenge

In 2018, the Adecco Group’s sales teams operated across multiple brands with no unified content strategy. Sellers spent hours searching for case studies, pricing information, and proposal templates. Most gave up and created materials from scratch.

The company was pursuing enterprise contracts worth EUR 1M-2B. These deals required coordinated responses across countries and service lines. But content lived in silos. Brand A couldn’t access Brand B’s success stories. Switzerland didn’t know what France had already written for similar clients.

The international bid team was losing deals they should have won. Not because their services were inadequate, but because they couldn’t articulate the Group’s value consistently.

Senior leadership wanted a content library. My team knew the organisation needed an operating system.

Implementation

I led a cross-functional team of content experts (content managers, graphic designers, marketing-adjacent roles), plus subject matter experts from each business unit and service line. My core team within Global Sales Operations worked in three-month cycles (see applied sprint methodology below.)

Cycle One: Foundation and Governance

We originally built a content taxonomy based on brand and service offerings. After numerous iterations, the taxonomy oriented towards sales stage and buyer role. Early-stage awareness content lived separately from late-stage technical documentation. CEO/CFO-focused materials didn’t clutter the search results for sales directors and account managers.

The governance framework established clear ownership. Each business unit appointed content stewards. They reviewed submissions monthly, archived outdated materials, and flagged gaps in coverage. Quarterly touch points were held between the cross-functional team.

We selected a SaaS platform that integrated with Salesforce. Sellers could access content without leaving their workflow. The system tracked usage automatically.

Cycle Two: Migration and Quality Control

First, the critical 200 assets were updated and synced between the SharePoint and SaaS platforms. Each piece received metadata tags: industry, service line, deal size, buyer persona, sales stage. Templates included guidance on customisation boundaries (i.e. “Change the client name and sector-specific examples. Don’t change the value proposition structure or proof points.”)

The team wrote content briefs for missing assets. Case studies were needed for 6 industry contexts as per the Global Sales segmentation strategy (e.g. healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing). Best practice submission materials were requested to increase time spent per deal.

Subject matter experts created new materials. My team edited everything. Consistency mattered more than perfection.

Cycle Three: Training and Adoption

We ran tutorials and knowledge-sharing sessions in each business unit / country team. Not ‘how to use the platform’ training. Scenario-based training. “You’re pursuing a EUR 5M logistics contract in Germany. Walk me through finding, customising, and delivering the right materials at each sales stage.”

We identified superusers in each team. They became local change sponsors, answering questions and demonstrating best practices. Adoption spread through peer influence, not top-down mandates.

Results

Within 18 months, 800+ sales assets were deployed and approximately 4,000 sellers across the organisation used the platform regularly. Intranet landing pages were configured for wider audience access (i.e. contacts, templates, capability offerings). Usage metrics showed the system had become embedded in daily workflow.

Search queries averaged approximately 50 per user per month. The platform delivered relevant results in under 5 seconds. Sellers downloaded case studies 12,000+ times in the first year. Target priority assets (i.e. corporate presentation and pitch decks) became highly visible.

Proposal development time decreased by 40% (based on tracked time logs from 200 tender responses). Teams previously spent 15-20 hours building tender responses from scratch. With templates and positioning/capability assets, that dropped to 9-12 hours. Time saved went into client research and relationship building.

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Content reuse increased substantially. Sales teams stopped recreating materials that already existed. A healthcare case study written in Switzerland got deployed in 15 different deals across four countries.

Deals using platform content showed a 12% higher win rate on strategic (multi-brand, multi-country) tenders than those that didn’t. This correlation held across deal sizes and sectors.

Senior leadership now had visibility into content performance. The data showed which industries needed more case studies, which value propositions resonated, and which thought leadership topics generated genuine interest from buyers.

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Lessons

The core lesson: sales enablement is an operating system, not a content library. Technology and governance matter, but behaviour change determines success. Build what users need, measure what they actually do, and adjust based on evidence.

This system is still running. The content libraries (SharePoint and SaaS) now contain 2,000+ assets (priority assets updated quarterly) and serve a growing audience across the Group.