The Challenge

In 2018, a multinational’s sales teams operated across multiple brands with no unified content strategy. Sellers spent hours searching for case studies, pricing information, and proposal templates — often giving up and rebuilding 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 had no visibility into 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. Their services were competitive. The problem was articulation: the Group’s value across markets wasn’t reaching buyers in a consistent, compelling way.

Senior leadership had outlined a content platform that could support the Group’s most complex deals. I set out to build that, hiring a team of content experts, then focused on enhancing the governance infrastructure to make it last.

What the organisation needed was an end-to-end framework: a system that made the right content findable, customisable, and measurable — so sellers could spend less time searching and more time selling.

Implementation

I led a cross-functional team of approximately 12–15 people: three core content specialists (content managers and designers), plus subject matter experts from each business unit and service line across the seven brands. The core team within Global Sales Operations worked in three-month phases.

Phase One: Foundation and Governance

The first iteration of the content taxonomy was organised by brand and service line — logical from a structural perspective, but misaligned with how sellers actually made decisions. A seller pursuing a EUR 5M logistics contract didn’t think in brand categories. They thought in deal stage: what does a CFO or a CHRO need to see at first meeting, and what closes the shortlist conversation?

Restructuring around sales stage and buyer role was the pivotal shift. Early-stage awareness content lived separately from late-stage technical documentation. C-Suite-facing materials stayed separate from account manager search results. Sellers could find the right asset for the right moment.

Governance solved a harder problem than structure: accountability. Without it, content quality degrades quietly: outdated case studies stay live, brand inconsistencies accumulate, and sellers lose confidence in the system. Each business unit appointed a content steward responsible for monthly reviews, archiving stale assets, and flagging coverage gaps. Quarterly cross-functional sessions kept the framework current as the business evolved. The result was a platform sellers could trust, and trust was the condition for adoption.

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

Phase 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.

Phase Three: Training and Adoption

We ran tutorials and knowledge-sharing sessions in each business unit or 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.”

Prosci® ADKAR methodology was applied for qualitative research, diagnosis and change communications. We identified superusers in each team. They became local change sponsors, answering questions and demonstrating best practices. Adoption spread through peer influence rather than 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 framework 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 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 framework, not a content library. Technology and governance matter, but behaviour change determines success. Measure what users actually do, build what they need, and adjust based on evidence.

This framework 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.