Take a moment and think about your sock drawer.

What does it look like?

Everyone has their own method of organizing their socks – there’s no judgment here. Yours might be neatly folded and stacked, organized by colour, size, and style. Or they might be strewn loose, unattached to their partners. Chances are, whatever you do, it works for you. 

But if you were to ask someone else to grab that pair of blue argyles, would they find the matching pair quickly, or would they need to ransack the entire drawer?

Sales enablement works the same way. The way you structure your content needs to make sense to everyone on your team, no matter how it’s set up, so everyone can find what they’re looking for quickly. 

After all, a bad organizational scheme can waste hours each week (if not each day) when reps can’t find what they’re looking for.

So how can you set up your Google Drive so it makes sense to everybody? How can you help your reps save time on the search?

The bad

First, let’s talk about the messy sock drawer of content and knowledge management. You’re in the danger zone if any of this sounds familiar:

Non-existent folder structures

If everyone creates folders when and where they see fit, you end up with a muddle of places your content might live. Simply navigating through – and backtracking when they can’t find content – can cost reps serious time.

Scattered files

You’ve got documents spread across your Google Drive, DropBox, OneDrive, internal shared drives, and even individual computers. Not only do reps need to search through folders, they need to do it across every service.

Duplicate or out-of-date content

When reps can’t find content, they often create (or re-create) it themselves. The end result? You end up with multiple versions, in multiple places – in other words, a document control nightmare when you need to make updates.

The better

How can we fix those problems? An organized folder-based system is a step in the right direction. To organize that sock drawer of content, you might try:

An organized filing system

Files and folders follow a unified system. That means building a folder structure that maps to your reps’ workflows, and using naming conventions across the board. It may still require some digging, but at least there’s a logical flow.

Integrations

First, get rid of content that lives in email inboxes and individual desktops. Then, find ways to link content services together. Integrations with Google Drive can allow your team to search for shared documents without switching applications, for example.

Tagging documents

Adding tags gives reps another way to find information beyond the folder and file name. They also add more context to the file before a rep opens it. The only downside: asking reps to tag their docs adds work to an already stacked schedule.

The best

That’s pretty good, but we can still do better. Instead of focusing on organizing information, the best way to save time is by focusing on discovering information. That means finding an intelligent solution that:

Prioritizes search over searching

Most folders follow a hierarchy from the general to the specific. It takes time to navigate even the best-designed systems. But a great search? It only takes seconds to find that content, and saves mountains of time if it can crawl all the places you keep it. 

Optimizes for micro-content

The content you’re looking for shouldn’t be buried in a 17-page PDF. Instead, look for a system that surfaces sales-ready nuggets reps can use in-the-moment, geared to your selling stages, target personas, pain points, and more. 

Remixes knowledge

Reps should be able to find content in multiple ways, whether they’re searching by deal size, industry, or format. The best systems are flexible so you can mix-and-match information that goes together in different situations, without duplicating or changing the source.

Unlike your sock drawer, your content gets used by everybody on your team. And as soon as you add one other person to the access list, you need to find better solutions that scale and grow with your team.