What is the best tool to store/distribute your marketing and sales assets?

We currently use Highspot — before this we've used a number of CMS systems including Drive & Google Docs, Dropbox Paper, Percolate, and Docurated. We also evluated Guru and some others. We also use Confluence for internal documentation. No tool has been perfect — but we've seen good traction with Highspot.

The biggest challenge imho is on the usage side and getting solid adoption of the tool for all use cases (remixing, pitching, etc). I want good analytics and an understanding of how sales assets are used. The challenge is that there are still a lot of people keeping, storing, and creating presentations on their desktop. It makes measuring performance and impact harder — and also drives me a little crazy on marketing rights (logos/permissions/etc).

Also, if anyone has tips for how you measure and evolve marketing assets, I would love to talk. There is a lot of "I like this" and "I don't like that" or "we need this" but I would like to get a little more regimented to creating and optimizing assets.

We evaluated a lot of sales enablement / CMS tools - Highspot, Showpad, Guru and Seismic included - but the one that has stood out is Highspot to be honest. For me they have the right blend of usability for both marketers and sales people, combined with intuitive reporting so I can actually see what collateral/messaging is working.

What we had before with an enterprise DAM (Egnyte) mixed with an organized spreadsheet to post the latest docuement links worked fine as far as getting assets to the sales team. But it defiinetly didn't help me be more effective at my job - so the ability to provie ROI and metrics for continuous improvment was the key factor. When Highspot showed me their 'Revenue Attribution Report' my mouth dropped and I just told the AE - 'this is how I'm getting my next promotion'. So yeah.. sold me.

Hi there - full disclosure from me as well, I work at Highspot and after experiencing this frustration in previously roles I actually ended up joining the company because I loved and believed in the solution so much. 

If you're looking for functionality beyond a content repository (which is where many of our customers start out) I'm happy to chat any time if you have questions.

We are currently looking into tools like Highspot, Showpad and Docurated. It allows us to create a central respository of managed and tracked collateral/content. 

These can obviously be slightly pricy so the other option is to keep a very organized Box/Dropbox folder that makes all content and collateral available to the sales team. This will make it difficult to track how things are being used, but is definitely a good starting point. 

Perspective: I was a potential buyer recently.

Important factors for the answer to this are: how big is your sales team, and how much content is there to track/organize?

If your sales team is 1-20, using something very basic like Google Drive (or Dropbox etc. etc.) might still be OK. My thought process has been that if you’re still in this phase as a company, a more sophisticated tool would be nice but there are often lots of other projects and ways to spend money that would take priority.

Less than 12 months ago I spent a lot of time looking at solutions for this -- months with various sales vendors etc. We had a sales org of over 100 and we had decided that it was finally time to move off of Google Sites / Google Drive as our way of organizing things. I looked at Showpad, Seismic, Highspot, Docsend, and others. I loved Showpad and probably would have chosen that had I not left the organization for another job. A lot of the capabilities are table stakes across each platform (tracking, analytics, plugins for gmail salesforce etc.). What I loved about Showpad was my product launch use case -- I wanted a single place I could point people to that not only organized my launch content but also allowed me to create a page within the tool: actually type out stuff, add images etc. Other platforms may have had solutions for this but it really stood out to me among other things.

I've used both Showpad and Docsend in the past. 

Showpad has some additional capabilities that Docsend doesn't have but Docsend could not be easier to get the sales team and SDR team to actually use.

I also put all of our gated content on Docsend which allowed me to sync visit times and view rates to Salesforce as activities e.g. John Smith and Acme Corp spent 3:51 reading Ebook X 

Full Disclosure: I am founder of one of the products that addresses this exact problem. 

You have vast array of options. As Anand mentioned, on the high end, you can look at HighSpot, Showpad, Seismic, and Docurated. There are also other options for the mid and lower tier market. 

Our product Enablix is targeted for SMB market for sales and content enablement. We also have other competitors in play here. I would recommend checking out G2 Crowd and search for Sales Enablement category. You will see the available options. 

If you plan to use any of the cloud storage platforms, please tread with caution. You have to make sure you do not cede control of that folder/repository to everyone and keep it under strong quality control. The biggest risk using Dropbox or Google Drive is that they can very soon get busy and unusable. Ofcourse it will be hard to get any usage metrics.