Quality Sales Materials on the Fly
“Unlike most online literature management systems, which can be cumbersome and technically challenging, Storefront has been simple to implement and very effective,” says Arlene Berensen, technology lead at Thomson West. “It took us just one day to get up and running—and that was without training.”
Once the system was in place, the Thomson West creative services department began offering sales representatives online collateral customization and ordering services. To streamline operations further, they developed unique portal sites to serve sales representatives from different divisions of the company. For instance, the Westlaw Academic Collateral Store enables sales representatives to customize collateral for specific promotional events and sales opportunities that target law students.
The sites are available to sales representatives behind a secure firewall or via remote access for approved staff. Online help is accessible from within the sites, and a Microsoft Word document was distributed to serve as a simple reference guide.
HOW IT WORKS
When a sales representative logs into a Thomson West online collateral store, the sales representative can select document templates from various categories, such as documentation, law review and events. The sites provide collateral as static PDFs and customizable templates. Sales representatives can view all the pages of a document online.
They can customize specific documents by selecting and typing content in Web forms or, for some documents, or they can type content directly on a “page” viewed within their Web browser. Some text entry fields in the Web forms use JavaScript to limit the number of characters entered. In other cases, the text boxes in the template are configured to adjust excess content to fit by reducing the font size within a predetermined range.
The sales representatives can customize and order a whole range of documents—from postcards to event banners—through the collateral store. The most popular documents include:
