Sales literature is an important informational resource sales people use to present a product or service, many times to introduce potential customers to an offering at the beginning of the sales cycle.  While most companies now create and distribute sales literature electronically, it can still be a challenge to organize these documents in a consistent way that is quickly accessible and easily distributable by an entire sales team.

Sales literature in Microsoft Dynamics CRM solves this issue by providing a storage area for electronic documents that can be categorized by multiple criteria and easily emailed to contacts.   To show you how to leverage this functionality, let’s take a look at how to setup and use it in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013.

 The Setup

Your sales literature library should really be setup by a system administrator, so to proceed:

1. Login to CRM as a User with System Administrator rights and then navigate to Sales->Sales Literature.
2. Select New from the Application Ribbon to setup a new document.

Note: Out of the box, the default fields are Title and Subject.  The subject categories can be configured to your business' needs in the Business Management section of Settings.  These are the same categories used by the Cases and Product entities as well.  The Type field is an option set that can also be customized for your own literature types in the sales literature entity by going to Settings->Customization.

Two great additional tools to help manage the library are two fields located in the header of the record, Expiration Date and Employee Contact.  Expiration Date is a date field you can set with the date the literature will expire, great for managing seasonal products sheets or time sensitive promotional brochures. Employee Contact is a CRM User look-up field that allows you to assign an owner of the document, which is perfect for members of marketing teams that are responsible for keeping the literature up to date. Using CRM workflows, you can leverage the both fields to notify the employee contact when the literature is about to expire to update or replace the document.

3. Once you have these fields fill out, click the Save button in the top left corner of the form.  This will create the record and allow you to attach the electronic document.
4. After the record is saved, go to the Sales Attachments sub-grid in the middle of the form and select the plus sign to add an electronic document.

5. The dialog box below will appear and you can then fill in details about your document and use the Browse button to search your computer and attach your document.

If you are using Products or Competitors in CRM, you can also link your literature individual products or competitors using the appropriate sub-grids on the Sales Literature form.

6. Continue to add Sales Literature library entries until your collection is complete.

 The User Experience

Once the sales literature library is setup, users can now search and sort literature by Title, Type, Subject or and other fields that can be configured in System and personal views.

And the real magic happens when users want to quickly send literature to a contact.  The example below shows how a CRM tracked email in Outlook can quickly and easily attach Sales Literature from your newly created library using the sales literature function in the CRM area of the Outlook toolbar!

Sales literature can also be linked to CRM Marketing Campaigns for better campaign tracking and access. As always, please read our constantly updated blog for further tips and tricks. Sales people everywhere... you’re welcome. Happy CRM'ing!