Let’s be honest; at some point we’ve all pounded a nail with a crescent wrench or pulled one out with pliers. It’s not pretty, but the job gets done, and the cost may be no more than a swollen thumb, a damaged tool, or some lost time. In tech sales and marketing, however, the costs of using the wrong tool are higher, the tools are more expensive, and time is a lot harder to come by.

Part of the problem in developing marketing tools— brochures, sell sheets, whitepapers, success stories, newsletters, etc.—is that their roles are not as clearly defined as those of the tools on your workbench. But if you’re going to spend time and money developing them, you’ll get a far better return on your investment if you know how each will be used. Too often, collateral, stories, and papers are developed in a reactive fashion—a salesperson or product manager needs it now—with no clear indication of how they will be used or what their purposes will be.

The ideal solution is to have a literature system architecture into which marketing pieces fit. The system is tailored to the organization, the product mix, and the sales process and can include templates for various types of material to speed and simplify development as needs arise. Developing such a system takes time and effort, but the return on investment can be huge. Get to it when you can (or hire help to develop it) but in the meantime, before you develop your next new marketing tool ask five critical questions:

1. What are we selling?
2. Who are we selling to?
3. What do they believe now?
4. What do we want them to know when they’ve seen this piece?
5. What do we want them to do as a result?