Edward Boatman • Aug 19th
The average sales team spends far too much time clicking through folders in Google Drive or SharePoint, only to end up with the wrong version of a deck. According to a Salesforce-backed industry survey featured by Simplus, sales reps spend at least 70% of their time handling non‑selling tasks, which includes administrative work and searching for the right content, proposals, or assets during customer interactions.
These tools weren’t built with sales in mind. Sales enablement materials need to be both quick to find while engaging on a call, and easily shareable to prospects and customers.
A broken link mid-call is more than embarrassing—it’s risky. Many sales reps keep a copy of a deck saved locally "just in case," which only increases the chance of sharing outdated or off-brand materials.
While file storage platforms are useful for internal collaboration, they don’t offer branding guardrails. Reps can easily grab the wrong logo, outdated messaging, or an old product shot from the archives.
If your sales portal is overwhelming, they’ll avoid it altogether. Reps don’t want to dig through six layers of folders to find a pitch deck. They want assets they can trust, and find fast. When you structure your portals with easy to read labels, it makes it that much easier for reps to find content on the go.
When sales reps go rogue, it’s rarely on purpose. They’re under pressure and working fast. But without an easy-to-use, branded portal, staying consistent is almost impossible.
A single outdated slide can sink a deal. If links break or decks aren’t updated, your reps are left scrambling, or worse, sharing the wrong story.
Misused logos, off-brand templates, or mismatched messaging can erode trust with prospects. It reflects poorly on your company and your product.
If reps can’t find what they need, they turn to marketing. That means a steady stream of Slacks, emails, and requests like:
“Do we have a one-pager for X vertical?”
“Can you send me the latest pitch deck again?”
Employees at large companies send more than 200 Slack messages per week on average. This high volume of internal chatter often includes requests for files, logos, or branded assets.
Now, imagine just 5% of those messages are for files and assets someone should be able to locate on their own. Every disruption causes around 23 minutes of disengagement. Scale that up against just 10 messages a week for a file, and before you know it, you have lost almost half a day in productivity. And, over the course of a year, should this stay steady, say goodbye to five weeks of work time simply looking for files.
The best portals aren’t just a dumping ground. They’re curated, visual, and organized around what sales actually needs.
Group assets into kits by product line, industry, or campaign. Lingo customers often create kits like “Summer Pitch Materials” or “Q3 Product Launch Toolkit” that reps can grab and go.
Brand misuse happens when brand guidance is unclear. Include short notes or visual do’s and don’ts, so reps know what’s approved without needing a training session.
Sales teams work fast. If they can’t search by keyword or filter by industry, they’ll either skip it or go off-script. Lingo portals are built to support the way reps actually navigate content.
At Curaleaf, one of the largest cannabis brands in the U.S., the marketing team needed a way to equip both internal field sales and retail partners and vendors with brand-compliant materials. Before Lingo, requests for updated packaging files, campaign assets, and regulatory materials were eating up time and increasing risk in this highly-regulated industry.
After launching a series of Lingo-powered portals, Curaleaf created brand-specific kits and placed them in state-specific portals with everything needed to stay compliant and on-brand. The result? Fewer fire drills, faster asset delivery, and better alignment across national and local teams.
“Kits allow us to combine the assets and the context together in one place. The ability to add headlines, images, and copy next to each asset makes them more usable and user-friendly. Portals just make it easy to group all those kits together and share them in a way that makes sense for each team or market” says Tawnie Oviedo, National Marketing Content and Communications Manager at Curaleaf.
Setting up a portal isn’t hard. The key is to build it for sales, not just for brand control.
Your portal should mirror how reps think: by product, by audience, or by stage. Don’t overwhelm them with every asset you’ve ever created.
Think quick-glance thumbnails, visual labels, and intuitive categories. If it takes more than 10 seconds to find, it won’t get used.
Not every rep needs access to every file. Lingo lets you control access by making kits and portals public, invite-only, or password protected. This is what helps you use Lingo for multiple use cases throughout the company—share your kits and portals only with the audience who needs to see it.
A sales enablement portal is a centralized hub where sales teams can access pre-approved, branded materials like pitch decks, one-pagers, logos, and messaging templates.
Good sales portals are easy to use, visually organized, searchable, and maintained by marketing. They include relevant kits and guidance to reduce confusion and ensure brand consistency.
By providing reps with up-to-date content and usage guidelines in a branded portal, you reduce the risk of outdated files or off-brand edits sneaking into deals.
Lingo is purpose-built for this. Other companies attempt to use Google Drive or Dropbox, but they lack the structure, permissions, and brand safeguards required to scale.
Lingo provides a single platform to organize, manage, and share your brand’s assets in one place. Sales teams spend less time fielding repetitive requests, chasing files, or fixing off-brand mistakes, and more time on the conversations that close deals.
Want to enable your sales team with confidence? Build a Sales Enablement Portal with Lingo today.