SharePoint and Teams are not sales enablement (especially in FMCG field sales)

Most FMCG companies do the responsible thing first. They put sales materials in Teams or SharePoint. Everyone gets access. Marketing can upload. Sales can download. IT is happy because everything runs on Microsoft.

And still, the field team walks into visits with the wrong story, old pricing, or just whatever they could find fast enough. That’s not a people problem. It’s a tool fit problem.

Great warehouse, bad front door

Teams and SharePoint are strong warehouses.

They’re great for collaboration, drafts, approvals, and keeping the archive safe. They do governance well, they keep files from disappearing, and they give the organisation a shared place to work. That part is not the issue.

The issue is what happens when the warehouse becomes the front door for field sales.

Field work is not a “find a file” situation. It’s a “use the right story now” situation. A rep is on an iPad, the meeting is moving, the buyer is busy, connectivity might be bad, and the rep needs to present something that is current, approved, and relevant.

In that moment, storage tools tend to create friction in a few predictable ways.

First, they don’t guide usage. A library can be perfectly organised and still fail the rep, because the rep is not asking “where is it stored”, they’re asking “what should I use for this customer, in this channel, this week”. Storage systems rarely answer that. They hold content, but they don’t curate it into a small set of “this is what we lead with”.

Second, the library grows into a museum. Old decks and old PDFs stick around because deleting feels risky, and nobody wants to be the person who removed something that might be needed one day. Over time, more gets added than removed. The result is that the field team sees too much, and in a customer meeting, too much behaves exactly like nothing. People default to what they remember, what they last used, or what they can open fastest.

Third, offline reality forces workarounds. When access is not reliable, reps protect themselves. They save local copies, they screenshot pricing, they keep “safe” versions they know will open. It’s not malicious, it’s survival. And once that starts, “latest version” becomes a hope rather than a daily habit.

Fourth, there’s no feedback loop. Marketing can publish a deck, but it’s hard to know what happens next. Was it used in meetings, or just downloaded once and forgotten. Which slides helped, which parts were skipped, what customers engaged with after the visit. Without that signal, content production turns into volume. More decks, more PDFs, more folders, and the field team becomes the filter.

None of this means Teams or SharePoint are bad. It just means they’re not designed to be the thing a rep presents from.

Keep the warehouse, add an enablement layer

The good news is you don’t need a dramatic migration, and you definitely don’t need a holy war against SharePoint. In most teams the clean setup is just splitting roles.

Teams and SharePoint stay as the warehouse and collaboration space. That’s where drafts live, approvals happen, and the full archive sits.

Then you put a field friendly layer in front, the place reps actually go before and during customer conversations. That’s Salesframe. It isn’t trying to replace your warehouse, it’s the front door that makes the warehouse usable in real life.

Salesframe curates so instead of showing everything that exists, it shows what’s relevant and approved right now, by market, by role, by channel, by quarter. If you want everyone leading with a specific campaign or category story this month, it’s obvious. If something is outdated, it simply stops being selectable.

It’s fast in the moment. Building a customer specific deck should feel like selecting building blocks, not hunting files. Templates matter because most field meetings are repeatable, grocery buyer, wholesaler, HoReCa, new listing, promo negotiation. If the rep can build a deck in seconds from a template, the system gets used.

It handles the messy parts quietly. Offline access, always latest content, and clear ownership so people trust that what they see is what they should use, not just “something that was uploaded at some point”.

And it creates a feedback loop. When sharing happens as one link, you can see what customers actually viewed. That helps reps follow up with something better than “just checking in”, and it helps marketing learn what content is working in the real world.

If you want a simple way to move toward this without ripping anything apart, start with two decisions:

What is the current story you want the field team to lead with this quarter, realistically three to five priorities.

What is the field ready set of content that supports that story, stripped down to what is actually used.

Once you have that, you can build templates around it, make link sharing the default in Salesframe, and keep the warehouse as the backend source.

That’s the shift: the archive can stay wide, but the field front door needs to stay narrow.

TLDR: Teams and SharePoint are great for storing and governing sales files, but they don’t help reps in the moment. Field teams need a front door that’s curated, fast on mobile, works offline, and makes it easy to build a deck in seconds, share one link, and learn what customers actually viewed. Keep SharePoint as the warehouse, add an enablement layer for distribution, presenting, and tracking.