The GMAC team is a content creation machine, cranking out tons of assets for both marketing projects, such as branding and website, as well as sales enablement and other client-facing usage. Sharing assets became a point of friction because there was just so much content to sift through and so many people in the organization who needed to access it.
Omeid Rahimian’s role as the project manager on the GMAC team is to ensure that the marketing team’s projects run smoothly from start to finish. He’s in the perfect position to identify areas of friction in the marketing team’s workflows, and championed using a digital asset management (DAM) solution to ease the team’s pain points around sharing content.
For Omeid, a DAM solution was a business investment that would pay for itself through peace of mind and time saved. Oceaneering’s marketing team had most of their assets on one local drive and various cloud accounts. Not only was this placing valuable assets at risk if a drive was compromised or the account owners left the company, it also created a bottleneck for finding and sharing digital assets.
“Because the company’s been around for over 50 years, some of our digital assets may not have another copy. If we lost one of those assets, we would lose it forever. That was the biggest selling point: to have a system that was backed up, which anybody could access and manage,” says Omeid.
After evaluating several DAM solutions, Omeid’s team chose Canto. He created a business plan to advocate for buying Canto that outlined the expected ROI, including the money the company would save from eliminating time wasted requesting and waiting for assets.
“How many times do we get requests for images, presentations or other digital assets? How long does it take for us to get those assets back to the requestor? I estimated the cost per hour that we would use for finding and sharing assets, and then expanded that out for weeks and years. That was how much time and money we would get back with Canto,” says Omeid.
I’m really proud of what we have been able to accomplish with Canto by streamlining requests for images and other marketing collateral. Canto is one of the first things we show off when people visit the marketing team.
Oceaneering uses Canto as the central hub for their digital assets – including presentations, high-resolution images, rendered images, videos and educational content – that are used both internally by marketing and in client-facing collateral by sales and engineering. The marketing team can rest easy knowing their assets are backed up, and they’ve also empowered sales and engineering to self-serve.
Omeid says, “I’m really proud of what we have been able to accomplish with Canto by streamlining requests for images and other marketing collateral. Canto is one of the first things we show off when people visit the marketing team.”
Off to a running start!
“We put together a demo and immediately people were asking us, ‘When can we have this?’, so we pushed forward with a pretty aggressive timeline,” says Omeid.
Omeid’s team got their Canto library up and running with thousands of tagged assets within just two months. The team had originally planned to launch Canto with 100 consumer seats – but once they began demoing Canto for the wider organization, the platform was such a hit that the team decided to increase their user seats by over 10x!
“We’ve been sending out promotional emails and encouraging anyone who is interested to start using Canto – right now, we have 900 users out of 1,100 seats. We’re trying to get our sales people and anybody else with need for marketing collateral into Canto, because a lot of our media is meant for those purposes,” says Omeid.
And although new software rollouts at a large company can be notoriously painful, Omeid says that rolling out Canto is “the easiest project I’ve implemented in my time here so far.”
Getting organized, enabling self-service
Omeid’s team wanted Canto to be a self-serve destination for anyone needing assets, so they set up their library to be super easy for any employee to navigate.
“The library structure was part of our initial discussion before we even put anything into Canto. We thought about what would be most intuitive to our end users: how could they easily find what they want even if they completely ignored all of our instructions and tutorial videos and manuals?” says Omeid.
“We set up our Canto library to be similar to what our people are familiar with, which is a simple folder structure. The idea was to drive people to a big bucket and then from that bucket they could drill down through the options via filters.”
Sales enablement made easy
Imagine trying to equip hundreds of sales people across the globe with the information and assets they need to sell a diverse range of technology solutions that can be applied to many different industries. Not an easy task, right? That’s the huge challenge the Oceaneering GMAC team faces when it comes to sales enablement.
“Our sales team is global, with sales representatives that focus on specific areas of the business, products and even just one or two clients,” says Omeid.
The marketing team creates tons of content for their sales team for all the technology solutions they offer as well as the industries they serve. Canto helps the sales team access this critical content on-demand.
“The biggest plus with Canto for sales will be the ease of presentations. They’re constantly having to show new, existing and prospective clients what our company does, because we do so much. We have so many different products and services that we offer that even people who have been working with us for decades might not know about certain technologies or solutions,” says Omeid.
What’s next for Oceaneering and Canto? Omeid plans on setting up ‘sales kits’ using Canto portals to provide their sales reps educational materials and targeted content for specific areas of the business. Because Oceaneering’s solutions are so diverse, this will help the sales team get up to speed with all the content they need to sell a particular product in one convenient location.
“Canto has the ability to provide our employees with the marketing materials they need, when they need them, in the field or at the office. This will help them tremendously when asked for additional material on business segments in which they do not work or with which they are unfamiliar,” says Omeid.
