How to Create Food Product Spec Sheets Your Brokers Will Actually Use
You’ve spent months, maybe even years, perfecting your product. You’ve sourced the best ingredients, refined the recipe, and designed beautiful packaging. Your marketing team has crafted what they believe to be the perfect sales materials to support your broker network. Yet, when you talk to your partners, you hear a frustratingly common story: they can’t find the right information when they need it.
If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Industry research shows that a staggering 70% of sales content created by marketing is never used by sales teams. For food manufacturers, this isn’t just a marketing problem; it’s a sales problem that directly impacts your bottom line.
Your brokers are on the front lines, and if they can’t quickly access the information they need, they can’t sell effectively.
The good news is that you can fix this. The solution starts with moving from a “document” mindset to a “data” mindset and rethinking how you create and distribute your food product spec sheets.
Why Your Spec Sheets Are Failing Your Brokers
For a food broker, a spec sheet is one of the most critical tools in their arsenal. They are in front of a retail buyer, and they need to be able to answer specific questions about your product in seconds. They don’t have time to scroll through a 10-page PDF or hunt for an email with the latest version. They need to know about allergens, nutritional data, and certifications right now.
The reality is that most spec sheets are not designed for this purpose. They are often dense, text-heavy documents that are difficult to scan and even harder to find. This is because most companies are still stuck in a manual, document-based workflow. Marketing creates a spec sheet, saves it as a PDF, and emails it to the sales team. When something changes, they create a new version and send it out again.
This process is fundamentally broken. It leads to version control chaos, with outdated information floating around in inboxes and shared drives. It frustrates your brokers, who waste valuable time hunting for the right document, and it can lead to costly mistakes when they present the wrong information to a buyer.
Ineffective Sales Content Is Costing You
The impact of this problem is bigger than you might think. When your brokers can’t find the information they need, they can’t have the conversations that lead to sales. They can’t answer the buyer’s questions with confidence, and they can’t position your product as the solution to their needs.
Think about it from the buyer’s perspective. They are looking for products that will fly off their shelves. They need to know if your product meets their customers’ dietary needs, if it has the right certifications, and if it fits into their store’s overall strategy. If your broker can’t provide this information quickly and easily, the buyer will move on to the next product.
From Documents to Data: A Better Approach
The only way to solve this problem is to change the way you think about your sales content. Instead of creating static documents, you need to build a centralized source of truth for all your product information. This is the “data” mindset.
When you have a single, trusted source for all your product data, you can automate the creation of your spec sheets and other sales materials. This means that whenever you update a product’s information, that change is instantly reflected across all your sales collateral. No more version control chaos. No more outdated information.
This is where a platform like Mobile Office can transform your sales process. Our centralized system allows you to manage all your product information in one place and then automatically generate up-to-date spec sheets, sell sheets, and other materials. Your brokers will always have access to the most current information, and you can even allow for custom uploads for those special cases that require a personal touch.
By moving from a “document” mindset to a “data” mindset, you can eliminate the friction in your sales process, empower your brokers to sell more effectively, and ensure that the 95% of buying decisions influenced by content are swinging in your favor.
