If you’ve ever polished your car, fed your pets, or used skin care products (all of which we recommend if you have a car, a pet, or well…skin), then chances are some of the ingredients in these products have been developed in a Barentz laboratory.

Barentz is a global life science ingredients distributor specializing in nutrition, pharmaceuticals, personal care, and performance materials. They leverage their network of labs and suppliers to source and formulate principal ingredients

for their clients worldwide.

They ensure every team is equipped with necessary resources for both internal and external use — including training materials, internal and corporate communications, and marketing content.

Marketing Manager, Barentz HI&I

Marketing Manager, Barentz North America

As a large conglomerate, Barentz manages a diverse portfolio of products and divisions, spanning industries like human nutrition, pharmaceuticals, personal care, animal care, and performance materials.

By any standard, that’s impressive– and a lot to handle.

Marketing Managers Jami Knoth and Schuyler Rosado let us in on what it looked like to manage each of these five divisions, each with its own dedicated teams and extensive content libraries. 

Their biggest challenges?

• Disorganized content spread across various drives and folders
  
• Difficulties in distributing large files to stakeholders

“We represent hundreds of principals across five divisions, and all these principals have a lot of literature. They have brochures, presentations, sell sheets, videos and technical documentation, and we needed a place to keep it organized for our sales teams and principal managers to use and to educate themselves on the different offerings for principals, and to also share with customers.”

“So we bought a company in Canada that was in the human nutrition division, and they already had a tool. We looked into it and decided to look at other comparable products, because this one had certain limitations”, Jami tells us.

Some of those limitations were:

After much deliberation, Barentz decided to set their eyes on another tool.

“Paperflite had the features that we were really looking for. The search is great. The user interface is great”, Jami adds.

With Paperflite, Barentz could explore new avenues of making their sales processes more efficient.

Barentz first introduced Paperflite through a pilot rollout, beginning with performance materials, the team already familiar with their former platform.

“We would pull in sales members that were really active on the product and have them talk about it at sales meetings. They’d write about it in their call reports, show how great the tool is to other team members and try to get more people involved.”

“So we started researching similar products. We found Paperflite and took the demo. It was just so much better, more intuitive, and easier to use for everybody.” 

One particular AE at Barentz creates a Paperflite Collection for all of her sales calls and is thrilled to know when it’s been opened. Notifications are sent out every time a new document is uploaded on the Collection, making it easier for her and the customer to keep track of.

“They know where all their documents are”, Jami adds. “It just makes us look like we're in the correct century.”

After an exciting and successful pilot, management eagerly initiated a division-by-division expansion across the company.

Paperflite also indexes the document’s attributes and the content inside, making the search Google-like, easy, and effective. The platform goes a step further and recommends tags based on the content making it easier for sellers to find and share the right materials with their prospects.

In Schuyler’s words:

The platform also offered them the option to create and customize content hubs for as many regions as Barentz operated out of at no cost. This made it the perfect tool to keep up with Barentz’s growth.

Phew.

Now, Barentz sales reps frequently use Paperflite to package content into these Collections, or digital micro-sites. With just a single link, they can securely share documents of any size or format, including multimedia files, directly through email, eliminating size restrictions and security concerns.

“Paperflite’s search function really sold it for me, with how much easier it was to find documents.”

Barentz’s content that lived across multiple platforms like OneDrive, SharePoint, Dropbox, and Google Drive was brought together by Paperflite’s Seamless integration with these content storage platforms.

Principal managers simply had to map a folder within their drive to Paperflite, after which all uploaded files on that folder automatically reflected on Paperflite.

“So whenever there's a need for an updated brochure, I drop it in SharePoint”, explains Jami. “It automatically gets synced to Paperflite, and so everything is organized in one spot.”

This made updated content easily accessible to reps, as it now lived in a single platform. 

This is especially useful as it makes the longer sales cycles feel less tedious for both sales reps and prospects. Documents are no longer drowned in long email threads, but are readily available in the shared Collection.

“Those longer sales cycle products are the ones that typically do better with a Paperflite Collection is what I've heard from the salespeople”,  Jami adds.

The teams also went ahead and created industry-specific Collection templates, which made life considerably easier.

“For instance, we have specific collections for coatings, adhesives, personal care products, plant-based ingredients, etc. This becomes a standard collection that the respective teams can use and send to a customer”, explains Jami.

"So what's great about a Paperflite Collection is it's just a link. They (prospects) click on the link, and it opens up this really nice webpage– it has graphics, a banner, your logo, and a personal message."

For new account managers at Barentz, diving into the technical side of such a wide-ranging product lineup naturally comes with a lot of questions. While teams at Barentz are always happy to lend a hand, having Paperflite Seek on board to handle those basic product inquiries would move things a lot faster.

“We're definitely looking forward to the AI aspect of it”, says Jami, on Paperflite’s AI companion, Seek.

What was happening at Barentz?

Being a large conglomerate, Barentz faced issues such as:

How did they solve this with Paperflite?

After experimenting with a different platform, Barentz chose Paperflite as a solution, which:

What changed?

Now, reps at Barentz are able to:

Marketing Manager, Barentz HI&I

Marketing Manager, Barentz North America

Customer Success Manager

Account Manager

“Before Paperflite, I always thought of it as like the Wild West with our documents. We had lots of different drives. Lots of people would just drop things in file folders. It was very, very messy. Things were outdated. You never knew what was the most up-to-date brochure”, Jami explains.

Each division had its own version of a content library, spread across local drives, Google Drive, DropBox, SDrive, and other content management platforms. All of these were overflowing with data sheets, product videos, lab reports, and technical documentation

Sales reps were struggling to cut through the flood of information and find the right content at the right time for their prospects.

With such a diverse product portfolio, reps also had to stay up-to-date and self-educate, so accessing accurate content quickly was crucial.

“So what we wanted to do was slowly get the different divisions using one platform”, Jami adds.

The sales cycles at Barentz are often pretty long- sometimes spanning 12 to 18 months. This meant frequent back-and-forths with multiple divisions and sharing vast amounts of content with numerous stakeholders.

Tracking down a lab report sent months ago often turned into a scavenger hunt through emails, Slack messages, and Google Drive links, further complicated by access and permission hurdles.

“There was too much sharing, finding, and re-sharing. We needed to provide a better experience for our customers. We started to look for a tool that could help us achieve that”, says Schulyer.

It wasn’t just about the volume of content– it was also the sheer size of it.

“The email comes up with, like, 10 attachments, which is a problem because people are afraid for security, you know, with downloading attachments for one, plus the file size.”

Buyers weren’t thrilled either. They dealt with file size restrictions, failed deliveries, and growing security concerns about downloading multiple attachments.

Barentz regularly sent massive files like lab reports, videos, and proofs of concept to customers, and email couldn’t handle these large attachments. Account managers frequently struggled with emails failing due to size limits.