The purpose of sales collateral is to help your prospective customers decide whether to do business with you. Collateral should support a dialogue you have with your customers by answering as many questions as possible to speed up the process. Speed is in everyone's interest when time is money. Some sales may not require collateral support but many customers will expect written proposals - both to confirm or formalise your business offer/arrangement and to help communicate it to other people who may be party to the decision. 

Changes in customer expectations and technology capabilities have seen three generations of sales collateral over the last 10 years:

1. Generation One: manual Word documents - possibly accompanied by pre-printed brochures. These document are likely to be based on templates prepared by marketing or sales management but suffer all of the risks of poor quality, inconsistency, error, and limited personalisation. The customer experience is likely to be poor and sales will be lost as a consequence.
2. Generation Two: automated Word documents - client-server automation applications that pull together pre-written content with variable inputs to create more coherent and consistent Word documents. These bring productivity and quality improvements and are becoming more of a standard in many commoditised industries but still suffer risk in final version edits and have limited capability to handle complicated business logic so offer limited personalisation.
3. Generation Three: SaaS-based documents - built fresh, SaaS solutions can avoid the limitations of Word and offer both centralised, workflow-enhanced control to the final output as well as complete personalisation in product and pricing. When customers experience the difference, appreciating how hard you are working for them, they vote with their purchase.