You could create a huge library of incredible sales content for your team…but if that content isn’t relevant and updated and if it’s hard for your team to access it when they need it, then this library is all but useless. The key to offering successful, effective sales content is proper sales content management: keeping content relevant, organized, updated, and easy to access.
But this is harder than it seems. While sales reps now have plenty of sales enablement tools to leverage during buyer interactions–they still have to process much information themselves. On average, a sales rep has 1400 sales assets to choose from. Sometimes, these assets go unused because they’re spread across multiple content repositories, making it difficult for reps to locate them.
It’s also quite common for reps to lose deals because they’re struggling to find sales content that's relevant to a prospect. The solution to this problem is effective sales content management: maintaining a single content repository with updated, organized, and easy-to-access information.
In this article, you’ll understand the benefits and challenges of sales content management and how to improve your sales content management strategy to drive revenue growth.
What is Sales Content Management?
Sales content management optimizes the process through which sales materials are accessed. It involves creating, organizing, storing, and delivering sales content used by sales reps from the beginning of the sales cycle and all through the sales pipeline.
It also ensures that relevant sales content like pitch decks, playbooks, sales processes, and prospecting tips are available to reps at the right time.
Sales content vs marketing content
Sales content is created for the decision stage of a buyer’s journey. It’s specific information about your business, product, and services designed to convince a prospect of your product’s value and how your product features can help solve their problems.
Marketing content, on the other hand, focuses on the awareness and consideration stage of the buyer journey. It is information that points prospects to answers they need concerning how a potential product (not necessarily yours) and its features work. Examples of marketing content might be blog posts, free ebooks, infographics, etc.
While sales content is created to persuade prospects, marketing content provides a wide variety of information that can help prospects achieve their goal.
Sales Content Examples
Let’s look at three types of sales content that help sales reps turn prospects into customers:
Sales Playbooks
Sales playbooks contain information on strategies, tactics, and best practices that sales reps can leverage during conversations with prospects. It guides reps on handling situations like pitching a product, qualifying leads, nurturing leads, or prospecting.
The major benefit of sales playbooks is that they reduce the time reps spend researching and gathering information. According to research, only 21% of a rep's day is spent selling. Making it easy to access sales playbooks can help free up valuable time for reps, enabling them to focus more on selling.
Sales Processes
The sales process is a set of predetermined steps that reps follow to convert leads into customers. Top sales reps typically spend up to 6 hours weekly finding and researching prospects.
Sales process documents such as the ZoomInfo basics training guide from Spekit help to streamline their efforts. These documents provide information on how reps can identify and find potential buyers, how to approach prospects to present sales content, handle objections, and close deals.
Prospecting Tips
Prospects are leads whose needs match your product offerings and who have shown interest in your product. Top sales reps generate more sales meetings via prospecting because they are armed with the best prospecting tips. A prospecting tip provides sales reps with the information they need to drive the prospects' interest and turn them into customers.
Prospecting tips outline strategies, or tricks reps can use when reaching out to potential customers through cold emailing, cold calling, business networking, etc. It enables them to define their target market, leverage sales prospecting tools, conduct discovery calls, and follow up with prospects.
For example, this LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides prospecting tips on identifying and engaging prospects on LinkedIn.
Benefits of Sales Content Management
The benefits of sales content management are numerous. Let’s look at some:
Easier Content Creation
Sales content management simplifies the entire content creation process since marketing and sales teams have accurate insights and information on what prospects need and how to deliver value to them.
Also, since sales materials are organized and accessible, they can easily notice content gaps and create sales content to fill in those gaps. This ensures content is never repeated and is always up to date.
Improved Sales Team Productivity
Sales reps and teams spend much of their time on non-selling activities. This is because they search for information or create content when they don’t find what they need. Sales content management aggregates all the needed materials in one place, making sales content readily accessible so your sales team has more time for revenue-generating activities.
Better Content Usage by Employees & Prospects
Sales content management helps you aggregate sales materials on one platform, and segment materials into categories like content type, buyer sales, and sales cycle stage. This gives sales teams easier access to all the information they need and can ensure they share only relevant content with prospects.
For prospects, they receive content that’s useful and can help them solve their problems. This increases buyer engagement and conversions.
Supports Revenue & Sales Enablement
Sales content management allows you to equip sales and revenue teams with the content, knowledge, training, and tools required to close deals and drive revenue. A central content repository reduces search time and speeds up the sales cycle.
Personalizing sales content enables sales reps to deliver tailored pitches, and analytics offer insight into content effectiveness, helping revenue teams develop strategies that optimize content and increase the ROI of sales materials.
Challenges of Sales Content Management
Sales content management is only effective when you have content management practices in place. Without it, you might run into some issues…
Old or Inaccurate Content
According to Forrester, 89% of B2B buyers want to receive relevant content–that should be accurate and updated too.
However, it can be challenging to update content when it’s scattered on various platforms. Fortunately, using tools like Spekit means you can update sales content from wherever you are. Spekit makes it possible to add Speks–bite-sized content–that can be embedded directly into your tech stack.
Let’s say you’re on the Salesforce platform and see new information related to a sales material you’ve created. You wouldn’t need to leave Salesforce to find your company’s Salesforce documentation, update the content, and then let everyone know there’s a new change.
You would simply click the Speks icon, select the document you need to edit, update it, and your team will receive this new data in real time. With this feature, your sales team can deliver the right content at the right time, driving conversion and sales.
Time-Consuming to Find Content
Reps typically spend 3-11 hours searching for information. That’s a lot of time spent searching for content when they should engage prospects and sell. Finding the right sales material for a prospect is difficult when content is scattered across different platforms.
Effective sales content management requires you to provide a central hub that integrates your sales team's tech stack. For example, Spekit’s Speks feature enables you to deliver sales content into your team's flow of work.
Using Speks, you can embed sales content directly into whichever platform sales reps work on. This reduces the time spent finding content, improving sales team productivity and ultimately enabling them to close more deals.
Hard to Track Content Usage
Despite the excess of sales content available to sales teams, about 70% of it goes unused. That’s a huge number.
Sales reps reach out to many prospects daily and don’t have time to track what sales content they use for each prospect. And, having sales materials spread on various platforms makes tracking even harder.
To effectively manage sales content, you need a sales content management tool like Spekit’s enablement analytics which provides analytics and reporting insights that help you uncover content usage gaps.
Spekit analytics provide an at-a-glance look at which Speks are popular, getting reactions, out of date, and more. These actionable insights are shared on easy-to-read dashboards that report on Spek engagement, use, and governance.
How to Improve Your Sales Content Management
Ensure your sales content is being used effectively with these strategies:
1. Assess Your Current Sales Content
Performing content audits is critical in sales content management. It is important to assess current sales content periodically. 53% of organizations that assess sales content regularly see increased engagement.
Assessing sales content provides answers to questions you may have, like: what content is being used? What content is outdated? What content drives the most engagement or conversions? These insights are needed to optimize the creation and delivery of sales content.
2. Align Your Sales & Marketing Teams
Alignment between sales and marketing teams is important for seamless sales content management. It contributes to increased closed deals by creating a better communication pattern from marketing to sales and vice versa, optimizing the sharing of ideas, strategies, and feedback on sales content.
For example, your marketing team can use feedback from the sales team to create and update sales content to ensure it is aligned with what prospects need.
3. Track Content Effectiveness
Marketing and sales teams often spend a lot of resources and time creating and delivering sales materials with zero insights as to whether they are effective. Tracking content effectiveness helps you understand if sales materials are useful to sales reps.
It also lets you know what sales content resonates most with your target audience or prospects and what content gaps need to be filled to close deals and increase sales.
4. Use Sales Content Management Tools
Sales content management tools reduce the level of manual effort required to manage sales content. These tools streamline sales processes and simplify workflow by automating tasks like managing user access to content, aligning sales and marketing teams, performing content audits, tracking content effectiveness, etc.
What is a Sales Content Management System (Sales CMS)?
A sales content management system organizes and stores all sales-related content. It serves as a central hub that aggregates siloed content in one place and enables sales leaders to control who has access to materials on the platform. A Sales CMS optimizes your content management through:
Collateral Organization & Delivery
Up to 65% of sales reps complain about not locating sales content to share with prospects. Sales CMS enables you to set up sales collateral categories depending on sales needs throughout the sales cycle.
Users can also group collateral according to the buyer’s journey and automate content delivery to prospects when needed. This effectively reduces the time spent locating content and ensures the delivery of relevant sales collateral to every prospect.
Tech Stack Integrations
Sales teams use a collection of sales enablement software and tools to manage and regulate their workflows. They often have to manually send information from one platform to another. Sales CMS is an all-in-one solution for integrating your sales team's tools. It allows you to automate workflows and synchronize data across platforms.
Analytics & Reporting
Sales CMS analytics and reporting tools enable you to track and measure the performance of all your sales collateral. You can analyze metrics like customer behavior, engagement, conversions, and ROI of sales content to understand what is and isn’t working.
Sales leaders say analyzing metrics increases the success of sales efforts. Sales CMS offers a data-driven approach to monitoring sales content effectiveness and creating custom reports.
User Permissions
User permissions allow you to specify the level of capabilities and access for your sales team. With Sales CMS, you can create user groups and designate permissions for each group. For example, you can create a group for users who create sales content and allow them only to create but not share content.
This feature ensures that everyone in your sales team only has access to what they need to perform their duties. In addition, you can set up permissions to allow different users to work together, enabling effective collaboration amongst teams.
Maximize Your Sales Content Management
The best sales content management systems enable you to solve whatever content usage challenges your sales teams might face while optimizing their workflow and sales processes. You need a platform that effortlessly lets you create sales content, manage user permissions, analyze content effectiveness, and integrate seamlessly with your tech stack.
Spekit’s sales enablement platform has all the features you need. With Spekit, you can create sales content in seconds and share it with your sales team on whichever platform they need. You can assess content usage and effectiveness using easy-to-review informative visuals and analytics .
Are you ready to maximize your sales content management and drive revenue growth? Start by working with the best sales content management system.
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