If you’ve ever made a big purchase, you know that content makes a huge difference in your decision-making process. I was recently in the market for a new bike and researched several makes and models across multiple vendors. The shop that ultimately won my business was the one that personalized and provided me with content about the bikes I was considering in a timely manner.
The same level of buyer engagement is important in B2B sales. Marketing content is an important resource that sellers rely on to educate buyers and accelerate deal cycles. In order to be effective, sellers need to quickly identify and personalize the right content for their prospects. In fact, 74% of buyers choose the company that was the first to add value (see above!). But, on average, sales reps spend 440 hours each year trying to find the right content to share with their prospects.
Sales content management software (CMS) enables sellers to find, personalize, and share content at the right time and in the right context. In this post, I’ll share a series of reasons why your organization should leverage sales enablement tools to manage content for sales reps.
What is sales enablement software?
We define sales enablement as the strategic process when sales, marketing, and operations stakeholders empower sales reps with the right resources, processes, and technology they need to engage prospects and customers throughout the buyer’s journey and sell effectively. In many ways, sales enablement is a philosophy and a core function. Sales enablement software is a tool enablement practitioners can use to drive sales and marketing alignment and personalize buyer engagement at scale.
If your organization is in the market for sales enablement tools, a content management system is often a great place to start. Here are just a few reasons why!
1. Simplify content discovery
Sales reps can’t use content they don’t know exists. For example, if your birthday card is mailed to the wrong address, you can’t use that shiny gift card because you don’t know it exists. The same goes for content — even when your marketers create exceptional sales enablement collateral, buyers will never see it if sellers can’t find it.
Content discovery is a significant challenge in enterprise organizations. So much so that they lose more than $2.3M annually because of opportunity costs associated with underused or unused content. Content management software chips away at this challenge by providing marketers with a repository or single source of truth for sales enablement content. The best software allows sales reps to search by persona, deal stage, product, and more to find the right content, at the right time.
2. Ensure that reps use the latest content
The content that your organization uses changes over time. Messaging and best practices evolve as your organization identifies which content is most effective with buyers.
In order to go to market with a consistent, unified message, your sales reps need easy access to the latest content. CMS software does two things to ensure sales reps always have the latest and greatest content available. First, it allows marketers to directly edit and update content, and it also flags content that is outdated or unused.
3. Personalize content for your prospects
Remember what I mentioned above about shopping for a new bike? My purchase decision was heavily influenced by the retailer’s personalized outreach. They provided content and resources about the bikes I was interested in, at just the right time.
Content management tools give your sales reps the ability to do just that. When sales reps can select content based on persona, deal stage, and product, they can tailor their outreach based on an individual prospect. Content management software that’s enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI) allows sales reps to drive even deeper personalization through intelligent content recommendations.
4. Send content faster
In a competitive B2B sales landscape, it’s important to connect sales reps with the right content at the right time. If you’ve just finished a client call and promised to follow up with additional content, you can’t afford to spend the rest of the day tracking down the right asset. When sales reps have to resort to word-of-mouth or sifting through multiple systems to find content, they slow down deal cycles, lose productivity, and leave buyers waiting.
By simplifying content discovery, content management software allows sellers to quickly access and deliver the content they need to share with buyers. Tools that allow sales reps to send content directly from the platform can help reps save time by eliminating the extra step of attaching files to an email.
5. Measure content effectiveness
Content analytics tools help go-to-market teams understand how content is used and consumed by buyers. Content management software allows enablement teams to monitor the content that sellers share in order to gain valuable insights. For example, content analytics can identify which content is most popular with sellers, which content buyers open the most, or which content influences closed-won opportunities.
There are a lot of insights that can be gleaned from the content your organization shares. When your content management system monitors usage and effectiveness, you can produce more of what works, less of what doesn’t, and optimize your content and processes to better serve your customers.
What’s next?
Content management is the cornerstone of any sound enablement strategy. No matter where your organization is on its enablement journey, we’d like to help you ignite your growth. Seismic’s content management tools help organizations reduce content chaos and drive revenue growth.
Want more sales enablement resources? Download our eBook, The Enablement Cloud: A Unified Platform for Engagement & Growth for information on content management and more!
