Empowering hybrid sales teams: Resolving content chaos
Today with digital initiatives taking pace, the volume of content generated has peaked and along with it the challenge of managing it to its full potential. Imagine managing it poorly and it can create a lot of chaos for the organisation like compliance issues, outdated content, delayed processes, lost content and much more. Hence, how to manage, protect and gain a competitive advantage by leveraging the full potential of your content? Content is an essential marketing element and it can help sales teams improve their sales pitches while making it a more convincing journey for customers.
Since inception organisations have been creating a lot of content with different goals and purposes. Some are for “internal use only”, some are “customer-facing”, some are “product or services facing” etc. Hence, they need to be managed in a way that everyone has the desired access to the right content that’s up-to-date. However, with a lack of effective content management strategy, and a lack of synchronisation between teams and departments, the big question arises, how to bridge this gap to get the result you are looking for?
1. Define your content need- Before creating content, the first thing is to find out why you need it, what problems it solves, and whether it fits in with the requirement of sales teams. Here, multiple groups and ideas need to be incorporated to get engagement from the audience of the sales teams. Simultaneously, the physical location of the files is also necessary to be defined so that sellers can get quick and easy access for specific interactions.
2. Organise and curate content- Once the content is curated and it is essential to evaluate whether its effective, useful and can help in revenue generation. If it does not fulfil any of these requirements archiving that content can be a better idea. However, in this process of evaluation, it is important to find a balance between creating, discarding and updating the existing content to make it available to sales teams on time. Let’s assume which of your content needs to be rebranded, which content can be eliminated, which one is outdated information, which content needs customisation etc., all these aspects should be evaluated before creating or organising any content. Note, that 90% of the sales content is never used by B2B sellers because it’s irrelevant or difficult to customise. Content curation is an ongoing process and one of the best practices of content management to avoid the situation of content churn.
3. Conduct content audit- Performing a time-to-time audit of your content is another important activity of content management. Any developed content must align with the sales stages and the buyer’s journey in that stage. Hitting the right aspect with the relevant content can create a meaningful relationship and a better convincing opportunity for sellers to move to the next level of sales. Content has a significant impact on buying decisions and when provided to a seller it creates an opportunity to educate them and how to use the content effectively to pitch better. Another benefit of a content audit is that it helps identify the gaps. Hence, it is necessary to perform audits periodically for necessary steps to be taken.
4. Provide content to assist buyers’ journey- So, before you decide to create content, it’s important to understand your sales team’s pain points when they engage with a prospective buyer. What are the objections they face most commonly? What is their feedback on products and services? And many such questions. Sales teams should be empowered with many such resources that provide them with the capability to prospect easily and provide a quick solution to any type of objection coming from the audience. Some of the most common types of content forms can be case studies, one pager, ebooks, whitepapers, demo videos etc. No one size fits all, hence, content needs to be modified in a way that fits different sales scenarios and customer needs.
5. Analyse your content- Get insights on all the content you use, the contexts, who is using it and how engaging this content is by getting desired analytics. This helps identify what type of content customers are most engaging with such as click rate, open rate, download and how much time they spend on each item. It will also help you create a similar type of content, refine existing ones and update the guidance that will help sellers pitch the content effectively. Typically, only a limited type of content is used by sales teams hence, it gives an opportunity to examine why? and also an opportunity to invest wisely when making content decisions.
What are the issues that the Sales Content Management system can address?
After setting up the content management strategy in place, it is important to consider evaluating software that can provide a centralised location with ease of access anytime, anywhere. It’s an approach to help sales teams effectively use the content for communication while maintaining brand identity. So, what are the needs it’s addressing?
1. Gain product knowledge- If you want to pitch a product, you need to be well-versed with the product. One of the ways sales teams can do it is by going through all the materials produced by marketing teams to understand the latest features or new product releases.
2. Manage assets with ease- Since organisations are consistently creating content, often there are multiple use cases, pain-point related collaterals. Like a short 2-minute video, case study etc. where customers can quickly get an overview of it instead of going through a 6-page brochure which is good when you are deciding on a few products. Hence, all these items should be easily retrievable, this is where sales content management software can ensure that sales teams are enabled to solve customer challenges.
3. Accessing the right content at the right time- Not all stages of the buyer’s journey are the same, some might be just in the very early stage of evaluation. Hence, it requires a different type of content to keep them engaged. But the challenge arises when they have to search for it in places-local storage, inbox, SharePoint, drive etc. It requires central storage where they know, it will be easily accessible based on hashtags, categories, and descriptions for easy understanding.
If you are planning to evaluate a platform with features to help you manage content centrally while enabling your sales and partner network with effective sales and marketing automation, online presence, branding and communication. Contact us to book a demo of SalesPanda, an effective sales enablement and acceleration platform with modules where sales teams and partners get easy access to branded marketing content pushed centrally — to communicate the value proposition with end customers. Furthermore, we help brands recruit new potential hires, providing them with training and coaching to pitch better and sell more.