Good Content Management Helps in Sales Enablement
A recent survey found that sales reps, on an average, spend five working days per month searching for relevant information. Let’s look at how good content management can help in sales enablement.
In the fast-paced B2B working environment, you’ll often find the sales department strapped for time and working at a frenzied pace. But being busy doesn’t always mean being productive. A lot of time is spent just on gathering relevant information, and this leads to a sharp dip in productivity. Aberdeen found out that sales reps spend around 43 hours every month searching for information. That’s a staggeringly high amount of time!
Effective organizations have incorporated a new process in their workflow that lets their sales team work at a fast pace but without any hassles, as mentioned earlier. That process is sales enablement. According to CSO Insights, 60% of companies now have a dedicated sales enablement function.
What is Sales Enablement?
HubSpot defines sales enablement as follows:
Sales enablement is the technology, processes, and content that empower sales teams to sell efficiently at a higher velocity.
**The purpose of sales enablement is to equip sales personnel with the necessary content and tools to help them engage leads and prospects while driving revenue and improving sales productivity over time.**
Sales enablement is a collaborative effort of sales, marketing, and product departments. And to facilitate this effort, organizations have introduced a new role — the sales enablement professional. Along with acting as a liaison among sales and marketing teams, the sales enablement professional is also responsible for developing sales content, talent onboarding material, and training programs, managing CMS, CRM, and sales enablement platform, optimizing the buyer journey and analyzing the sales performance to improve the process.
Also Read: Improving Sales Coaching and Training with Modern Learning Techniques
The Role of Content Management in Sales Enablement
Considering the scale of content marketing, we can classify sales enablement as a part of content marketing, and to follow sales enablement best practices, your content marketing strategy should prioritize following content categories for sales enablement:
- Customer-Centric Content: Blog articles, case studies, white papers and other downloadable material (Such as eBooks and guides), etc.
- Customer-Informative Content: Presentations, emails, brochures etc.
- Internal Sales Content: Competitor analysis documents, sales scripts, product sheets, training material, sales playbook, etc.
The scope of content marketing invites its own set of challenges, such as using stand-alone tools to perform sales and marketing activities instead of using a marketing automation tool, or the lack of a stable content repository. These practices adversely affect sales productivity and revenue.
However, sales enablement software can help you with content management in an effective manner. Let’s look at how good content management can help in sales enablement.
Also Read:
Top 20 Content Marketing Online Courses and Certifications to Enroll in 2020
1. Improves Productivity
When the content is not maintained in a centralized repository, things get complicated for salespeople. Many organizations use different tools or platforms to keep different types of content. Sales reps must go through these various tools to find what they’re looking for, taking up plenty of time in the process which could otherwise be spent productively.
**A content management platform ‘de-siloes’ scattered content by unifying it under one umbrella. With the help of custom navigation, sellers can easily find the content they need based by applying filters such as buyer persona, stage of the buyer’s journey, etc.**
2. Nurtures Leads
Someone just downloaded a PDF guide that you recently released. Although the lead hasn’t shown any interest in buying from you yet, you need to stay on top of their minds. With the help of a content management platform, you can send the right content at the right time to your leads and prospects.
As Steve Jobs once said, “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” You need to keep sending out content to your leads during the lead nurturing process before they start looking for it. Sending highly personalized content based on the stage of the funnel and the profile will guide the lead through the funnel and when the right time comes, making the sell is just a walk in the park.
3. Makes Easy Availability of Content to Sales People
According to Michael Brenner, CEO, Marketing Insider Group, 60-70% of content doesn’t get utilized at all. A similar phenomenon is also noticed with salespeople as well. Most of the time, sellers cling on to a product or content because it has become their comfort zone. Due to information overload, it’s just impossible for them to contain the information that is being generated today. That’s why the phrase ‘out of sight, out of mind’ is so relevant in the age of web 2.0.
A sales management tool can bring all the information in one place making it easy for salespeople to find relevant details. And as the organization expands its product range or adds new features to its existing products, it wouldn’t pose a problem as all the required information is just a few clicks away.
Also Read: 5 Metrics to Assess your Content Marketing Effectiveness
4. Enhances Sales Enablement Efforts
Content is just one piece of the sales enablement puzzle. As described, sales enablement also consists of other functions such as talent onboarding, training, buyer/journey funnel optimization, managing platforms and so on.
**Content is foundational to all the other functions of sales enablement and thus when managed well, can automatically improve the performance of the overall sales enablement efforts. **
5. Tracks Content Metrics
Marketing and sales are highly data-driven. Every decision you take is supported by what worked or didn’t work in the past. A content management platform allows the sales enablement manager to track various content metrics. Metrics such as views, shares, downloads, average time spent, etc. and how the content has contributed to acquiring new customers. Based on these metrics, sellers can decide the further course of sales enablement strategy.
Also Read: Key Account Management: from Sales Enablement to Strategic Partnerships
The Success of Sales Enablement Lies in Good Content Management
Although the term sales enablement is loosely defined and approached differently by different organizations, it is indeed not a fad.
**If we look from the customer experience point of view, sales enablement empowers your sales personnel with the tools and processes to guide the prospect towards making a purchase, and it all starts with effective content management.**
link
.jpg "The next frontier of personalized marketing")
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/Inv.Terms_Scarcity-d54a392456f344a7acec0e4a650740b3.jpg "What Is Scarcity?")
