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Enabling your sellers with the right sales content, in the right format, at the right time, has a material impact on your sales process. This is how you build trust with buyers, establish yourself as an expert, and ultimately close deals.
Yet research shows that 65% of available sales content goes unused by sellers. This statistic is pretty startling, especially considering how impactful these assets can be. There are a myriad of reasons why this might be the case. Can sellers find the content? Is it still relevant? Do sellers even know it exists?
Sales enablement teams can help close the content gap by measuring sales content performance. When we understand what resonates with buyers most, we can effectively arm our people with just-in-time resources that will move deals forward.
What is sales content?
Sales content should instill confidence or trust with a buyer by communicating value, answering their questions, and addressing exactly how you help solve their pain points. Since sales content is surfaced further down the funnel, personalizing this content for a specific audience or buyer can make it even more effective.
It’s important to note that sales and marketing teams often work together to develop sales content, but the two teams have different objectives. The enablement function helps connect what the sales team needs to build confidence with what the marketing team creates to accomplish the ultimate goal: telling a consistent, compelling story for the customer.
Customers need to hear different pieces of that story, at different points in the buying journey, and in different ways. Sales content can take a variety of forms, including:
- Spec sheets
- One-pagers
- Case studies
- Competitor research
- Battle cards
- Pricing sheets
- Customer testimonials
- Templates and playbooks
How to Measure Sales Content Performance
Sales content alone can provide value, but it’s your team’s ability to share it with a customer at exactly the right time that makes it effective. Educating and coaching your reps consistently on how and when to utilize which resources is the precursor to measuring sales content performance.
When enablement leaders think about content performance for sales teams, they care about how successfully content is used throughout the sales process to help you achieve your desired results—or, in other words, how well your content resonates with a buyer. Does the content prompt the desired next step, and how quickly does this happen?
Providing just-in-time content to a buyer requires a deep understanding of the buyer journey, individual customer needs, and what sales content is available. Here are 5 steps you can take to begin developing and enabling your sellers around the right content using the Addie model of learning:
- Analyze your content process and identify gaps
Come up with a system for organizing your content that makes sense for your team. This might be tagging content by topic, use case, buying stage, or product. When you have an organized repository and your sellers know how to find what they’re looking for, you’ll facilitate more impactful customer interactions and decrease sales cycle length.
- Design training and define the goal of each piece of content
What action do you want a buyer to take after reading a case study, downloading a template, or reviewing pricing? Clearly define the goal for each piece of content. Content alone will never close a deal or progress a buyer to the next stage, so it’s important that reps understand how the content functions to inform, educate, and verify the story told by marketing and sales.
- Develop content in line with the needs of your team
Your greatest resource here is your top-performing seller. Ask them if they have what they need, what they feel like they’re missing, and if they’re happy with the content they have. If you use a CMS, look at your underperforming content to understand what needs optimization and what you can retire.
- Implement new content and engage your reps in meaningful ways
Sales reps don’t really care about your new content—they care about hitting quota, so you must find ways to make the content interesting to them. Make this part of your training by identifying what’s in it for them. Utilize group check-ins, 1:1 sales coaching sessions, and role plays to drive that interest and help them see how the content benefits their day to day activities and goals.
- Evaluate adoption and content success across your sales team
Content performance depends on whether or not people actually use it. Integrating your sales coaching software with a platform like Seismic allows you to set and track daily, weekly, and monthly content sharing goals like LiveSends and LiveDocs in a scorecard.
Sales Content Performance Metrics
When reps are properly enabled around sales content and they’ve put it into practice, you can then begin measuring sales content performance.
This can look different depending on the piece of content and where it falls in the buyer journey, but here are some standard metrics you can use to measure who’s using your content and how effective it is:
- Awareness: Does your team know the content exists and where/how to find it?
- Adoption: Is your team utilizing the content?
- Usage: How often is content shared with customers?
- Customer sentiment: How are customers responding to your content?
- Open rate: What percentage of customers open the content you share?
- Time on page: How long does the customer typically spend reading the content?
- Time between stages: Is the content converting customers to the right next step in a timely manner?
- Rep confidence: Does the content adequately equip reps? Collect sentiment, success stories, and feedback from collaborators to keep optimizing.
Optimizing Sales Content for Conversion
Many factors contribute to content performance, but controlling what you can and using the content in a consistent way is how you can best measure its effectiveness. If you’re tracking relevant performance metrics and see content positively impact your sales process, keep doing what you’re doing, and find ways to iterate on what works.
If your content doesn’t positively impact your sales process, it’s time to optimize. My motto here is “Tight alignment, loose attachment.” This means staying in lockstep with all GTM teams to understand what your buyer wants and needs, and collaborate to both create content and enable people to use it successfully.
