While on the one hand, 60% of the sales content is not accessible or discoverable, on the other, the sales team does not know the appropriate time to use existing content. Your content must assist in product discovery and increase the utility value of digital resource.
Digital content is a high-value aspect of any effective online sales funnel. More companies today know the critical role your content plays at every stage of the sales process.
Valuable content can help your sales representatives and your company stand out, establish expertise, and build trust with prospects faster. Sales enablement content includes –
- Informative blog articles
- Case studies
- Print materials
- Email campaigns
- Customer testimonials
- Social media content
- Email campaigns
The best kind of content is the one that enables your salespeople to be successful in their endeavors.
Road to Creating High-Value Content
58% of sales pipelines stall because sales teams are unable to add value. There has to be an alignment between sales and marketing while growing your sales enablement content. There are tips that organizations can follow:
Audit existing content
Identify common questions and concerns with your sales team, including issues they encounter at any point in the buyer’s journey. Identifying content that aligns with specific questions will save you time and money in the content creation process.
Connect with the customer support team to get more support questions to know where disconnects are happening between the product and the audience. However, not all content will be a good fit. Some existing content needs tweaking or reworking to fit the context you’re hoping to use it for.
Identify –
- Pieces that are sales-enablement ready,
- Parts that need additional work and
- Content with no place within your content strategy.
Let the sales team help dictate the direction
Your salespeople are the ones who are in the trenches having real conversations, talking to prospects while wishing they had supplemental material handy to explain points and pass to other stakeholders in the organization.
They understand what content they need. You must sit with the sales and marketing teams to identify the content types that could help them break the walls. Doing so could provide insight into how each team operates and set the stage for content-centric collaborations in the future.
Use internal documentation as a foundation for content
Internal documentation is often overlooked, but prospects could refer to product comparisons and product spec sheets, not usually shared with prospects. However, these documents may not be polished enough though they have enough material to help prospects better understand your company, processes, and product.
However, they need alternation to make it digestible for consumption, addressing specific questions.
Track content usage and analytics
You must parallelly track content to understand the effectiveness of each piece.
You will have insights into –
- Who is viewing each piece?
- Number of times a particular content was visited and
- What areas of the content they are interacting with the most.
While you must use the insights to know the content creation process in the future, those content with high engagement rates should serve as a model for future content pieces.
Map content to the customer’s journey
Use the insights uncovered during your content audit to develop a buyer’s journey and tie relevant content to specific stages of the buyer journey. Know when to use ebooks, learn when prospects read blogs, and understand when you should introduce case studies.
You must also know what content will answer questions or concerns at a specific time in the journey. Ideally, you must create a well-rounded library of rich content to arm your sales team for usage down in the sales funnel.
Update sales content over time
Sales enablement content is not a one-time project. As B2B buying teams get bigger and their team members are spread across borders, they have concerns about the solutions their company is investing in. In such an event, your sales team may need content that speaks to the stakeholder’s perspective.
Sales enablement content is an up-front investment. Needs shift over time, and so must your marketing content. You must continually make improvements and updates to your existing content.
Draup is a sales intelligence tool that tracks millions of data points and provides specific insights about prospects in the form of digital intentions. These insights will help the content team, and the sales and marketing team create perfect pitch and sales enablement content opportunities.
