Buyer's Guide to Sales Content Management Software

In our first blog post, Everything You Need to Know About Sales Content Management Software, we showcased why sales content management software is important for enabling sales. 

Now, you’re ready to consider a sales CMS, but how do you determine the best solution for your organization? In this post, we walk through the 5 key features you should consider when evaluating sales content management solutions and whether Enable Us is the right enablement solution to manage your sales content:

1. Easily sync and import your content
2. Set sales content sharing permissions
3. Search and filter content quickly
4. Share content with a single, persistent link
5. Get actionable content insights

5 Key Features to Consider for Sales Content Management Software 

1. Easily Sync and Import Your Content

Most of our customers use a third-party content management provider, such as Google Drive, Sharepoint, Box, or DropBox, to store, organize and distribute content. Marketing is creating a range of content from videos and blogs to eBooks, white papers and more. Moreover, this content is increasingly being distributed across multiple channels - website, social media, emails, etc.  (Source: Hubspot). 

No matter where your marketing media is saved, you’ll want a provider that can easily sync or import this content into the sales CMS. Questions to consider are:

1. Content cloud provider integration and syncing - Do they integrate with your current content cloud provider? If so, is this a one-time sync or can you determine which content assets can be manually or automatically synced when files are updated on your content drive?
2. Upload content from other channels - Can you use a URL or embed code to bring in content uploaded on other channels - such as blog postings or videos?
3. Time to manage content - If the platform requires that the original file is uploaded, how much more administrative time does this add to manage your content?
4. Sales and marketing integrations - What other sales or marketing tool integrations do they have? For example, would sales want their demo recordings available in the sales CMS to share with prospects and customers ?

Enable Us has integrations with many of the popular cloud content providers, such as Google Drive, Sharepoint, Microsoft OneDrive, etc. You select the provider and assets to seamlessly upload, seeding your content library with sales content. 

If content is created on other sales and marketing tools, such as RingCentral, Zoom and Gong, those media assets can be imported into the Enable Us Content Management module. We also provide content owners the flexibility to add content from a URL or by adding the embed code. 

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2. Set Sales Content Sharing Permissions

Our customers are typically using Google Drive or Sharepoint to manage their content. While these are great for collaborating on documents internally at minimal cost to the company, there are a few downsides to this approach:

• Sharing content externally - what content has been shared to whom, when and for how long?
• Managing permissions - how many times have you set incorrect permissions to correct them?
• Controlling versions - which version is the most up-to-date? What flexibility is there for sales to edit copies of master presentations or documents without impacting the brand and messaging?
• Ensuring message and brand accuracy - how often has a sales deck been shared with customers with old messaging and branding? How often has an outdated image or banner been used?
• Calculating the true cost of free - how much time are you spending curating, tracking and finding content or responding to questions about sales content? 

The Enable Us Sales Content Management offering provides content administrators the ability to set content permissions to ensure only approved sales and marketing content is shared with prospects and customers. Admins simply set file permissions on what can be viewed, shared, edited, or downloaded by internal users and external visitors. Admins also manage what content is available in the public content library, reducing the likelihood of duplicate and outdated content. 

To ensure that sales has the flexibility to personalize documents for prospects, such as a master sales deck, we offer users the ability to copy, edit and save a Google slide, doc, or sheet all within the Enable Us platform. The edited content asset is then saved to the individual user’s content library. 

With regard to images, admins can easily manage brand-compliant banners, cover images, and room thumbnails via the Image Gallery. Admins can upload new images or remove any of the pre-loaded images. To replace an outdated image across all rooms, assets or thumbnails, simply update the image in the Image Gallery and it will automatically populate across the platform. 

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3. Search and Filter Content Quickly

“Sales reps spend an average of 440 hours each year trying to find the right content to share with their prospects and customers” - G2 Blog

For those considering Google Drive or Sharepoint as “good enough,” take into consideration how easy can content be tagged or organized to make it easier for sales to find (e.g. buyer persona, industry, content type, etc.)? Alternatively, a sales CMS centralizes all your important sales collateral, product videos, demos, and more to make it easier for your sales team to discover and share sales content:

• Keyword search - what criteria is being used for keyword search, such as title, description, full transcript, other? 
• Tagging - how do you tag content? How configurable are the tags? 
• Filtering - how dynamic is the filtering functionality to help users navigate and find the right content?
• Content sort - how can you sort content, such as by shares, views, last updated, downloads, etc?
• User interface - how intuitive is the search and filtering capabilities for users?

Our advanced search capabilities not only looks through title and description, but also full transcripts of text, audio, and video-based assets. Users can filter results based on content attributes tailored to your organization and select top-performing content with a snapshot of content shares, views, and more. 

Case Study: SaaScend Gains Visibility into Buyer Engagement with Enable Us

As SaaScend grew its client base, sales and marketing was spending up to 5 hours a week finding, managing, and sharing content. 

SaaScend was not only looking for a better way to manage their sales content, but also to gain visibility into how sellers and prospective clients interacted with sales content. SaaScend partnered with Enable Us to provide the right mix of seller and buyer enablement tools to make the process more efficient, transparent and personal. Read the case study.

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4. Share Content with a Single, Persistent Link

Currently, sellers send emails with multiple attachments to buyers. This email “train” can be frustrating for buyers as searching through an inbox for the correct document or email to review. For sales and marketing, the email enters a black hole with the only visibility being whether an email has been “opened.” Questions left unanswered include:

• Did the email recipient truly review or share the documents?
• What attachments did sales send and did it address the buyer’s persona, stage, industry, etc?
• How often do new stakeholders enter the process and have to be caught up on what’s been shared?
• How many times does the prospect ask sales to resend the original email? 

The overall buying experience is poor for both sellers and buyers. The ability to share an evergreen link to a single content asset or a digital sales room, which is a persistent, online portal for interactive sales collateral, shines a light into this black box. 

With Enable Us, all of our shared links are evergreen. Hence, you don’t have to worry about sending updated links when you update sales content or add content to existing rooms. This makes it easier for your prospects and their buying committee to stay up-to-date on conversations and next steps. 

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5. Get Actionable Content Insights

Beyond making it easier for your buyers, a single, evergreen link keeps your data and analytics intact. You’ll now know if prospects are clicking on the links and reviewing the content with in-depth analytics on visits, views, shares, and more. This provides insight into how engaging and effective sales content is during the buying process. 

Some considerations: 

• Persistent links -  What happens to the link if you update the content asset or add more content into the digital sales room? Do you have to resend the link to your prospect(s)?
• Sending a single link to multiple prospects - how does the tracking work if a single link is sent to multiple email recipients? 
• Notifications - what type of notifications are sent when a content asset is viewed or a digital sales room visited? How are these notifications delivered?
• Seller and buyer insights - what type of data and analytics are provided regarding content effectiveness, seller behavior, and buyer engagement? 

Unlike some providers, Enable Us provides in-depth content insights on both seller and buyer engagement and behavior. Marketers, sellers, and leaders can understand content effectiveness with details on which content is viewed and how much time is spent on each page, video or presentation. 

• For sales, they can better forecast and prioritize opportunities based on recent buyer activity.
• For sales leaders, our at-a-glance dashboards help sales leaders review individual performance, identify trends of what’s working, and uncover coaching/training opportunities
• For marketing/product marketers, they can make data driven decisions related to sales content based on how sellers and buyers interact with the content, as well its influence on deals. 

Hear how companies are benefiting with insights on sellers and buyers. 

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Conclusion: The Right Sales CMS Increases Productivity & Revenue

We highlighted the benefits of sales content management software in our Making the Business Case for Content Management Software ebook:  

• Increase sales productivity - On average, our customers reported saving up to 2-5 hours a week on managing, discovering, and sending content. This time can be used to focus on higher value projects and priority deals. 
• More engaging buying experience - A central content repository enables sales to discover and send the right content tailored to the buyer’s needs. According to Gartner, prospects are 2.8 times more likely to experience a high level of purchase confidence when salespeople provide constructive information during the buying process. Moreover, this resulted in purchases 3x larger and with less regret.
• Develop higher converting sales content - Anywhere form 65-90% of marketing content is untouched by sales :(, with a significant portion of a marketing’s budget spent on content. Since Enable Us provides marketers with insights on what content resonates with sellers and buyers, marketing teams can develop sales content strategies that truly engage and convert. 

By investing in a sales content management system, sales and marketing collaborate more closely. Ultimately, this closer alignment can boost sales results, with companies 67% better at closing deals and sales teams experiencing 41% increase in meeting their quotas (Source: G2).  

You're ready to organize, manage, and track your sales content management with a CMS. Download The Sales CMS Buyer Cheat Sheet for a list of questions that will ensure you get the right sales content management software for your sales enablement needs. Interested in how Enable Us can help with your sales enablement and content management needs? Schedule a demo with us today.