Free Template to Manage and Track Your Sales Content
Free sales content tracker template to audit, manage, track, and measure sales content saved on cloud-based file sharing services.
We recognize that every team or company may be unable to formally adopt a sales enablement or content management system for their sales content. Rather, sales and marketing content is saved on a cloud-based tool such as Google Drive, OneDrive or Sharepoint.
That’s why we’re providing a free content template to help sales enablement and marketing folks manage and track your sales content. In this blog, we highlight:
What are Cloud File Sharing Tools?
Why Use Google Drive, OneDrive, or Sharepoint for content management
Reasons for Considering a Sales Content Management Tool
How to Use the Sales Content Tracker to audit, manage and analyze your sales content
Cloud file sharing refers to a range of cloud services that allows people to store and synchronize documents, photos, videos and other files in the cloud—and share them with other people. These services also allow users to share and synchronize data among multiple devices for a single owner. These services are accessible through desktops, notebooks, smartphones and media tablets, and provide a simple mechanism for synchronizing data across multiple devices.
Why Use Google Drive, OneDrive, or Sharepoint for Content Management?
With the ubiquity of Google and Microsoft, there are several reasons to use their native file sharing tools:
Cost-effective: Frankly, most of the cloud file sharing services are cost-effective. OneDrive and Sharepoint are part of Microsoft 365, while Google Drive offers quite a bit of storage with a free account.
Familiarity: At one point or another, users have used the Microsoft 365 of Google suite of applications for school, work, or personal use. So most individuals and teams are familiar with how to create, save, move, and share files and folders.
Collaboration: Multiple people can collaborate on a document in real-time with the ability to comment, tag people, and make edits.
Full Office Suite: Each provides a full suite of tools, such as email, document, presentations, and more, as part of the day-to-day process to produce content.
Reasons for Considering a Sales Content Management Tool
While file sharing software has its benefits, using a sales content management tool is often a better option when you’re seeking to manage, track, and analyze sales content.
In-depth analytics: A sales content management software CMS) provides more insights into seller and buyer behavior to determine content effectiveness, performance and influence on the buying process. This enables sales and marketing to make smarter decisions about content strategy.
Single location for all content: Without a central location, sales content and marketing materials could be saved in multiple personal or team folders, making it difficult for content audits and metrics. A sales CMS solves this problem with admins who manage what content is uploaded.
Content permissions and control: Admins can manage content sharing permissions, such as internal or external, and versions. This ensures that your messaging and positioning is consistent across all content.
Curate, manage and audit content: File sharing services are great for storing and sharing files. However, they lack basic CMS features, such as tagging, filters, and taxonomies, to help organize, categorize, and archive content effectively.
We understand if you’re unable to bring on a sales content management software like Enable Us’. That’s why we’re providing this free content tracker template to help you manage and track your content. Built with Google Sheets, it has some preset drop downs, pivot tables, and graphs built into the sheet. As you add content to the sheet, you can also use it as a way to audit your content - what has to be updated, archived, or deleted - and determine gaps in our content strategy.
We’ve set it to read only, so you can easily download it and upload to Google Sheets or Excel.
Content Calendar tab
This is where you list all your content. If you have one content asset that is in multiple formats, such as an infographic, ebook, etc., list each asset type in its own row.
Content name - name of the content asset
Status - track the progress of the asset
Persona - identify which buyer persona you’re targeting for each asset
Writer - assign and track to which content your writers are assigned
Proposed and Actual Publish Date - optional columns that you can use to forecast timelines and against actual publishing dates
Month Published - The month you published your content. This is used to track production by month in the pivot tables and charts. Do not delete this column if you're seeking to track progress by month.
Content Type - We’ve seeded this with some values which you can update directly to suit your needs
Topic - These are the key content themes based on your messaging umbrella
Funnel Stage - how does the content align to the buyer’s journey - Awareness, Consideration, Decision
Keywords - to help with drafting content for SEO purposes
Comments - anything additional to add regarding the propose asset
TIP - To update a drop down list in Google Sheets, go to Insert/Dropdown. For Excel, go to Data>Data Validation >List to add values for a drop down.
Example of Google Sheets for Creating Dropdown lists
Content Dashboard and Pivots Tabs
The Content Dashboard pulls from data on the Content Pivots tab. If you’re unfamiliar with pivot tables or need a refresher, here are two articles for your reference:
Sample charts for measuring and tracking sales content
We developed 5 pre-set pivot tables and charts that we thought a sales content owner would track for progress and reporting purposes.
Content Type by Status: This tracks what type of content is production (e.g. case study, ebook, etc.) and by what stage (e.g in progress, published, etc). This helps you determine if you’re creating too much of one type of asset.
Content Type and Personal Breakdown: This tracks what type of content is targeted for specific personas. You can visually scan if you’re favoring one persona over another.
Content by Persona and Buying Cycle: Goal is to ensure you have a balanced distribution of content for your persona throughout the buying process. If you have too much content in the Awareness phase, you can focus on Consideration or Decision to move leads down the pipeline.
Content by Month: This tracks the type and number of content pieces you’re publishing each month
Content Theme by Persona: This tracks the overall theme of your content by persona.
TIP - The content charts use the content pivot tables as the data source. As you add rows to the content calendar, you’ll have to adjust the data range on the charts to ensure all the data is captured from the corresponding content pivots.
Feedback on the Sales Content Tracker?
While it’ll take a little bit of effort to seed the sheet with your content, it should be fairly easy to maintain.
If you find the sales content tracker useful for your needs, please share and link back to our website or social channels (Twitter and LinkedIn). We’re always open to hearing any suggestions to make the content tracker more useful.
Schedule a demo to learn how Enable Us can move you from spreadsheets to a sales content management system.
