Top 5 Key Challenges and Benefits of Sales Content Management
Managing sales content as part of a sales enablement program is tough. Here are the top 5 key challenges and benefits for sales content management.
Your marketing and sales enablement teams have spent innumerable hours creating sales content - both internally and externally facing. As we’re sure you know (and probably have experienced), your sales team is unable to find content, requests additional content be created, or uses outdated content. You’re not alone.
According to Forrester, B2B sellers have at least 1,400 content assets available to them. Yet, 9 out of 10 sellers don’t use available sales material, because it’s “irrelevant, outdated and difficult to customize.”
9 in 10 sellers don't use sales collateral (Source: G2 Crowd)
For enterprise organizations, this disconnect between content creation and usage can cost over $2.3 million annually in opportunity costs related to underused or unused marketing content (Source: G2 Crowd). Small to mid-sized businesses can’t afford to produce sales collateral that underperforms.
According to Gartner, digital sales content management is:
“Digital sales content management (DCMS) applications encompass repositories, authoring tools, collaborative environments, and interfaces for publishing, versioning and presenting content, to help salespeople (both direct and indirect) efficiently and effectively develop and close business. These applications improve the delivery of internal- and external-facing content to salespeople, or improve engagement with prospects and clients, and increase win rates, deal velocity and deal sizes. They are most commonly used to support long-cycle B2B and B2C sales processes, but they also apply to transactional sales processes, such as detailing merchandisers on the retail selling floor.”
What are the Top 5 Challenges with Sales Content Management in Sales Enablement Today?
PMA, Sales Enablement Landscape Vol 3, 2022
Sales productivity is key. However, when sales spends upwards of 30 hours a month searching for or creating content, your sales efficiency dips, impacting your revenue growth. This is due to these top 5 challenges related to sales content management:
Disorganized content: Sales enablement content is saved throughout the organization with a mix of free or paid tools. Respondents to a PMA sales enablement survey cited a variety of ways to manage sales content: a folder on the server, wiki, 3rd party app, CRM, and Google doc.
Outdated, Inaccurate, and Irrelevant Content: Without a single, organized place to store content, sales content is manually tracked via a spreadsheet or a word doc. This is fine when you have one to two dozen content assets; however, this soon becomes unwieldy with dozens if not hundreds of sales assets. As your content library grows, the tracking document becomes out of sync.
Compliance Issues: As domestic and international laws change, ensuring that sales collateral complies with the relevant laws, regulations and industry standards is time consuming.
Content ROI is Unknown: Tracking seller and buyer interactions - such as what content was shared and viewed the most, for how long, how often, and by whom - is complex. If this data is captured, it’s most likely stored in separate systems, requiring that data sets are combined and analyzed. While this provides a sense of sales collateral effectiveness and influence on the sales cycle, it's more directional than definitive.
Lack of Actionable Insights: As such, you’re unable to identify trends related to which sales asset influences the sales cycle most or potential content gaps. Instead of making smart, confident decisions on content, it further exacerbates the underlying reason why sales content remains underused or unused by salespeople. It’s deemed “irrelevant, outdated, and difficult to customize.
What are the Top 5 Benefits of Sales Content Management for Sales Enablement?
Nearly two-thirds of B2B buyers expect a personalized buying experience. This requires providing personalized content to prospects at the right time during the buyer’s journey. According to McKinsey & Company, incremental improvements in personalization provides organizations with a competitive edge and potentially faster revenue growth.
Sales content management can support these efforts and offer 5 additional benefits:
Centralize Your Sales Content: Easily organize all your sales collateral in a central, online location. This automatically provides a record of when your sales content was created, updated, shared with buyers, viewed, downloaded, and more.
Sell More Effectively: Sales can find relevant, accurate, and up-to-date content to share with prospects based on their use case, industry, stage, persona, and other content attributes. Sales recaptures and refocuses their time on supporting prospects and their needs throughout the buying process.
Increase Control: By centralizing and managing sales content, it becomes easier to ensure compliance, giving businesses greater control and visibility over their sales materials.
Boost Purchasing Confidence with Prospects: When sales provides constructive, relevant information during the purchasing process, prospects are more likely to experience 2.8 times higher level of purchase confidence. This translates into a 3X larger purchase and with less buyer’s remorse.
Produce Higher Converting Sales Content: With the right system in place, you gain in-depth insights on seller and buyer behaviors, what sales content resonates with buyers, and what content impacts the buying process. In turn, sales and marketing can craft smarter, data-driven content strategies to produce sales content that converts.
Conclusion
Marketing and sales enablement spends time creating sales content that is underutilized by sales, while lacking insights into how it‘s used and influences the buying process. Moreover, salespeople waste time looking for relevant, up-to-date content. Oftentimes, they resort to using outdated sales collateral or create content from scratch.
The cost of not managing sales content can no longer be overlooked.
With an effective sales content management in place, you can:
Increase sales efficiency;
Boost your sellers’ credibility;
Increase deal sizes by providing personalized, on-brand content to prospects; and
Produce fewer, more quality content that converts and is used by sales.
