If you’ve been around the sales world long enough, you hear the term “Sales content management” thrown around a lot. In this article, we’ll discuss why it matters for your business and why you should hop on the sales content management train!
What is sales content management?
Sales content management sounds like an advanced concept, but it’s not!
Let’s get the definition of sales content management straight: It basically entails the creation, storage and organization of sales content that sales reps use during the buyer’s journey.
With all the hype around sales enablement, it can get confusing to figure out why your organisation needs to do it. We’ll talk about this at length in the article.
Why you should organise your sales content properly
Sales leaders usually think – “I know organising sales content is important. But is it more important than other tasks to do?” And we won’t blame them for it!
But, the B2B sales world is filled with horror stories of sales reps losing out on deals because they couldn’t produce vital sales info to the client at the right time! All of these could have been avoided if the sales collaterals were organised properly.
Let’s talk about the benefits of organising sales content. They are as follows:
1. Keeps buyers engaged after buying the product:
Onboarding a customer is time-intensive and takes a lot more time than sales reps would like to admit. On top of it, keeping the buyer engaged is a different battle in itself!
It’s a core marketing and sales tenet that you have to formulate your processes by assuming the buyer isn’t interested in your service. Naturally, this makes you want to try your level best to get them to sign up.
You have to account for inconveniences the buyer faces that can get them to zone out. And the biggest of them all is waiting for answers from their sales rep! Answers they presume the sales rep should know.
Done effectively, sales content management can reduce onboarding time and cancellations by a lot. Timely access to relevant content retains the buyer’s interest after getting onboarded.
2. Makes your messaging brand compliant:
Throughout, the buyer’s journey, your brand persona in the mind of the consumer should stay consistent. There’s a high chance the buyer may not even recall your brand in the first go!
So keeping your brand messaging consistent across every step of the buyer’s journey ensures brand recall increases. Failure of your sales, marketing, branding, etc. team to have the same brand language means the prospect perceives your product differently. Let’s not forget: It can make them forget your brand too.
All of this can be avoided if your sales data is organised properly with the same brand language and guidelines throughout!
3. Know which sales content actually works
Thanks to analytics of your CRM, you can find out the content that’s being read, shared, and downloaded the most, either by your sales rep or your prospect.
This means you can separate the weed from the chaff right away. By removing irrelevant, confusing content and doubling down on useful content, you can strengthen your sales enablement efforts. Analytics makes this job easier: It helps you distinguish which content is irrelevant and which isn’t!
Given that your team doesn’t have enough time, you have to be selective about what content is being published. Thanks to effectively organising sales content, you double down on writing more of what gets a good response.
4. Make buyer’s journey faster
As discussed earlier, one of the many reasons behind the ineffectiveness of sales reps is the inability to find answers to prospects’ queries.
This means sales reps have unanswered questions from prospects, spend time on longer meetings, and waste time finding relevant content, instead of doing what they are paid for… selling! This translates to prospects taking a longer time to convert.
An amazing content management system organizes your business’s content so you can get the prospect to a “yes” faster.
5. Your content actually gets used
As mentioned earlier, organising sales content tells you which content actually works and which doesn’t.
But there’s a catch: What if the content isn’t visible in the first place? This gets even harder if your content is spread across social media, desktop, CRM and forums!
Let’s be honest: You would prefer curating existing content over making new content all day. The reason is simple: You get done in far less time and manpower.
To ensure a user actually utilises the content, you have to either increase the content quality or make it easy to search.
6. Easier to apply sales enablement
Sales enablement is the process of coaching sales reps and providing them with resources for sales success. Of course, they need a repository of readymade content like brochures, videos, PDFs, etc. to perform sales enablement successfully.
Sales content management is the backbone of sales enablement. How? Effective sales enablement is impossible without the help of a dedicated CRM that allows the hosting of the aforementioned resources as well as makes it easier to search for them!
Efficient CRMs help organise content better which in turn, helps with sales enablement efforts!
Conclusion
Sales content management can seem a daunting task at first. For it to exist, you have to coordinate between sales and marketing teams and spend a lot of manpower to create and curate content.
Although a huge investment, the rewards of sales content management are immediate. You are potentially losing lots of deals because the sales cycle goes longer because of delays.
Sales content management gives you an unfair advantage compared to your competitors too. Instead of frantically looking for resources across the internet, having them easily searchable and organised leads to faster deals!
If you want to organise your sales content and distribute it securely to your team and close more deals, signup for kytes and get instant access.
