Content is King

(but you knew that)

Our recommendation at the start of 2021 is that you make this the beginning of the era of NEW content within your organisation.You’ve doubtless honed your methodology and process over time, you have numerous tools in place to support your teams, so now is the time to make sure that final, vital piece of the puzzle is in place.

An excess of noise and overwhelming volume meant that, even without Covid, the way our buyers engage with content had already changed, and this has only increased in the last twelve months.

Buyers now do more of their own research, and with less face-to-face meetings they have more time to devote to engaging with online content. Conversely they typically tend to spend less time in shorter Zoom/Teams meetings for online presentations and demos.Have you really pivoted your content to serve this new market? Are you still using standard linear presentations from several years ago, and boring Word documents for your proposals, or have you embraced the new ways of selling?
Furthermore, if you have already invested in a major sales enablement platform, does the content it contains allow for the complex and decidedly non-linear buying cycles that sales now have to contend with?Most sales methodologies boil the sales process down to a number of sequential steps for sales to follow (typically from 4 to 8 different phases of a sale), which means that supporting content gets aligned to this.But as the graphic overleaf from Gartner shows, in the real world our buyers no longer fit into these convenient steps, so the content we give to sales teams now needs to have the flexibility to be tailored perfectly to each opportunity to cope with this complexity.

This means inserting Company Name B in place of Company A for a presentation or document that always gets rolled out at a certain pre-defined stage on a sales engagement simply won’t cut it anymore!

When it comes to sales enablement we would urge you to take a close look at the content that your teams are using – this includes collateral at every stage of the pipeline from lead generation to final proposal.Review your presentations, proposals and supporting materials and ask yourself the question of whether they really are fit for purpose for the way that sales works in 2021. Have you thought long and hard about their relevancy in this new era or have they been side-lined in the rush for other new initiatives? If, in the later stages of an engagement, your tool is generating the same beautiful looking content for every one of your opportunities and doesn’t feature customer-specific insight from your salesperson, then we would counsel you to think again on how effective that will really be for your buyer.