Informing and controlling content

Data-driven insights and staying on-brand

Measuring successThe best sales enablement tools come complete with clever analytics to give you deep insights into the performance of your content. By showing you which content your audience engages with, and what they ignore, they can help to drive the relevancy of your sales conversations and unlock new opportunities.They can also provide powerful clues as to which salespeople are really taking advantage of the opportunities that they are presented with, which can help drive coaching and training within the business.But if your content is out of step with their capabilities you will be missing these gains, and not getting the return on the investment you’ve made in the platform and your training programmes.
The other consideration here is of course who owns the content creation process.

^{"A 2017 CSO Insights study revealed that, despite most sales leaders considering it to be ‘marketing’s job’, in fact just 39% of the content salespeople need is created by marketing."}

This is a fascinating area as the plethora of tools and processes result in various models that each bring their own pros and cons – and conflicts.In some firms we certainly see the marketing team as the engine room, serving up a raft of great-looking, on-brand and well written content which, frustratingly for them, sales then ignore in favour of something that ‘has always worked perfectly for me’!In others we see sales owning far more of the content creation process, which can be something of a wild-west environment where things are re-built time and again, elements from years ago get re-purposed and brand, tone and currency are afterthoughts.The wider adoption of tools in the market is bringing some of the wilder elements of this under control. However, this in itself can introduce new pressures if sales don’t feel their real-world requirements are being met.

The actual sales process at the coal-face can differ substantially from the theoretical process that was used to inform the initial implementation of the solution, which means that the supporting content that is mapped to it may not serve its intended purpose.

It’s therefore critical that sales are given a voice and an involvement in the creation of this content, in order to make sure it is both effective and widely adopted. Otherwise the risk is that people will simply circumvent the system and go back to creating their own materials, completely undermining the purpose and investment in the platform.