Sales Content Management Guide

Sales Content Management: Introduction

Mike is a traveling salesman at Ingenius Precisions Inc., manufacturers of high-tech enterprise products such as routers and networking devices based in New York. He meets prospects and customers thrice in a week, often at their offices, cafes or at events/conferences.

Mike keenly listens to his prospects to understand their challenges and leverages sales collaterals to help customers visualize the benefits of using high-end products.

One day, during a Hi-Tech conference he is attending, Mike bumps into Brad,  an executive decision-maker whom he was chasing for a while. Brad was a highly qualified lead but gone cold.

Despite repeated attempts, Mike had not been able to get hold of him. This time, he wants to introduce Brad to the newest product, Ingenius Precisions had rolled out recently. Mike remembers seeing an updated sales kit with stunning visuals sent by the marketing team. But, to his horror, he can’t seem to find it on his machine or inbox.

All he could manage was a dated brochure that was lurking in his mail from some time ago. Brad agrees to take a look at it. Mike knows he has let an excellent opportunity slip by. The brochure’s visual elements complimented along with a video, would have been critical in engaging with Brad effectively.

It is a so-near-yet-so-far situation for Mike. He speaks to his manager about how to avoid future mishaps. They realize an effective sales content management strategy might hold an answer to their woes.

This scenario plays way too often in small and large enterprises. Successful companies realize it sooner and put an effective sales content strategy in place. 

In this blog, we will delve deeper into Sales Content Management, including:

• What is Sales Content Management?
• The Importance of Sales Content Management
• Adopting an Effective Sales Content Management Strategy
• Measure the ROI of Sales Content
• The Need for a Sales Content Management System
• Sales Content Management Best Practices

What Does Sales Content Mean?

Before we proceed further, let us understand what sales content is. Sales content is used to convince clients with the value proposition of the company’s solutions. These could be videos, brochures, customer credentials, case studies, etc. For a more detailed understanding, read our blog titled “The Basics of Sales Collateral You Need to Know.”

Sales content can be shared with prospects/customers to guide them towards our product in the buyer’s journey. They are embedded with the company’s branding elements to increase customer mindshare. The target audience for sales content is external customers.

Now, let us understand what sales content management is.

What is Sales Content Management?

Sales content management is the art of producing, storing, organizing, and distributing content that sales teams use to sell their products/solutions. It shrinks the conversion time from an initial pitch to a paying customer.

A practical sales content management approach lays down the principles to:

• Host and curate content
• Distribute sales collateral to buyers
• Use sales content during events and campaigns
• Use a content management system for all content-related activities
• Discover sales content
• Manage user access
• Audit sales materials
• Measure the ROI of sales collateral

12 Reasons Why Sales Content Management is Important

Sales content management helps sales reps to organize their content, giving them visibility into what needs to be shared with customers and stay on top of their priorities. More importantly, it helps them use appropriate sales materials to reach new audiences every day.

Here is how it empowers sales teams:

1. Improves Sales Rep Effectiveness

With a good sales content management strategy, sales teams can streamline and arrange sales collateral based on their needs such as regions, themes, campaigns, target audience segments, and more. All updated content will be in one place instead of multiple sources that they can immediately put to work. Sales reps know what they could achieve with the sales content they have.

2. Enables Sales Enablement

We’d explained in an earlier blog that sales enablement helps sales teams win deals. Sales enablement includes critical sales operations like recruiting, coaching, training, onboarding sales reps, back-end operations, ensuring adherence to processes, etc. 

An effective sales content management strategy helps sales teams to host vital content like videos, images, brochures, case studies, etc. and retrieve them when needed. The core of this strategy is a sales content management system that helps teams access any content from anywhere at any time.

Scroll down to read about why businesses need sales content management systems.

3. Overcome Limitations of Information Systems

Today, businesses have to appeal to a global audience and need software/systems that can match the demands of agile marketing teams.

Enterprise Information Systems offer limited functionalities and often fall short of organization-wide expectations. It becomes more exacerbated if you are a small & medium business with limited resources at your disposal. You will not be able to track every piece of content generated by all departments in your company through an MIS system.

4. Accelerated Sales Cycles

A good content management system helps to reduce sales cycles and move the pipeline faster by:

• Enabling sales teams to answer customer queries effectively
• Helping customers compare products/solutions and make decisions
• Sharing sales content as soon as it is available for distribution
• Locating appropriate sales content timely
• Linking deals with contextual sales collateral

5. Become Brand Compliant

Nothing irks a brand marketer more than seeing sales reps share collateral with customers with dated branded materials. That prevents customers from perceiving the product differently. Every brand marketer swears by it.

Sales collateral is audited by teams such as marketing, communications, and branding before being uploaded on sales content management platforms. This way, prospects get sales materials that are brand-compliant and approved.

6. Bring Everybody On the Same Page

An efficient sales content management strategy keeps all stakeholders informed. People can quickly familiarize themselves with its approach, focus, goals, benefits to suggest newer content forms that directly help solve customer challenges. This collaborative approach helps everybody involved in the sales cycle.

7. Decreased Onboarding Time

A new customer might be overwhelmed by a product's features. They need to be hand-held for a while before getting used to it. The right sales content management approach helps in actively reaching out to new customers before they lose interest by using relevant sales content to onboard them quickly.

8. Sales and Marketing Alignment

Sales and marketing teams are forever at loggerheads over content for sharing with customers. Using a practical sales content management approach, they can agree to create sales materials suitable to customer needs. As customer expectations change every day, aligning sales and marketing teams early is crucial.

9. Manage, Track and Control Media Across the Whole Buyer Journey

Sales reps reach out to numerous customers every day by way of conversations, emails, in-person meetings, etc. And, it can be challenging to keep track of sales content and its utility to every individual customer. Managing sales content effectively helps in tracking the buyer’s engagement with it.

10. Helps Nurture Leads

Managing sales materials effectively helps nurture leads. Sharing contextual sales content at every stage of the buyer's journey keeps them interested. As every lead/prospect gets content that suits his needs, chances of leads going unattended go down.

11. Make Content Easily Available to Sales Reps

Sales reps need content at short notice for conversations, meetings, and campaigns. Far too often, sales material gets buried in inboxes, shared folders, or personal computers, making it unretrievable. Even when a website hosts sales content, sales reps aren't aware of its location, leading them to exasperation.

An effective content management strategy can ensure that sales content is published and distributed appropriately. 

12. Removing User Bias

Sales reps often fall into the trap of assuming that their clients/prospects love their content. Sales reps tend to have this bias based on hearsay or wrong assumptions. Sales content management can help uncover deep insights about user engagement with content than relying on instincts.

Struggling to organize your content? Here're eight simple tips to get it right.

Adopting an Effective Sales Content Management Strategy

No matter how good your sales collateral is, it will not help you close a deal unless it is useful to your customers. Sales collateral must provide adequate value to your customers by engaging them to achieve its objective, i.e., more sales.

You need a proper strategy to make your reps derive benefit out of the sales collateral that you've put together. Here is what a sales collateral management strategy must encompass:

1. Identify the Gaps

Know the gaps that exist between the sales content that exists currently and what your sales reps need. You can accomplish this by: 

• Periodical sales content audit.

• Sales rep interviews.
• Checklists.
• Using a sales content management system

By doing this exercise, marketing teams can plan their publishing calendar, assemble necessary resources before making it available to reps.

2. Identify the Objectives of Sales Content Management

Before you implement a sales content management approach, know what are you measuring. Here are a few objective questions that you need to ask yourself before diving into it:

• Why are we creating sales content?

• Why do we need a sales content management strategy?

• How will our customers benefit from our sales content?

• How will our reps discover this content?

• How will our reps distribute content?

• How will our sales reps know which content is successful?

Answering these questions will help you stay on course towards implementing a successful sales content management strategy.

3. Create a Sales Content Editorial Calendar

How often will your sales materials be refreshed? Sales content cannot be generated randomly without guidelines or timelines. Sales collaterals are appropriate when there is a need for it. For example, a new feature or a new product that directly addresses customer pain points warrants new sales collaterals.

Having a publishing calendar aligned with significant events helps sales reps distribute content instantly and not wait for it.

4. Type of Sales Content

One size does not fit all. Don’t compress all your messages in one single collateral type because different audience segments have different ways of consuming them. For example, millennials might prefer videos, while older adults might prefer printed material. Decide which type of collateral suits your audience and earmark resources for it.

5. Audit Sales Content

Sales content must be audited periodically to ensure its continuous availability, application, and contextuality. From our conversations with marketing teams, we found that based on the volume of sales collateral that exists, a half-yearly or annual audit is their preference. It is vital to publish audit results so that all stakeholders are aware of their responsibilities, and there is concrete action.

6. Sales Content ROI

Return on investment is the revenue earned for every dollar invested.

Sales content ROI is about measuring the results of your sales content activities against your expenditure (including creation, hosting, and distribution). Sales content ROI tells you which content pieces are most effective in generating sales for your company and focus on creating more of them for best returns.

“Sales content ROI is about measuring the results of your sales content activities against your expenditure (including creation, hosting, and distribution).”

Measuring sales content ROI is a key element of sales content management.

7. Monitoring Sales Content Results

How do you know if your target audience is engaging with your sales collateral? Do they prefer videos over written sales materials? Do they re-share it with a decision-maker?

Answers to such questions will tell you how good your sales collateral is. A sales content management platform will give you critical insights about your content. These insights help marketing teams chart their future course for sales content creation.

8. Understanding User Engagement

User engagement helps you to know which sales collaterals your target audience prefers. Is the message in your sales content compelling, or is it scattershot with results that are hard to track? Are your customers coming back to you with more questions? Here are a few user engagement metrics that sales collateral effectiveness:

• Number of views
• Number of downloads
• Number of re-shares
• Time spent on each piece of content

9. Which Sales Content is Used and Unused?

Along with knowing how popular your sales content is, it is also vital to know which of them is unused. A thorough evaluation of the least-used content pieces will tell you why they aren't popular amongst sales folks. These sales collaterals could then be optimized to suit audience needs through a content refresh (such as conciseness/clarity of message, visual depiction) to make them relevant.

The Need for a Sales Content Management System

To make the most out of your branded sales content and materials, it’s worth considering software for your company. It is an online location for all your authorized sales materials that can be accessed anytime.

A sales content management system is a secure, web-based platform that houses all sales resources necessary to support the company’s sales, marketing, and branding efforts.

The sales content management system allows marketing and communication teams to produce localized pieces of collaterals while still maintaining their brand identity.

Sales teams tend to use sales collateral management system once they realize its intrinsic value. Here is how sales reps can use it under different circumstances:

1. Gain Product Knowledge

Before selling to customers, sales reps need to know their products well. One way of doing it is by looking through all sales materials that are produced by marketing teams to learn about the latest feature updates and new product releases.

Even before sales collaterals make their way to customers, sales reps themselves need to become familiar with it to answer queries during demos.

2. Manage Digital Assets With Ease

Often, there are far too many collaterals for a single use case or pain point, which undermines their utility. For example, a quick 1-minute video can be compelling, especially when your leads/customers have time constraints instead of a 3-page brochure. A detailed brochure is useful when they are deciding between a few products.

Nevertheless, all such sales collaterals have their different uses and must be easily retrievable. Sales content management software can ensure this and enable sales reps to solve customer challenges.

3. During Field Trips

Today, sales reps are facing an explosion of digital assets at their disposal. Sales reps can use a content management system during field trips when they are out meeting clients. Many a time, they may experience poor internet connectivity. Besides, lugging around a laptop is not chic anymore.

Sales reps can access content management systems on mobiles or iPads to whip up a quick demo or presentation.

4. During Live Demos

Imagine flicking between different media files during a webinar that you are hosting. Viewers could get disengaged with a lot of activity happening on their screens.

Sales collateral management platforms are a medium of discussion during demos to customers. Digital content such as media files and documents can be seamlessly retrieved from these systems and demoed to customers. It is easier to switch between two content pieces when all of it is on a single content management platform.

5. Accessing the Right Content at the Right Time

Not all buyers are on the same stage of the buyer’s journey. Some might just be testing the waters, while a few others might have made up their minds already. As a result, all of them need different content. Salespeople must be able to project the most suitable material for each class of buyers. Looking for it in inboxes, local PCs, and Sharepoint is a futile exercise.

A sales content management platform can store content with hashtags, categorizations, and descriptions so that they are quickly accessible.

6. Discovering Content

There is no way salespeople will know which collateral is available. Even with a well-organized calendar, it is difficult to keep track of which content is ready. That is why content must be available to them instead of manually adding every piece.

When they do not find content, they tend to create their own. That does not augur well for the company because salespeople need to focus on selling.

Choosing the Best Sales Content Management Tool

An efficient sales content management tool should have the below features to help sales reps do their job effectively:

1. Host Sales Content

Sales collateral management systems must host content to make it accessible by sales reps. Content could be heterogeneous such as videos, documents, spreadsheets, datasheets, battle cards, PowerPoints, URLs, and images. It is because the assimilation of different types of sales material makes a deal happen.

2. Distribute Content

Sales content management systems should let reps distribute content to customers. While most sales reps use emails to interact with customers, they are not suited to send files with large file sizes. Sending content through sales content management systems (that can handle any file size without breaking down) helps sales reps address customer pain points promptly.

3. Integrate with Email Providers

Expecting a sales rep to use different tools - one for content interaction and one for email (besides CRMs, email automation tools, etc.) is a little unfair. Integrating with email providers such as Outlook and Gmail synchronizes all your conversations than having them in multiple systems. It ensures all your interactions are in one place, and you know the stage in which your buyers are in their journey.

4. Look for Sales Content

Imagine having to scramble to look for your content when a buyer is showing keen interest to buy your product during a demo. Sales reps are often in a rush to meet their targets and need their tools handy to perform well. Sales content management platforms should let reps search for content intuitively to get what they're looking for instantly. 

5. Tagging and Categorizing Content

Content should be tagged and categorized for easy discovery in content management systems. This feature ensures easy discoverability and content tracking. It also allows others to find it using keywords instead of searching for it.

6. Describing Sales Content

Remember how helpful YouTube videos are? It helps viewers know more about their creators, purpose of creation, and have a call to action. Similarly, sales collateral management systems should enable descriptions for every piece of content.

7. Sales Content Personalization

Who does not like personalized stuff? It is an age-old strategy to make buyers feel special. Sales content management software should allow sales reps to match their content with buyer personas and personalized content for easier recall and action.

While sales collaterals are rarely created to suit individual needs, sales content management platforms help personalize generic content for every buyer.

For example, buyers could engage with sales collaterals in exclusively personalized microsites created by a sales content management platform. It helps drive more user engagement with content and generate feedback as well.

8. Sales Rep Usage Patterns

Content creators should know which sales reps are using what form of content. Do they prefer brochures over case studies or testimonials? In essence, what is their go-to content type for selling?

Insights from their usage patterns enable optimizing the content strategy for specific content types. For example, if long-form case studies are not engaging users enough, content in smaller capsules such as infographics or short videos could be useful.

9. Sales Collateral Themes

Scanning through content analytics can help content marketing teams use themes that will resonate with their target audience. Based on this data, they could decide content marketing themes for the business.

A company specializing in ERP software for large enterprises might discover that their buyers are engaging with content that focuses on improved employee productivity. It is a clear indicator of the broad themes for their sales collateral strategy.

10. User Access

Not every sales rep should have access to all sales collaterals as a lot of data (such as pricing, deal value, etc.) can be confidential. Sales collateral management systems should allow administrators to grant access to those who need it.

11. Move Content Around

Reps should be able to move sales content around using a collateral management system. It helps content reuse in different contexts and sales conversations.

12. Seamless Integrations

Besides email, sales reps use software such as CRM, storage systems like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and chat platforms to engage with buyers. A sales content management platform should integrate across these systems, making it seamless for sales reps.

13. Accessible Anywhere

Salespeople are often traveling or attending events/conferences or at a customer’s office. The sales content management platform should be available for use over iPads and mobiles, giving sales reps extra flexibility to access the content.

14. ROI of Sales content

Despite all the features, reps must be able to know sales content ROI. Without it, they do not know which content is working well with their target audience.

Sales Content Management Best Practices

As with any content management strategy, there are best practices that sales reps must follow to make themselves productive.

1. Sales Content Audit

Auditing sales collateral from time to time helps you to take stock of all sales collateral that sales reps will use to sell their product/service. It tells you which pieces your audiences are connecting with, which pieces have outlived their shelf life and which ones need a refresh.

2. Sales Rep Training

Sales reps must be trained on the content management platform to be able to make them work. Use internal communication mechanisms (such as videos, internal newsletters) to tell sales reps about new features that are available, product updates, new releases, etc. Schedule training sessions for sales reps periodically to help them learn new ways to use it.

3. Content Consolidation

No matter what content platform you use, if you do not consolidate your sales collateral, it will become unusable. So, you'll need to consolidate sales content under different types, and modes such as:

a) Forms - Videos, documents, podcasts, PDFs, images, PowerPoint, infographics.

b) Audience segment - Different segments of the target audience such as millennials, baby boomers, elderly folks.

b) Themes - Themes such as innovation, digital transformation.

c) Buyer personas - Different buyer personas that buyers have.

d) Buyer’s Journey - Various stages of the journey that buyers are in.

e) Business Units - Various business units in your company. Each business unit may have a dedicated landing page, which would host its own sales content.

f) Campaigns - Different campaigns that you are running, such as spring sale, summer offers, etc.

g) Regions - Regions/geographies that produce content such as North America, the UK, Germany, etc.

h) Industries - Based on the industries that your business sells into - manufacturing, banking, healthcare, etc.

i) Brands - Number of brands that your company has.

4. Ensure timely updates

In an era where customers are always 'switched on,' sales reps need ammunition to sell products. A sales content management tool should let sales reps know of the new content as and when it is available.

5. Maintain a Regular Publishing Schedule

Ensure you publish sales content periodically to build trust amongst sales teams. Assure sales reps that they would receive a steady stream of content from the content marketing team.

Sales Content Management: What You Still Don't Know

When it comes down to it, sales content management isn’t just a one-off process that you conduct once in a blue moon. It is a mindset approach that you need to bring amongst producers (content marketing teams) and consumers (sales reps and customers).

By assessing the insights for each content piece's engagement, make informed decisions to help your sales teams sell better, reach more customers, and improve content ROI.

Moreover, there is no one-size-fits-all solution here. Sales collateral management can take many routes, approaches, and scopes. It depends on your organization’s needs and goals.