Companies possess and continuously create a wide variety of sales content designed to build awareness, generate prospect interest, and help sales teams close new customers. And many companies also have a tremendous amount of content available for post-sales and customer support needs.
One question that sales leaders and marketing leaders alike must constantly ask and understand is: How effective is my sales content during the sales process?
The sales process is the time period after someone has expressed interest and before they become a customer — essentially the middle and end stages of the funnel. In some businesses, this can be a very short amount of time (hours) and in others it can be a very long amount of time (months). Regardless, the approach is the same, which is to have thoughtfully and correctly mapped the supporting sales content to the buyer’s journey and to make it easily accessible and updated for a sales team that may or may not be in one location.
Effectiveness can be measured in many ways from pure usage (how often) a particular piece of collateral or demonstration video is used or by actually understanding what pieces led to a prospect becoming a customer and at exactly what stage content was used during the sales process.
Getting this level of visibility can be challenging. What is even more difficult is to harvest the vast amount of experience and learnings from a distributed sales force and incorporate that back into future content development plans and sales playbook construction.
To us here at Highspot, a sales playbook must be continually fed by these experiences and learnings and tuned over time to fit the right type of prospect or product line being sold. Doing this manually is both inefficient and time-consuming, so putting a content scoring engine to work to capture these inputs is essential. Putting them back into the hands of the sales team where they already spend their time is critical. This accelerates distribution of sales knowledge back to the team, essentially delivering updated sales training and guidance as it becomes available.
Highspot has built a sales engagement platform that sorts, orders, and prioritizes the content used to sell and makes it easy for a sales professional to use via our Salesforce.com plugin and easy-to-use web application. Sales reps will search beyond the playbooks and we streamline that process as well by anticipating needs and organizing the chaos that often exists in file shares or content management systems.
The role of content doesn’t end at the top of the funnel, where content marketing efforts drive awareness and lead generation activities. It flows through the entire customer lifecycle, where enabling your sales team with the best content and engagement intelligence makes for better connections and faster close rates.
Contact us if you’d like us to tell you more or schedule a demo.
