Content marketing is a hot topic for marketers and sales teams. The challenge for content managers is how to create, distribute, and maintain engaging content in a way that’s simple for their employees to execute while remaining profitable. With the various content managing platforms available, there’s no need for this to be done manually.
On average, a salesperson will spend 80% of their day reading and 20% talking. That ratio shows that reps spend too much time looking for the right content to share. These days, it’s easy to have all the necessary tools to take an idea from design to prospecting in a few apps or websites. Sales teams can create and send proposals, presentations, and reports all within the same platform. It’s never been easier to manage your information than with a content management system.
This blog post talks about tools for designing and managing content so that you don't have to worry about where to find resources for your next pitch.
What Does Sales Content Management Mean?
Sales Content Management is the process that all content should go through to make it easily accessible and actionable for a sales team. From production, storing, organizing, and delivering content, managing your content is an intricate process that ensures sales reps get the right content to their customers and prospects. Having an effective sales content management system means your sales reps can find content quickly and efficiently. Having a single place to go to find content eliminates a lot of the time reps waste looking for the right content.
Benefits of Sales Content Management
Did you know the average rep spends 64% of their time on non-revenue generating activities? (XANT) A lot of that time is spent on individual content management. Not only is sales content management convenient for the company as a whole, but it could benefit each sales rep by increasing their individual revenue productivity. Instead of reps spending hours trying to find the right content and preparing for each sales interaction, they can consult the company’s main source and select content that will make the sale. Reps can focus more on making the message specific to their prospect. Taking content management out of sales reps’ hands means they can spend time doing what they’re good at: selling.
Here is a list of other benefits you will see with sales content management:
- Enhance team productivity. Companies that adopt content management see more collaboration between their marketing and sales teams. That means marketers will know what types of content the sales reps and prospects find the most value in and adapt their creative calendar accordingly.
- Increase team efficiency with shorter sales cycles. If reps quickly find content that is the perfect fit for their sales situation, they can speak to the persona that they’re selling to. When prospects have a personalized sales experience, the sale tends to move faster than if the pitch was more generic.
- Higher content visibility and usage. A Forrester study has shown that 60-70% of sales content goes unused. Because of its easily accessible nature, sales content management ensures all content is readily available to sales reps depending on their needs. And if the content continues to go unused, the marketing team can account for it and generate content that better fits the reps’ needs.
Improving Your Sales Content Management
Improving your sales content management can look like a lot of different things, but the first step is developing a game plan. That involves setting goals for where you want your sales content management strategy to be. Sales content management is beneficial in general, but it’s important to set goals that will benefit your company specifically.
Here are the five A’s to get you started with your content management goals:
- Ask your sales team. Ask them what content they feel is effective or could be improved/updated. This is a great jumping-off point when it comes to deciding what content to integrate into your new management system.
- Assess your sales collateral. After consulting your sales team, you should still go through your content and see what is useful, or what can be improved/updated. This is also an opportunity to ensure you have the right content for each persona you sell to. From there, you can work with your marketing team to fill in the gaps.
- Aggregate your content. Often the biggest hurdle with content management is putting it all in one place. This is an opportunity to go through all of the company’s repositories and gather all of its content in one place.
- Assimilate your content into your CRM. Salespeople spend a lot of time using CRMs (Customer Relationship Management). That’s why integrating your content with a CRM is an easy way for reps to keep all of their work in one place. Adding content allows reps to have it right within their daily workflow.
- Activate content tracking and analytics. The best way to know how well your content is performing is by tracking it with analytics. With analytics, you can see how many people looked at the content and for how long. Knowing this can help you and your sales reps make informed decisions about what content they share next.
What Are the Best Ways to Use a Sales Content Management System?
A Sales Content Management System could be the solution to a lot of the issues sales reps are facing. To give you an idea of what that can look like, here are a few use cases when it comes to managing your sales content:
- Presenting and sharing content. Having all your content in one place means you can easily pull it up during a meeting with prospects or quickly send content as a follow-up.
- Preparing for meetings. How can you come up with the right things to say or speak to? When reps have all their content in one place, it means they can find the perfect topic to discuss depending on the customer’s needs.
- Nurturing leads. If your content management system is efficient, it will notify you to reach out to prospects at the optimal time, which depends on the persona and where they are in the sales process.
- Share announcements with your team. Content Management Systems usually have a system where you can share with reps the new content that has been released to the platform so they can start using it right away. You can also post product updates, new company policies, and training materials for reps so they stay in the loop.
With the verbTEAMS platform, these benefits and use cases are at the tips of your (and your reps) fingertips. All of your team’s content is in one searchable database. Your reps can pull the right content from it and share/present it on the spot. Having all of your sales content in one place eliminates time and friction from the sales process and empowers reps with the right tools to close sales faster.
Interested in learning more about Content Management Systems and how they can benefit your sales process? Click here for a demo!
