Today’s buyers want your sales reps to understand their business and articulate how your product can fulfill their business needs. Sellers are capable of driving these intelligent conversations, but it’s up to Sales and Marketing leaders to supply them with messaging and content to stay one-step ahead of buyers.
This seems like a logical process, but bringing it to life is easier said than done.
To provide sellers with solid material that will add value and demonstrate expertise, it’s not enough to hand over website or lead gen assets and call it a day.
Sellers need content that is relevant and tailored to fit into their conversations with prospects and customers. And to provide this customized and personalized content, leaders first need to know what resources sellers are using, what’s working, and what else is still needed.
Here enters content tracking metrics.
Instead of guessing what reps are using, asking a random sample for feedback, or relying on Marketing’s intuition, top-performing enterprises are getting smarter about content.
Here are 4 sales content metrics Marketing should be tracking:
Basic Content Management
First and foremost, Marketing needs insight into asset age and freshness. What content is recent? What pieces are in need of a makeover or should be tossed out all together? To maintain visibility over your content you must be able to track what you have, know where it’s located, and have a view into its life-cycle.
Content Engagement
It’s important to consider how internal users are interacting with your content. Who is viewing and downloading assets? How and where are they doing it – in CRM, at their desks, on their device? Which pieces are the most popular and which others are stale and unused? With these metrics you can begin to correlate content to business performance. This can also be extended beyond the borders of your organization if you use channel partners. Are you providing content that makes doing business with you easy or are your partners disengaged? If you track content engagement you’ll see what pieces of content are used over others by direct and indirect sellers alike.
Content Consumption
If it’s helpful to know what internal users are consuming, imagine what can be learned with insight into what buyers, your targeted audience, are consuming. What are your prospects or customers viewing? How much? Who are they sending it to? Having this view into the external use of your content can reveal what’s resonating with your audience and what’s missing the mark – and you can adjust accordingly.
Return on Content
Having a view that allows you to tie content and consumption back sales is arguably the most valuable metric of all. What kind of impact is your content having? Which pieces are commonly used to close deals and which are associated with lost ones. By tracking the content that reps use to progress opportunities you can begin to assess which assets are most closely correlated with sales results. Now you’ll see what content is most productive and should be prioritized and what content is least productive and could be retired.
By tracking these 4 content metrics, you can optimize future spend and create content that has a greater impact on sales results.
