This blog post is an excerpt from one of Seismic’s recent guides: Is Your Marketing Content Supporting the Sales Process?
How are you going to get ahead of the competition in 2015? It starts with higher quality, more personalized sales conversations.
In today’s sales environment, buyers are expecting a one-on-one experience, and want to know how your solution or product is going to solve their specific problems. But according to Forrester, 77% of executive buyers claim salespeople don’t understand their issues and where they can help, and 78% of this same group claims salespeople do not have relevant case studies to share with them. In order to stay ahead of customers—and competitors—it’s important to provide as personal of an experience as possible throughout the decision-making process.
Questions to ask:
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Do your reps use the same presentation for each client or prospect meeting?
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Does your marketing team send the same content to your entire mailing list, regardless of industry, role, or company size?
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Once content is shared, does marketing have difficulty measuring its performance?
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Is there a lack of analytics/data showing how recipients are interacting with content?
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Do your reps report wasting time creating a new presentation for each sales conversation?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, it may be time to take a closer look at your sales collateral and presentations. Make sure you’re providing reps with a customizable template that allows them to change what they need to—and nothing else. This will save reps time and improve the quality of sales conversations. You may need to invest time and effort into creating templates that reps can use for different conversations at different stages in the sales cycle, and possibly differentiate by industry as well. But 2015 is the time to make a change; your prospective customers expect a lot from you and it’s time to deliver.
