Skip to content

THE SEISMIC SPRING 2022 RELEASE IS HERE. Learn More

CHOOSE YOUR LANGUAGE

  • English
    • Enablement Cloud

      Meet the unified solution that’s igniting revenue growth for customer-facing teams.

      Learn More
    • PRODUCTS

      • Sales Content Management
      • Learning & Coaching
      • Buyer Engagement
      • Content Automation
      • Strategy & Planning
      • Enablement Intelligence
    • PLATFORM

      • Platform Overview
      • Integrations
    • What is Sales Enablement?

      New to sales enablement? No problem. Learn what it is and why it matters here.

      Learn More
    • USE CASES

      • Sales Enablement Teams
      • Sales Teams
      • Marketing Teams
    • INDUSTRIES

      • All Industries
      • Asset Management
      • Banking
      • Healthcare & Life Sciences
      • Technology
    • Read Their Stories

      Read how global customers from all different industries thrive with Seismic.

      Read Their Stories
    • CUSTOMER STORIES

      • Genesys
      • Deluxe
    • FOR OUR CUSTOMERS

      • Seismic University
      • Seismic Community
    • About Us

      Discover who we are, what we value, and how we work at Seismic.

      Learn More
    • ABOUT SEISMIC

      • Careers
      • Leadership
      • Diversity & Inclusion
      • Partners
      • Aftershock Store
      • Contact Us
    • NEWS

      • Newsroom
      • Analyst & 3rd Party Reports
      • Shift 2022
    • Sales Acceleration

      Explore best practices for onboarding, ramping, and upskilling your sellers.

      Learn More
    • WHAT'S NEW

      • Blog
      • Events & Webinars
    • COLLECTION HUBS

      • Resources Center
      • Enablement Explainers
      • AI-Guided Selling
      • Social Selling
      • Financial Services
      • Buyer Engagement
  • Get a Demo
Return to the Blog
Enablement

Four Sales Content ROI Stats and the Elephant in the Room

There’s an uncomfortable truth that we need to talk about as marketers.

Seismic
Seismic
March 13, 2018

There’s an uncomfortable truth that we need to talk about as marketers.

But before we “go there,” we need to talk a bit about all of the time, effort, and spend that goes into a critical business function: the collateral that sales uses in order to sell.

We recently collaborated with Demand Metric on research to understand the state of sales content ROI. The resulting report, Sales Content ROI Benchmark Study Report sheds some pretty interesting light onto an area that a lot of marketers spend much of their time and effort: creating materials for sales. Here are the insights and stats I found most interesting from the report.

Four Sales Content ROI Insights & Stats from the Benchmark Study

Sales really needs content. Sales uses 6.7 pieces of collateral in an average sales cycle. Between presentations, videos, solution sheets, competitor comparisons, analyst reports, and white papers (to name a few), there are a lot of weapons in the content arsenal for sales reps to use. And Sales acknowledges the importance of the content in their selling cycles. The report shows that 83% of salespeople have a positive view of the importance of sales content.

Marketing is responsible for creating most sales content. In many organizations, there are several different functional areas that could be producing content. But Marketing (including content marketing and product marketing) is responsible for 84% of content creation, according to the report.

Marketing has no good way of getting content to Sales. Even though Marketing is doing the clear majority of the heavy lifting on content creation, it’s glaring that about half of the marketers surveyed had no good way of getting this content to sales. Furthermore, a third of respondents resort to one-off emails for content distribution. What a mess! I’ve spoken to marketers who are living like this and they say it feels like working at a 24/7 fast food drive-through window. It’s a hamster wheel existence.

Marketing doesn’t know if content is being used or if that content is even good. The report shows that less than 25% of respondents can determine sales content ROI with any precision. While this isn’t surprising (I mean, if you’re distributing content via one-off emails, how the heck are you going to have any idea of content is being used and whether it’s performing?), it’s kind of alarming. Marketing is acting as an order-fulfillment house, doing its best to deliver a perfectly hot meal after you pull up to the next drive through window.

The Elephant in the Room

I talk to marketers all the time who feel under-appreciated and misunderstood by their sales counterparts in large organizations. While I can sympathize with their plight—in many ways, Marketing exists to support the revenue engine in the best way that it can—I also think there’s something bigger going on.

I don’t think Marketing wants to be as accountable as Sales.

Now before everyone blasts me for saying this, please hear me out. For starters, sellers don’t have a choice in the matter—hit your number or hit the road. But for marketers, the stats above don’t lie. The majority of us are fulfilling a critical business function yet have no way of proving it or improving it.

Improving—that’s the key here. Sales has all of these fancy coaching tools and methodologies to help them to get better at their craft. Yet Marketing doesn’t. Why is that? Is it because there is too much art to content creation? Is it because those methodologies and best practices in design and storytelling haven’t been created yet?

I think it’s partly driven by fear of the truth. That some of the sales collateral Marketing spends a billion hours creating—heck, maybe even the majority of that collateral—kind of stinks.

Marketers who want to improve need to know how they are doing in the first place. It’s the only way to get better. You have to ditch the drive-through window mentality and want the spotlight of accountability on you. You have to want to show your value—not just fulfill orders.

Until marketers rally around that mentality, they will still be viewed as a cost center rather than part of the revenue engine of the company.

  • asset management
  • banking
  • buyer engagement
  • content analytics
  • content management
  • content marketing
  • enablement
  • financial services
  • healthcare
  • marketing
  • wealth management

Related articles

Illustration of a woman pointing to displayed analytics.

5 reasons to use sales content management software

Did you know sales reps spend 440 hours searching for content each year?
Read More: 5 reasons to use sales content management software
Illustration of a woman making notes on a laptop and looking at analytic results.

How to uncover the truth about your sales content

Understand how and when your content is used.
Read More: How to uncover the truth about your sales content
Illustration of a seated woman pointing to large chart display.ing to

How companies can drive revenue growth through smart enablement

4 tips to help navigate digital and hybrid sales cycles
Read More: How companies can drive revenue growth through smart enablement

If you made it this far, we must be striking a chord.

Get a Demo
Seismic
  • Product
  • Seismic Enablement Cloud™
  • Sales Content Management
  • Learning & Coaching
  • Buyer Engagement
  • Content Automation
  • Strategy & Planning
  • Enablement Intelligence
  • Solutions
  • Sales Enablement Teams
  • Sales Teams
  • Marketing Teams
  • Resources
  • Blog
  • Resources Center
  • Trending Topics
  • What is Sales Enablement?
  • What is AI-Guided Selling?
  • What is Social Selling?
  • Integrations
  • All Integrations
  • Google
  • Microsoft
  • Salesforce
  • COMPANY
  • Contact Us
  • Careers
ISO 27001 Certified by Schellman
  • © 2022 Seismic
  • Terms of Use
  • Privacy Policy
  • Follow us on Linkedin
  • Follow us on Instagram
  • Follow us on Twitter
  • Follow us on YouTube
  • Follow us on Facebook