Marketing analytics are imperative for gauging marketing performance and success. Sales content analytics allow marketing to measure its contribution to a company’s success in a way that sales and other parts of the organization can understand. But most metrics that marketing teams are tracking don’t go far enough down the funnel, and marketers don’t have enough visibility into the rest of the sales cycle.
For example, common marketing analytics include lead quality and quantity, download and click rates, and website conversions. But once leads are passed on to sales, it can be difficult to see how leads are interacting with your website and marketing content especially.
The key to enhanced visibility is to gain insights on content usage: how sales reps are interacting with marketing-created content, and how customers and prospects are interacting with the content that sales is sharing with them.
According to the Aberdeen Group, 40% of best-in-class companies have set up their process so teams can see how prospects and customers are consuming content, and 100% of best-in-class companies are more likely to provide marketing with extensive visibility into sales’ utilization of content and assets. Content usage analytics help companies improve this visibility to enhance their sales enablement strategies.
But there are still many companies that aren’t employing content usage analytics, and their sales and marketing teams are suffering. The challenges these teams experience are:
Little visibility into internal content usage by sales
Marketing has no idea what content sales reps are using and sharing with prospects, so there is no way for them to measure the effectiveness of collateral. For all they know, sales reps are sharing old, outdated and irrelevant content with prospects. And on the other hand, they won’t be able to analyze what is actually working in order to produce more of that content.
Little visibility into external content usage by prospects
Without content usage analytics, sales reps are unable to see whether the collateral they send to prospects is opened or consumed. This makes it difficult to know whether content resonated with prospects, and can lead to sales reps continuing poor or ineffective behaviors because they don’t know any other way. This guess-and-check methodology is inefficient and will lose your sales organization a lot of credibility.
These two major challenges lead to random acts of sales support, longer sales cycles, and lost deals. Sending sales content out into the world with no way of tracking it is ineffective and reckless. How can your company make sure it has the right content usage analytics in place to track the success of content and get the feedback marketing requires?
