It shouldn’t be a surprise as it happens every year—and the earth’s trajectory around the sun has been pretty well established for a few thousand millennia give or take—but the end of the year is right around the corner. As soon as the calendar hits October it seems like everything goes into overdrive and in the blink of an eye everyone is settling down for a turkey dinner.
The calendar seems to shrink in Q4 for a few reasons. The first is the fact that everyone in the world wants to finish off the year strong. With the holiday season occupying a large chunk of the Q4 calendar, the pressure starts early in the quarter to ensure initiatives and processes are in place to meet goals. Marketing teams need to get campaigns built out and targeted to reach their audience in the most effective way. Sales has to push for important meetings early—before Holiday Apathy settles in and a glass of eggnog near the fire sounds much nicer than responding to a seller.
The second reason the days start flying by in Q4—and the reason there’s that gnawing pit in your stomach—is because planning for the new year needs to begin in earnest. Budgets have to be settled upon, content calendars created, sales plans & quotas established, tech stacks evaluated, and any number of other activities that will make an organization successful in the coming year.
Planning for 2018 is no easy task, especially with everything else going on, but there are two steps any organization can take that will set both their sales and marketing teams up for success.
1. Sales content personalization
Decision-makers nowadays are deluged with emails and communications on a nonstop basis. The job of a seller is to cut through the noise and prove to a buyer that they can solve their problems. To do this, sellers need to communicate to their buyers on a personal level that as sellers they truly understand the buyer’s specific and individual needs. Enterprise-level organizations with teams spread around the globe will find it difficult to personalize sales content to speak directly to a buyer at scale.
But just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean buyers don’t appreciate it or expect it. Gartner has found that in 2018, personalization will bring 30% higher close rates. And because personalization is a proven tactic for improving communication with buyers, organizations are searching for a way to up their personalized sales content. The Aberdeen Group reports that 45% of best-in-class companies prioritize improving their personalization efforts.
Sales content personalization is a critical initiative organizations can undertake to set themselves up for success in 2018. Personalized sales content gives sellers an avenue for fostering genuine connections with buyers. For large organizations, empowering their sellers with sales content personalization requires a sales experience for sellers that makes creating the content intuitive and easy. A technological solution that lets sellers personalize at scale and reduces the number of one-off requests to Marketing is the best solution for making sales content personalization a priority in for your future sales strategy. Also, discover how marketing teams are becoming more strategic by adopting automation.
2. Sales content automation
In the same vein as sales content personalization, sales content automation is a great way to set your teams up for success in 2018. SiriusDecisions reports that sellers only spend 18% of their time interacting with buyers. Their attention is increasingly being divided amongst myriad other activities that takes them away from doing what they do best—selling.
The activities that can eat up a lot of sellers’ time includes locating and creating content. RingDNA has found sellers spend around 30 hours each month searching for and creating their own selling materials. From building their own decks, to crafting content that speaks directly to a buyer’s needs, a seller can quickly begin taking on marketing responsibilities. And in the long run, neither Marketing nor Sales wants that.
To ensure that sellers have access to all the content they need, an organization needs to deploy a sales content automation solution that gives Marketing peace-of-mind and sellers the ability to automate content when they need to. Sales enablement personalization – and sales content automation in particular – enables sellers to personalize content at scale and spend their time on selling—something that should be a priority for every organization.
