This is the second in a series of guest posts from Brian Groth, Sales Enablement Manager at Xactly Corp. Brian will be sharing sales enablement challenges and solutions on the Seismic blog over the next few weeks!
Last week, I discussed the challenges surrounding content creation, and how it is important to organize the content created by different teams within a company. But this organization needs to be thought of in the long-term, which is where content management issues arise.
What is Content Management?
In sales enablement, content management includes the processes, technologies and people who manage the content that a sales team needs. Content Management Systems (CMS) exist to help entire companies, or divisions of it, to publish, organize, update, manage, version, and eventually remove content.
Why is it a challenge?
Sales reps need both internal documentation and customer-facing content. There are usually different authors for both of these, as mentioned in my previous blog post about content creation. Multiple authors means that content is lost or saved incorrectly more frequently, meaning that sales reps spend much longer searching for or creating their own content. Ideally, sales reps only need to refer to one location to access whatever content they need. Further, this one system can provide the right content for that sales rep at the right time during the sales process. Managing the content while taking all variables into account to determine what’s “right” requires the expertise of the sales process, sales roles, customer segmentation, product details, and much more. Many companies face a huge hurdle when attempting to provide this content at the right time while reps are swimming in a sea of content from many different sources.
What can you do about it?
The number one thing sales enablement individuals or teams can do to help with content management is to educate the marketing team on the different roles and responsibilities in the sales organization. Because marketing teams are responsible for the majority of content creation, it is important that they understand how sales teams sell, what they focus on when selling, and what content is important to them at different stages in the selling process. Another approach sales enablement teams can take is to adopt a single and shared content management system. Ensure that sales and marketing are committed to using the shared system and that the complexity is hidden from sales reps. By exposing only the right content at the right time during the sales cycle, marketing can be sure that messaging is consistent and content is relevant for the customer. This way, sales reps know exactly where to go for the most relevant and valuable content for the customer with whom they are trying to resonate.
I look forward to sharing a third sales enablement challenge with you next week: sales processes.
Brian Groth is the Sales Enablement Manager at Xactly Corp, where he successfully created and manages Xactly’s entire sales enablement program, including the sales process, tools and training.
