A recent survey of hundreds of sales people revealed that more than 90% of sellers want more content. They want content and other sales resources because these resources help them to engage and advance their prospects. So, how do you make sure that you’re equipping your sellers with the right resources — the content they need to succeed?
Content shouldn’t be built for content’s sake. It’s built to address a particular business issue. Just consider marketing content that’s designed for the top of the funnel. Your team builds assets that support your SEO strategies. Your team builds it to support website and landing page conversion. And when it comes to sales enablement content, it’s created to address particular sales challenges.
So, how do you discover what those assets should be? Below are three ways that you can go about collecting information and determining what to build.
Assess your buyer’s journey and frictions
Sellers look for content to support them as they move through the buyer’s journey. But what are the frictions that they run into? Clearly a seller won’t be satisfied with a lightweight infographic if they are looking to convince a senior executive late in the sales process.
Start by learning from sales what the typical buyer’s journey looks like. Look at conversion rates to understand where frictions exist. Try interviewing your sellers to better understand these frictions and what works to limit the inertia and keep things moving. Then, build content around the information that can support your sellers here.
Get content into sellers’ hands
A major challenge of sales content relates to simply getting it used by your sales team. Much of sales enablement content use comes from being accessible to sellers when they need it most. Look to push content to where sellers work. That could be on a mobile device, in the CRM, or in a portal experience that sellers love.
Access is one element. But you also need to ensure that the content is discoverable. That means not only a configurable search. It also means making it simple to find relevant content. A great portal experience is customized to a seller’s role and their sales situation. When the content is ready for the seller, it will get used.
Measure content use and performance
Sales enablement content creation and use is a cycle. That means that as content is built, you need to be aware of its level of effectiveness. Is the content being used by sellers? Are there gaps in the content portfolio that need to be filled?
When you can measure your content and its relative effectiveness, your marketing team can allocate resources to the right assets and build more great content.
