Yesterday, Seismic hosted a webinar with Anthony Nygren, Executive VP at EMI Strategic Marketing: Cleaning Up The Content Mess Before A Sales Enablement Rollout. An expert in strategic sales acceleration solutions, Anthony was the perfect advocate for organizing enterprise content and gave webinar attendees a step-by-step process for doing so. While Anthony gave many tips for enterprise content organization, three major takeaways are below.
- The average salesperson spends around five hours a week searching for content. When you look at that on an annual basis, that’s 32.5 full sales days lost per year. Marketing wants sales to use branded, consistent collateral with the right messaging, but sales would rather save time by creating their own. A disorganized CMS can create tension between the teams and costs everyone valuable time and money.
- Content organization problems have been around since Biblical times. Well, maybe not that long. But the content mess can be compared to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel: in the story, the people building the tower get separated by different languages and therefore can no longer communicate. Chaos ensues and the tower can’t be completed. Content disorganization can be looked at in the same way; with an overflow of content and increasingly more people trying to search, upload and save, effective communication is difficult and all productivity goes out the window. It’s important to address this confusion and develop a strategy for simplifying the CMS.
- When it comes time to organize, take a few baby steps, but then “Just Do It.” Alongside Nike’s logo and famous tagline, Anthony explained that once the cleanup strategy is decided, the first step is taking a small sample of content to tag, consolidate and organize. Then once the strategy has proven successful, you just have to execute. It may seem daunting to roll out such a colossal plan, but it’s very possible (and sometimes necessary) even in a tight timeframe.
The benefits to organizing your content are plentiful: more effective sales reps, more efficient marketing teams, a shorter sales cycle, and ultimately an increase in revenue. But the execution can seem overwhelming at first and it’s hard to decide where to start. With a step-by-step process, Anthony and EMI prove that an efficient CMS is more than just a pipe dream, and it can be a reality much faster than you might think. For more on EMI’s strategic sales acceleration solutions and how your own company can get started, watch the webinar recording below.
