Let’s face it. Every successful organization goes through it: as your company grows bigger, what once seemed like simple, effective processes quickly become more entangled. Your sales strategy becomes increasingly disjointed. And as a result, your sales reps lose valuable time searching for content, ramp-up for new hires become shorter, and your sales cycle grows longer. Soon, each member of your sales team has their own modus operandi in which to achieve their individual goals in the simplest (and quickest) way possible. Not only is this detrimental to your sales cycle, but it can also unfairly affect your customers’ overall satisfaction. And that, of course, can transitively have a negative effect on your brand. One doesn’t have to be a branding expert to realize that this unfortunate chain of events can compromise all you’ve accomplished – and perhaps more ominously – what you have in store for the future.
So now that Debby Downer is done making you second-guess your sales operations and success, let’s focus on how to avoid such pratfalls and begin with a critical question: what are the necessary steps that will help ensure your sales enablement strategy can permeate seamlessly across your entire organization? Well, a good place to start would be by defining and evaluating your company’s KPIs. But for the purpose of this post, let’s focus on the basic premise for any successful sales enablement strategy: content accessibility. And probably the best way to establish the most effective strategy is to run through a simple checklist before you even implement yours. Begin by asking yourself the following questions:
- Are all your sales tools, assets, and materials housed in one centralized location? More importantly, are they the right tools, assets, and materials to help your team succeed?
- Where is that location and how easily accessible is it for reps in the field? Do they need to access some remote server? Place an order through production? Or overly rely on what is already on their desktop?
- Is the most recent content in line with the latest branding efforts? And are all the accessible resources properly aligned, consistent, and purged of out-of-date materials?
- How quickly can your team access the content they need? Is it accessible from any device? Is it readily at their fingertips or do they have to download through some cumbersome Intranet process?
- Is the content easily digestible based on where they are in the sales cycle? Do they know exactly where to go to minimize their search and maximize their time with customers?
- Can you accurately track what content is being used most and why? And by contrast, what isn’t being leveraged as often as it should?
- Can this data directly be linked to increased or decreased revenue over time? Or maybe, to increased frustration on the part of your sales team?
- Finally, is there a method in place to determine what content you might be missing? What are customers and prospects asking for most that your sales team just doesn’t have in their holsters?
Of course, there are plenty of other questions you could ask yourself when addressing content accessibility for your sales enablement strategy. But by beginning with these great eight, you’ll enable your entire sales team to take responsibility for presenting the most consistent and clear content possible that is on brand, on target, and on their device in an instant.
This is a guest post written by Nate Archibald.
