Client-facing teams are under more pressure than ever to send relevant, personalized content to their books of business. However, too many organizations are still putting the onus on their sellers to find — or worse, create — their own sales collateral. This exposes organizations to immense risk and leaves frontline teams digging through droves of existing assets, only to find and send dated, ineffective content.
With haphazard content practices like these, governance is nearly impossible. Plus, marketing teams are left in the dark and have no way of knowing which content resonates or how often assets are being used. This is a no-win situation that results in:
- Client-facing teams wasting time digging through dated assets.
- Clients receiving lackluster, irrelevant content from sellers and advisors.
- The inability for compliance managers to monitor what sellers on the frontlines are sending.
- Marketing teams that don't have clarity about what messaging is landing in the market.
Thankfully, there's a better way: content governance.
What is content governance?
This is the formal content governance definition we use here at Seismic: Content governance is a framework that establishes the roles in content creation and maintenance, the standards that will be adhered to, and the processes in place to ensure high-quality, up-to-date, and curated content for buyer engagement.
In short, content governance is about excellently overseeing your organization's sales content marketing strategy. It's what protects prospective and current clients from seeing outdated, irrelevant content, and it's what protects organizations from putting their name on non-compliant, off-brand collateral.
Why is content governance important?
Without content governance, organizations suffer from challenges that negatively impact their revenue. Three of the biggest ones are:
Misalignment
Unsurprisingly, mixed messaging about what content should or shouldn't be used makes client-facing teams skeptical of new initiatives and, subsequently, delays results. A content governance framework aligns entire go-to-market (GTM) organizations by establishing standards that ensure everyone's using messaging and content that's directly connected to desired business outcomes.
Seller productivity
A lack of content governance leads to seller frustration, confusion, and lost deals. When frontline teams don't feel like they have on-brand, relevant content to share with their clients throughout their different deal stages, they're between a rock and a hard place: they can spend copious amounts of time creating mediocre content, or just accept that they don't have relevant content to share. This hurts morale and reduces productivity. But by offering well-governed sales content via an enablement platform, reps have the content they need at their fingertips.
Content chaos
We've been in the sales content management space too long not to know this: Where there is content sprawl, there is confusion. Content chaos hurts both sales and marketing team performance, but thankfully a good content governance model leads to a stronger partnership between the two departments. A content governance process ensures any piece of content someone finds in their sales content management system (CMS) is compliant, customizable, and current. This reduces seller friction and gives marketers the insights they need to create more of what works.
How to create an effective content governance framework
Wondering what it looks like to implement content governance best practices? An effective content governance framework needs a healthy mix of strategy, technology, people, and process. There's no one-size-fits-all way to roll out a governance program, but there are three vital elements of the best programs we've seen. These are:
1. Establish and define roles and responsibilities
Ending content chaos starts with a clear delegation of tasks and ownership. Together as a sales and marketing organization, agree upon permissions around who can create content, who can edit content, who should review and approve content, and who should audit and clean up content periodically.
By sorting people neatly into these four buckets, organizations can provide adequate training and enablement for each role so everyone understands their scope of work and responsibilities.
2. Design content workflows and processes
Once everyone knows their role, it's time to make the creation, approval, sending, and archiving of content a repeatable process. That's easier said than done, but this list of questions and considerations is a good place to start:
- Do we have clear definitions of what content is and is not appropriate for our brand?
- How do we want to train our content owners? How often do we want to deploy training?
- What are our content expiration standards, and who's responsible for archiving content?
- How frequently should we conduct content audits? Who should be involved?
- What consistent naming convention do we want to use?
- Do we want to provide promotion or use-case guidelines for each piece of collateral?
- If content is customizable on a client-by-client basis, how do we communicate that?
Answering these questions — and sticking to those answers — is much more manageable with sales enablement tools, and we'll touch on that later in this explainer.
3. Create policies, standards, and procedures
This element of a content governance framework is really just the deployment of the workflows and processes you establish based on your answers to the questions above. Stack hands internally on what the ideal state of your content creation, approval, and sending would look like, and then turn those best practices into concrete policies and consistent procedures.
A successful implementation of new content processes will directly impact the quality of content in your broader organization.
Quick reminder: Don't forget to establish a few metrics for success up front to track the impact and ROI of your content management and governance efforts.
