Sales content management best practices

Today’s go-to-market (GTM) organizations are continuously looking for effective ways to generate more leads and close more deals. To make that happen, sellers need to have quick and streamlined access to the right sales enablement materials. This is where sales content management comes in.

What is sales content management?

Sales content management is the process of creating, organizing, and analyzing the content that your sellers use to engage with prospects and close deals. Sales enablement content includes pitch decks, case studies, one-pagers, and ebooks. No matter the format, sales content needs to engage, inform, and persuade buyers to move forward in the buyer journey. 

By having the best sales content management strategy in place, leaders can ensure that sellers have the resources they need to be productive and successful. After all, when they have access to content that’s relevant, informative, and engaging, they’re more likely to capture buyer attention and move them closer to a purchasing decision.

Sales content management is a critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to driving revenue and growing your business. It requires a strategic approach and a commitment to ongoing improvement, but the benefits are well worth the effort.

Why is sales content management important?

Sales content plays an extremely important role in organizations, which means that the way it’s created, organized, shared, and accessed by sellers is just as important. Effective content management ensures that sellers can easily find, personalize, and share relevant content with prospects at the right time. Without an organized and efficient management process, an organization’s sales enablement strategy will not be successful. 

Seismic’s 2023 Value of Enablement Report found that respondents who don’t have a sales enablement tool spend an average of 10 hours a week searching for content. When teams fail to organize their sales enablement materials, sellers waste crucial time and resources tracking down the assets they need when they need them. This takes time away from the task that matters — connecting and building relationships with prospects and customers.

The benefits of great sales content management

Centralizing all of your assets is valuable in and of itself. Sellers who have access to a single source of truth for their sales enablement materials are more engaged, prepared, and informed in their roles. In fact, 97% respondents in Seismic’s report say that quick access to content helps them speak to buyers from a more informed standpoint. Additionally, 85% say that quick access to content helps them better prepare for meetings with buyers. 

There’s plenty of other data that emphasizes the importance of sales content management in terms of efficiency, scalability, and visibility, too. Consider the following:

• 95% of buying decisions are directly influenced by content.
• 82% of buyers view at least 5 pieces of content before making a purchase.
• 95% of sales reps say they don’t have enough valuable content, but 65% of content that’s created by marketing goes unused.

The bottom line: Organizations and sellers need a single, well-organized content library to be successful in their roles. Companies that have a great sales content management process in place also experience a number of benefits including:

1. Enhanced productivity: When sellers know where sales collateral is located, they won’t spend as much time searching for or creating content. Instead, they can focus on their top priority—selling. 
2. Accelerated deal cycles: By giving sellers access to relevant content that can be personalized, they can better provide prospects with content that’s actually engaging and useful. This can accelerate deal cycles and move prospects through the buying process much more quickly. 
3. Improved content usage: As we shared earlier, a large portion of content that’s created by marketing goes unused. Sales content management increases the likelihood that content will actually be seen and used by sellers which results in more effective content marketing campaigns.

How to improve sales content management

Implementing an effective sales content management process is important for every organization. But, it’s important to take the time to understand your current sales content management process, identify opportunities for improvement, and collaborate with sales and marketing teams. Let’s take a closer look at 5 best practices that teams should use to improve their sales content management efforts.

1. Generate content ideas and needs

When sales enablement and marketing teams decide to build content, they shouldn’t do it in isolation. Simply dreaming up which content to produce serves little purpose. So, how can your team generate content ideas and identify the most immediate needs?

Interview reps: Your sellers are likely full of ideas about how they can close and win more deals. After all, they spend all day with their prospects and customers, so they have a very strong sense of what does and doesn’t work. So, interview your reps and ask them questions about what works in order to gather valuable content ideas.

Look at sales content data:  If your organization uses a sales content management platform, you’ll be able to see which content is shared most frequently, with whom, and in what context. That detailed sales data lets you quickly spot where the holes in your sales content portal are. (We’ll talk more about this in-depth a little later, too).

Trace the customer journey: Lastly, in every instance, you should understand how your buyers flow from being prospects to happy, engaged, and referring customers. That means looking at each step in the sales process. The more you understand the flow and reasons why they stall, the more you learn what content should be built to support the customer journey.

2. Audit your sales content assets

You likely already have a large backlog of sales content assets. They might be stored across different folders in your marketing automation platform or located in a content management system. While it’s terrific that you already have a leg-up on producing sales, how much of that content is useful and should be retained?

The first step is to understand your current library of content. Then, identify the purpose and type of each content asset. This will allow you to map content back to the sales needs that you identified in the previous step. Then, you can quickly see which content you can preserve, update, and create.

If you have a sales content management system in place, you can also see which content is used and consumed by sellers and prospects. That gives you an incredible head-start in auditing the real results of your content — and eliminating non-performers. 

3. Build new sales content

Once you’ve identified where there are gaps in your sales content portfolio, you should consider what your team should build. The type of content can often be as important as the content itself since certain types are easier to consume than others. This will also help you take the most useful approach to building content. For example:

Create a calendar: Part of the challenge of any commitment is setting yourself up to win. One of the best ways to do that is through a shared content calendar. This will help you allocate resources and time to produce the materials you need. 

Understand your producers: Content doesn’t build itself. You need resources — either internal or contracted — to produce your content. Some may be skilled in writing, some in graphic design, and some in interviewing subject matter experts. Understand who you have on your team so you can smartly divide content production.

Get a review and approval process: Content production isn’t a free-for-all. You need to ensure that the material is on-message and well-produced. Set up an approval process that ensures the right members of your team can OK content before it is finalized and sent to the sales team.

4. Distribute sales content

You’ve built some terrific sales enablement materials. But if it sits idly on a virtual shelf, it doesn’t do anyone much good. So, what are the most efficient ways to get content into your sellers’ hands? Here are a few key approaches:

Push content to reps: Your salespeople don’t have a lot of time, and they might struggle to use yet another tool to find critical content. But if you can push content to where they work, you’re much more likely to get great adoption of sales content. Look for an approach that pushes content into their browser, email, CRM, or other essential sales enablement tools that they use daily.

Centralize your content: None of the above should diminish the value of a content portal. In many cases, a salesperson just wants to access content from a single content repository tool. Sales enablement and marketing need to make this portal as intuitive and helpful as possible so salespeople can quickly get the information they need — fast!

5. Measure sales content performance

Closing the loop on sales content requires an understanding of which content is performing best. You need to know which content is being shared with prospects, how frequently, under what sales situations, how engaging it is for prospects, and whether it contributes to more sales.

That same set of data also enables managers to discover where there are gaps in the content portfolio. For instance, they may learn that a “financial services” case study is shared extensively with manufacturers. Maybe a new manufacturer case study would be a good item to build next. When sales teams have great, useful content, they’re more effective. Sales enablement and marketing groups can produce more and better content by following this simple content lifecycle.

What’s a sales content management system?

If you think these steps sound daunting and unfeasible, there’s good news. A sales content management system (CMS) helps teams create, organize, update, track, and access sales content at scale. This provides GTM teams the ability to search and find the right collateral in just a few clicks. This ensures reps have quick access to the right content when they need it and leaders can make informed decisions on how content is being used across the organization.

We make sales enablement content management easy

When it comes to creating and managing your team’s sales content, is your organization following these best practices? Seismic’s leading sales content management software allows marketing teams to create, store, update, and manage personalized content. This gives sellers streamlined access to the right content that they need for every interaction. As a result, teams dramatically improve the time spent selling and overall win rates. Ready to learn more about Seismic’s end-to-end sales enablement platform? Click here to get a demo!