Blog series: Increasing Content Usage & Sales - The Fix

As we continue on our series on 'Increasing Content Usage & Sales Today', let's look into the fix: how to ensure your sales representatives use your content.

When it comes to content usage, instilling good usage practices starts with onboarding. This ensures that your sales people understand your sales cycle and how they can leverage it daily, especially if you have an extensive network to manage.

How to Ensure Your Sellers Use Your Sales Content

Start by ensuring all your content is easily accessible across all devices. More importantly, the most commonly needed file types can be accessed on both mobile and desktop. Showell helps to declutter and streamline the way sales representatives access content. Only the most up to date materials are accessible, and it's only ever a click away. Ensure that the content available to them is updated regularly, in line with your brand, tone and messaging.

Intermittently catch up with your sales representatives to understand the conversations they are having and how those discussions go with potential buyers. This can help you adapt your content to be more relevant.

Showell also adds value in this department, using data analytics to refine content over time by gathering insights on prospects and their needs as they view marketing collaterals and presentations.

It's also essential to provide your sales team with content that helps them sell throughout their sales cycle. The relevant content can then be easily pulled up during meetings to help them engage their prospects! Content can also be labeled based on which portion of the sales funnel prospects are currently in. With tools like Showell, your salespeople can pull up material instantly, even if they are offline.

The fact is a single pitch won't work on all your prospects. Naturally, when it comes to content, you need to provide materials that hit the mark. Still, it would be best if you also allowed your sales team some room to personalize and customize without sacrificing your brand's image. Empowering your sales team to personalize content for every sales pitch will guarantee higher engagement and content use. At the end of the day, your content should support what your sales representatives need, including how they sell it and when they push specific USPs. Showell not only aligns your sales and marketing teams, creating more impactful collaterals, it allows salespeople to customize content in a controlled manner.

Read more about Improving Sales Readiness By Aligning Your Sales Teams →

To increase content usage, you should also add a variety of sales materials based on customer engagement levels. While some prefer whitepapers and eBooks, others may gravitate towards videos or infographics. Provide your sales teams with a range of options to cover more ground; after all, sales pitches are not one-size-fits-all.

Next you should prioritize measuring how effective your content is. Why? Because that's how you gain some of your most important insights. See what your sellers are looking for and what they are actively using. Use this data to build more informed strategies and identify new patterns to help you form your next steps. While one USP may be a hot topic one year, another may take precedence the following year; use data to stay ahead of these curves.