The role of an effective sales enablement content strategy for your sales enablement initiative cannot be overstated. Sales enablement content, the curated resources, and materials that empower sales teams to sell more effectively, is a linchpin in converting leads into loyal customers. But just creating this content isn't enough.
For sales and marketing people, it's essential to comprehend your content’s real-time influence and the impact it imparts on your overall sales success. But how can we be sure that our resources are hitting the mark? How can we identify which materials are driving results and which ones need refining?
This is where measuring the effectiveness of your sales enablement content comes into play. The truth is, you can't improve what you can't measure.
So, let's delve into the heart of the matter and explore the top metrics that can help you accurately measure the impact of your sales enablement content. These metrics will provide you with a deeper understanding of your content's effectiveness, help drive your sales strategy, and equip your team with the tools they need to succeed.
Table of contents:
- Understanding Sales Enablement Content →
- 4 Challenges of Not Measuring The Impact of Your Sales Enablement Content →
- Benefits of a Content Evaluation Process In Terms of Aligning Sales and Marketing Teams →
- Top 6 Metrics to Measure the Impact of Your Sales Enablement Content →
- Leveraging Metrics for Sales Enablement Content Optimization →
- Case Study: How BSH Home Appliances Boosted Their Sales Content Management and Aligned their Sales And Marketing Teams with Analytics →
Understanding Sales Enablement Content
Sales enablement content, at its core, is a collection of materials designed to support and empower your sales team. It can take many forms - from product sheets and case studies to presentations, multimedia files (3D, AR, etc.), and email templates - all aimed at assisting your sellers in leading a prospect through the buyer's journey.
But sales enablement content isn't just for your sales team – it should be for your buyers. It's a vital asset that bridges the gap between sales and marketing efforts. A well-designed piece of content can transform your leads to opportunities and eventually into loyal customers. It's what equips your salespeople to address the unique challenges and objections a prospect might have, helping them translate the marketing messages into a language that the prospect speaks and appreciates.
Let's take the example of a SaaS company. Here, a significant piece of sales enablement content could be a detailed product walkthrough or demo video. This content can help sales reps demonstrate the product's functionalities effectively, showcasing its value to potential clients. It can also support marketing efforts by being repurposed as an interactive piece on the Digital Sales Room or as a part of an email campaign, engaging leads at different stages of the sales funnel.
But creating sales enablement content is not a one-and-done task. It's a dynamic process that evolves with your product, market, and customer needs. And just as a great composition can move an audience, poor sales enablement content can disjoint your sales efforts, confusing your team and your prospects alike.
What truly distinguishes successful sales and marketing leaders is the ability to measure and optimize this content, ensuring it continually serves its purpose – to facilitate sales and foster customer relationships. This brings us to the crux of our discussion – the need for measuring the impact of your sales enablement content.
The Need for Measuring Sales Enablement Content
When we talk about measurement in the context of sales enablement content, we're talking about more than just tracking views or downloads. While these basic metrics provide a snapshot of your content's reach, they don't necessarily reflect its impact. And the impact that you should be most interested in. Why? Because sales enablement content has a direct influence on the efficiency and effectiveness of your salesforce.
For instance, if your team is consistently using a certain piece of content during the sales process, it’s a clear indication that the material is useful. But if that content isn’t leading to closed deals or shorter sales cycles, it might be time to revisit its quality, relevance, or application.
4 Challenges of Not Measuring The Impact of Your Sales Enablement Content
On the other hand, failure to measure the impact of your sales enablement content can lead to a variety of challenges. Let’s have a look at a few:
Missed Opportunities
Without measuring the impact of your content, you may be unaware of what's working and what's not. This lack of knowledge can lead to missed opportunities to optimize the content that's resonating with your audience and improve or discard the content that's not.
Wasted Resources
If you're unaware of the content's effectiveness, you risk spending time, effort, and budget on creating content that doesn't deliver results. This misuse of resources could be better utilized elsewhere in your sales and marketing efforts.
Lower Sales Productivity
Sales reps might be spending time on content that doesn't assist them in closing deals. This can lower their productivity and efficiency, ultimately affecting your sales numbers.
Inconsistent Messaging
Without proper measurement, it's difficult to ensure that the sales and marketing teams are on the same page. This can result in inconsistent messaging to the prospects, causing confusion and potentially losing their trust.
Without clear visibility into content effectiveness, you risk creating a disconnect between the sales and marketing teams. Your marketing team might continue to produce content that isn't resonating with your sales team or, more importantly, your customers. This not only results in wasted resources but can also lead to missed sales opportunities.
Benefits of a Content Evaluation Process In Terms of Aligning Sales and Marketing Teams
The benefits of accurately assessing the impact of your sales enablement content go beyond rectifying these issues. Despite the challenges mentioned above, investing time and effort in measuring sales enablement content can reap a multitude of benefits:
Improved Content Quality
With measurement comes the understanding of what types of content are most effective, which helps in creating more of the right kind of content and improving the overall content quality.
Better Resource Allocation
When you know which content is impacting your sales positively, you can make better decisions about where to allocate resources, ensuring the most effective use of your time, budget, and manpower.
Increased Sales Productivity
By providing your sales team with the most impactful content, you can increase their productivity and help them close deals more efficiently.
Sales and Marketing Alignment
Measuring the impact of sales enablement content can help align your sales and marketing teams around a common goal. With shared insights and understanding, both teams can work towards a unified message and a seamless customer experience.
When both teams understand what content works and why, they can work together to create even more effective materials, leading to a more streamlined and effective sales process.
Think of it this way: you're a coach of a soccer team. You have a playbook (your sales enablement content) that you believe will help your team win the match. But, if you never analyze how your players use these strategies in real games (sales situations), or if these tactics are leading to goals (closed deals), then the playbook serves no real purpose.
By measuring the impact of your sales enablement content, you can effectively turn insights into action. It allows you to understand which content drives revenue and which needs improvement. It's about gaining a comprehensive view of your sales process, shedding light on potential bottlenecks and uncovering opportunities for growth. In the following sections, we'll delve into the key metrics that can help you achieve this.
| 💡Pro Tip: Numerous organizations employ shared Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for both Sales and Marketing departments to bolster their synergistic collaboration. For instance, within the realm of sales enablement and with a particular focus on content, sales conversion rates can serve as an effective KPI that bridges the efforts of both departments. This unified approach not only ensures a streamlined strategy but also enhances accountability and fosters a conducive environment for achieving common objectives. |
Top 6 Metrics to Measure the Impact of Your Sales Enablement Content
In the world of sales enablement, data is your guiding star. It shines a light on what's working and what's not, paving the way for informed decision-making and strategic improvements.
The challenge, however, lies in identifying which metrics genuinely reflect the impact of your sales enablement content. So, let's explore the top six metrics that can provide valuable insights into your content's effectiveness.
1. Content Usage by Sales Team
This metric refers to how often and what type of content your sales team uses. It provides insights into the popularity and perceived value of different content pieces among your sales representatives. For instance, if product comparison sheets are used frequently, it indicates their high relevance in sales conversations. Conversely, low usage of a particular content piece might signal a need for revision or removal.
2. Sales Engagement
This involves assessing how your sales teams interact with the content. Are they sharing it with prospects? Are they using it in presentations? You can track this through your sales enablement platform. High engagement can indicate that your content is useful in progressing sales conversations, whereas low engagement might suggest the content is not resonating with your team or their prospects.
3. Content Influence on Sales Cycle
This metric measures how your content affects the length of your sales cycle. For example, a well-crafted product demo video might expedite the decision-making process for prospects, shortening the sales cycle. Analyzing this metric can help you identify content that accelerates deals and focus on creating similar impactful content.
4. Deal Influence
This metric evaluates how often and in what capacity your content appears in closed-won deals. By linking your content to successful deals, you can identify which materials have a direct impact on revenue. This could range from a persuasive case study that tipped the scales in your favor to an informative blog post that established your brand's authority.
5. Customer Engagement
This metric measures how prospects and customers interact with your content. Are they spending time reading your eBooks or watching your webinars? For how long? Are they sharing or commenting on your blog posts? High customer engagement often correlates with high-quality, relevant content that resonates with your target audience.
6. Feedback from the Sales Team
While the above metrics provide quantitative data, it's equally crucial to gather qualitative feedback from your sales team. After all, they're the ones using the content in the field. Regularly soliciting their opinions can yield invaluable insights into content relevancy, usability, and areas for improvement.
By effectively tracking these metrics, you can gain a 360-degree view of your sales enablement content's impact. Up next is when the real magic happens: when you leverage these insights for strategic content optimization.
Leveraging Metrics for Sales Enablement Content Optimization
Now that you've gathered a treasure trove of data, the next step is to use these insights to optimize your sales enablement content. By effectively leveraging these metrics, you can ensure that your content continues to evolve, improving its effectiveness and aligning with the ever-changing needs of your sales team and prospects.
Analyze
So how do you go about this? The first is to analyze and improve. Start by analyzing your metrics to understand what's working and what's not. For example, if a particular case study is consistently leading to more closed deals (deal influence), you might want to create more case studies in that format. On the contrary, if a certain sales pitch deck is rarely used by the sales team (content usage), it might need revisiting or reformatting to make it more useful and engaging.
Experiment and Improve
Next is to test and iterate. The world of sales enablement is dynamic, making testing and iteration crucial. For example, if a product demo video shows low customer engagement, test different variables like video length, content, style, or even the presenter. Continuous A/B testing will allow you to optimize your content and keep it fresh and engaging.
Always Consider the Buyer Journey
Sales reps often deal with prospects in various stages of the buyer's journey, so the next step is customizing your content. Doing this based on these stages will increase the likelihood of your content’s relevancy, accuracy, and usability. For instance, if feedback from the sales team indicates a need for more content for prospects in the consideration stage, you can focus on creating content like battle cards (comparison guides) or expert webinars to fill this gap.
Seek for Feedback
Also, encourage feedback! Make it a point to continuously gather and act on feedback from your sales team. This can be done through regular meetings and surveys. This not only helps in content improvement but also fosters a culture of communication and collaboration.
Communicate and Collaborate
Finally, regularly share your findings with both the sales and marketing teams to nurture alignment. This ensures everyone is on the same page and working towards a common goal – creating content that drives sales. A shared understanding of what works will help both teams create a seamless and effective sales enablement strategy.
Remember, the goal of measuring and leveraging these metrics is not to create more content, but to create more effective content. Quality over quantity is the mantra.
Case Study: How BSH Home Appliances Boosted Their Sales Content Management and Aligned their Sales And Marketing Teams with Analytics
BSH Home Appliances, a leading manufacturer selling top brands such as Bosch and Siemens, found a unique solution to their scattered sales content problem through Showell, a powerful content management platform. With 80 salespeople now relying on Showell for customer interactions, BSH experienced a significant boost in their sales team's efficiency and interdepartmental cooperation.
Initially, BSH faced a major challenge when it came to delivering a unified brand message. Salespeople were creating their own presentations due to the absence of a consolidated content management system, which led to scattered sales materials and a lack of cohesive messaging. This caused undue stress for the sales teams, who spent more time tracking down correct information than actually selling.
Enter Showell, which has transformed the content management landscape at BSH. As a central information hub, Showell provides easy access to all relevant materials, enabling the sales team to focus on selling, not searching. This has significantly reduced stress, boosting their confidence during customer interactions.
With a feedback loop in place, Showell offers BSH insight into whether their sales teams fully understand the content, helping them to refine and improve their resources based on user feedback. This not only improves interdepartmental cooperation but also ensures that the sales team has a clear, unified message to present to customers.
Sales enablement plays a crucial role in sales process optimization. To learn more, check out our blog Fixing Sales Performance Issues: A Guide to Sales Process Optimization →
Beyond just providing a central hub for content, Showell's analytics capabilities allow BSH to monitor the usage of its content. This understanding of what content is effective informs their onboarding process, helping them deliver a tailored and impactful training experience for new members of the sales team.
Overall, Showell has not only become the gold standard for content management at BSH, but it has also revolutionized its sales process. It has offered a streamlined solution to the content management conundrum, saved time, improved confidence, and fostered collaboration, ultimately enhancing the company's competitive edge in the market.
Read more about BSH Home Appliances Case Study →
In Conclusion...
By focusing on key metrics such as content usage, sales engagement, content influence on the sales cycle, deal influence, customer engagement, and feedback from your sales team, you can transform your sales enablement content from a guessing game into a well-calibrated, data-driven strategy.
Remember, sales enablement content is not a static entity but an ever-evolving component that changes with your product, market, and customer needs. By continually tracking, analyzing, and leveraging these metrics, you can ensure that your sales enablement content remains a potent weapon in your sales arsenal, consistently driving growth and success.
Don't let your sales enablement content be a shot in the dark. Empower it with the right metrics, refine it with data-driven insights, and watch it drive your sales to new heights.
Learn next:
- Sales Enablement KPIs to Track to Maximize Sales Performance
If you're ready to take your sales enablement strategy to the next level, book a demo below or Get Showell Free! Let us assist you in making your sales enablement content not just informative but transformative, paving the way for remarkable sales success.
