How To Get Winning Content For The Bottom Of The Funnel
In Part I, we discussed how to create winning content to promote sales marketing alignment. When you create buyer-centric content for each sales stage, your sales team will win more deals faster. But what does this look like in practice? Emailing your team every time a document is uploaded or edited is unsustainable, especially if you manage hundreds or even thousands of assets.
Thankfully, sales enablement platforms have evolved to the point where you can track content engagement and automate updates in a snap. Here in Part II, we’ll explore some of the advanced tactics involved in deploying and tracking winning content. Take these steps to foster sales marketing alignment in your organization.
Put Winning Content In Context
One of the primary benefits of a good sales enablement platform is its ability to put content in context. Sales reps spend almost one third of their time looking for content or creating their own, but good sales enablement platforms can reverse this disturbing trend. Make your winning content live up to its name by giving it to reps where they live: in the CRM. This way, they won’t have to spend time looking for it and they can spend more time selling.
Advanced sales enablement platforms like Veelo allow you to assign specific pieces of content like knowledge checks and video coaching modules. Scheduling practice sessions like this can be especially valuable during onboarding and sales kickoff. Never before has it been this easy to see which reps are mastering critical concepts, and which ones are struggling. See our free guide for how to set up an onboarding program that works.
Winning Content Will Be Anything But… Unless You Track It
How do you know you’ve got a piece of winning content on your hands? If your sellers can share documents and monitor prospect engagement, you’re on the right track. Once sellers can see how prospects use content, they’ll be able to gauge interest and better manage pipelines. Look for features such as view, open, and forward tracking intelligence to give your reps immediate value.
From a marketing perspective, you’ll gain visibility into what’s really happening with your content at the bottom of the funnel. Which reps use content to close more deals? What are the content pieces that prospects engage with the most? And which winning content pieces help move deals from one sales stage to the next? Now you can transition from anecdotal evidence to facts backed up by data.
Streamline Seller Feedback
Do your sellers have a quick and easy way to rate content and provide feedback? Your most vocal reps will always have opinions on the winning content and the duds, but how do you collect data from the rest of team? Advanced sales enablement platforms like Veelo allow your reps to score content and submit comments with just a few clicks.
Once you’ve got the infrastructure in place, review ratings monthly and look for winning content and poor-performing pieces. If you see several reps give low ratings to a piece, invest the time and energy to improve it before adding something to take its place. In the same vein, audit your winning content and look for ways to make other pieces in the same style.
Winning Content: Make It Work With Sales Analytics
If you’ve come this far, you recognize the value of delivering winning content in context. This content strategy will allow your sales reps to track prospect engagement, and monitoring feedback. Now, establish ground truth by studying which pieces actually help win deals. If you’re laser-focused on the needs of prospects, then every piece of content you create has the potential to be winning content. Sales marketing alignment is within your reach when all your content helps sellers move deals to the next stage of the sales cycle.
Now, close the loop by integrating your sales enablement platform into your CRM. We touched on this briefly above, when we discussed the importance of adding winning content to your sellers’ workflow. Now let’s look at this relationship from a marketing perspective.
When you combine your sales enablement platform with your CRM, you can correlate content engagement with vital revenue metrics:
- How each of your sellers uses content
- Which pieces of content reps use by industry vertical
- How content usage is related to deal size
- Content usage related to sales stage
- Which pieces of content do reps share most often with prospects?
- Content that prospects open and forward to others in their organization
Now you can see how sales enablement platforms are preparing marketing professionals for the coming revolution. Marketing has never had a clear view of how reps and prospects use content at the bottom of the funnel… until now. Sales enablement platforms like Veelo can provide marketers with much richer context and a view into the lifecycle of their winning content. Now marketers can gain clarity into their content strategy and make improvements where it counts.
Summary
In this article and previously in Part I, we’ve discussed the value of creating winning content that’s buyer-centric, but do you know who your most important buyers are? Your sales team! If you don’t consider their needs while you’re creating and organizing content, they won’t use it.
If you nail the basics of sales marketing alignment, then you’ll know there’s still work to be done. Buyer-centric content aligned with each sales stage is a great start, but you won’t have winning content until you take it a step further. Apply these advanced tactics to monitor prospect engagement and determine which pieces help your team close more deals faster.
If your reps see the value of your winning content, then they’ll want to use it when they talk to prospects. And once they start using it to win more deals, the sky’s the limit.