by Brandon Vasciannie

In Part 1 of “Make Your Sales Content Count,” we looked at why the majority of sales content goes unused. The good news is that it’s not too late to turn around your company’s sales content strategy. How? Implementing a sales enablement solution with analytics capabilities is the key to establishing the ROI and determining the overall effectiveness of your sales content.

Dynamic Content Delivery

Part 1 of this series discussed that salespeople struggle to find and access content that is distributed by marketing. Sales enablement solutions solve this problem by providing a single, well-organized repository where all their sales content lives. Sales content is dynamically pushed to the sales team, and they are notified when new content is published.

Solutions like Bigtincan also go as far as providing AI-based content recommendations, so the salesperson doesn’t even have to spend any time looking for content. These types of solutions also provide increased mobility, allowing sales content to be accessed on any mobile device, regardless of network connectivity.

By making content easily accessible and relevant, salespeople are much more likely to use it during customer engagements, leading to an improved sales content ROI and overall stronger engagements.

Collaboration Tools

Sales and Marketing alignment is a problem that plagues too many organizations (hence why we made a whole webinar on #Hacking Sales and Marketing Alignment!). Sales enablement solutions bridge the gap between sales and marketing by providing a place where they can easily communicate and collaborate. If a salesperson needs a certain piece of content, Sales Enablement platforms enable them to reach out to marketing in the platform, instead of bombarding them with emails. Salespeople can also provide feedback on existing sales content by liking and commenting on it. This lessens salespeople’s desire to go rogue and create their own content, and provides marketing insight into how they can improve the content they have created.

Solutions like Bigtincan also provide social features that allow salespeople to have their own profiles where their role, skills, and successes are shown. These profiles allow salespeople to exchange tribal knowledge and advice in a familiar way, while also allowing them to see the content that the most successful reps are sharing out to their customers. Social features such as these help replicate success organization-wide.

Usage and Share Analytics

 As discussed in Part 1, many marketing teams churn out a plethora of sales content, with no visibility into how, or even if, it is being used by their sales team. Sales enablement solutions like Bigtincan remove the blindfold from your marketing team, and provide them analytics into how their sales team is interacting with their content. Goodbye to guessing and anecdotal evidence, hello data!

Sales Enablement platforms enable visibility into the specific pieces of content salespeople have or haven’t viewed, how long they and prospects have viewed it for, and who they shared the content with. These insights help Marketing properly allocate resources to develop the type of content that salespeople are actually using.

On the sales side, all of the same analytics are provided when salespeople share content with customers. Not only does this help salespeople to determine the right time to re-engage with their customers, but more importantly, is essential to determining the ROI of sales content. By tying the content shared during engagements to the revenue the deals generated, marketing can finally put a number to the ROI of their sales content.