Sales content management – the ability to create, organize, store, and distribute sales enablement content – is an integral tool for sales teams to be able to sell their organization’s services or products.
When an organization has taken the time to create useful sales content and a sales content management strategy – the conversion time from the first pitch to the final transaction with a buyer can get noticeably shorter.
With the use of a standardized sales content management system, your sales team can find the right piece of content quickly, reliably, and deliver it effectively – right at the perfect time to counter objectives and allow a potential customer to visualize your solution to their specific problem.
For these reasons, sales content management has a crucial role in a successful sales strategy.
What is Sales Content?
Nowadays, there are many different kinds of sales content being used by organizations. But in general the main types of sales content companies use are brochures, videos, case studies, customer testimonials, cut sheets, visualization tools, and similar types of content.
The sales team utilizes this sales enablement content by sharing these materials with their sales prospects so that the prospect can be guided towards your product as a solution, thereby personalizing their buyer’s journey and helping them visualize your offering as a solution to their problem.
Your sales content should be branded with your company’s branding elements, and contain high quality, specific, actionable material in order to boost customer confidence in your solution to their problem.
Why is Sales Content Management Necessary?
Organizations that decide to apply a modern and efficient content management strategy to their sales process can achieve significant performance benefits, including higher productivity, better time management, more valuable content adoption, enhanced lead conversion, and most importantly – higher win rates and increased sales revenue.
In addition – as a result of applying sales content management to the sales process, organizations are often more aligned with their marketing employees who provide the content, therefore getting better performance, and value from the marketing employees.
If sales content management works well, sales reps don’t have to spend extra time searching for necessary promotional materials – they’re able to focus on their priority – effective sales.
Let’s elaborate on the key benefits of this practice so that you could see how crucial sales content management is to your sales enablement strategy:
Shorter Sales Cycles and Enhanced Effectiveness
If a sales content management system is in use, members of the sales team can quickly find materials that are most appropriate for a particular selling circumstance, and quickly and easily adapt and evolve them over time, resulting in content that’s adjusted to the chosen buyer’s specific needs, at every stage of the sales cycle, allowing the sales team to reach prospects with an individualized sales message, resulting in a more personalized buyer’s journey & experience.
Improved Productivity of Your Sales Team
One of the most significant benefits of sales content management is combining all sales collateral in one easily reachable and organized place so no time is wasted searching for sales content, or the latest version of a document.
Not only does a consolidated sales content management system reduce the amount of time necessary for the salespeople to find the right materials for a given situation, but it also makes it quicker and easier for managers to take inventory of the content, and most importantly – keep it updated and evolving for new use cases.
Boosted Content Visibility and Usage
It often happens that B2B sales content remains untouched and sits wherever it’s stored never to be used.
Thanks to a dedicated sales content management system and having everything consolidated in one place, you can be sure that all the materials have a chance to be noticed and used by sales reps.
If content sits in your Content Management system unused, it’s an indication to the marketing team that they should change their content strategy to provide materials that are adequate for the needs of the sales team.
How are Sales Content Management Systems used to Improve Sales Performance?
An efficient sales content management system is an excellent compliment for sales enablement tools as it helps sales managers enhance sales team effectiveness by streamlining sales collateral and improving the results of the sales process. Selected use cases of a content management system are presented below:
Preparation for a Meeting
When all the sales collateral are systematized and easily accessible, sales reps can easily browse the materials and modify their presentation and content they are going to use to contact a particular prospect right inside the system.
Everything can be easily personalized and adjusted to individual needs, prior to the meeting.
Delivering Sales Collateral
Digital content management systems leverage sales processes and deliver content to a salesperson in accordance with their location, role, level of the sales cycle, and the customer they are dealing with at the moment.
Because of this system, the amount of time required to find the right content is noticeably reduced.
Thanks to a sales content management system, a salesperson can be sure they have the most appropriate sales collateral for any selling circumstances.
Lead Nurturing
High-quality content management systems provide sales reps with recommendations associated with particular materials to show to a prospect or lead based on their needs and the phase of the sales cycle.
Modern systems can also be integrated with email clients, making it possible for the content to be sent directly from the salesperson’s email window.
Making Announcements
With the help of a digital content management system, sales managers can make announcements to their teams more easily.
No matter if it is a new company policy, a sales training session, or a product update, all the right users will get a notification about it and receive access to the content of the announcement.
Presenting and Sharing Content
By including a sales content management system in your enablement program, you grant your salespeople convenient access to materials they can show to prospects during a meeting and also send as a follow-up afterward.
While sharing the content, sales teams can observe how a potential customer interacts with it and, as a result, they know when it will be best to reach back out.
Overall, applying a modern content management system to your sales enablement strategy is one of the best practices you can think of – benefiting sales people, your brand and ultimately – sales revenue. Start your free trial with our sales enablement platform today, and start making more effective sales pitches for more sales, more sales revenue and more fun.
