10 Ways Marketers Can Create Sales Content That Actually Gets Used

If you’re a marketer supporting a sales team, you’ve got a lot on your plate. Sellers are facing one of the most difficult buying landscapes in recent memory—and they need your help.

Sales enablement has never been more important than it is today. Today’s competitive economy—and the new requirements of virtual selling—have increased demands on marketers. More than ever, you have to be flexible, responsive, and closely aligned with your sales teams.

Your first priority is to deliver the best content that will move deals through the pipeline. Your second has to be making sure sellers can find and use these resources properly.

But it can often seem like all your hard work is for naught. Consider these statistics:

• Two-thirds of marketing content goes unused. (Sirius Decisions)
• One-third of marketing and sales teams don’t talk regularly. (Kapost)
• 55% of marketers don’t know which assets sales uses most. (Kapost)

If you’re like most marketers, you’ve got a full production calendar of solution briefs, case studies, videos, blog posts, product guides, and more to support sellers and help them be productive.

It’s challenging to keep your sales content program firing on all cylinders. Ideally, you’re working on a continuous process of creating and sharing new materials with reps to allow them to reach customers and sell more effectively.

But do you also work with sales to learn which types of content are working best to nurture leads and close deals? Are you keeping your ears open to industry trends and one eye on the company roadmap to anticipate content needs and fill in any gaps? Find out what steps you can take to make sure you’re creating great content—that sales will use.

10 Ways to Activate Content and Accelerate Sales

Here are ten ways you can overcome obstacles and turn your sales content into an engine that will turbo-charge your sales growth for years to come.

#1 Activate With Information

It’s not enough to simply make new assets available, sellers must know how to use these resources. You can activate sales collateral with messaging, talk tracks, and win stories to highlight the best use of the content, and recommend deal-specific content based on sales stage, competitors, and other factors.

#2 Crowdsource Ideas

One of the best ways to make sure sales will use new content is to incorporate their ideas. Ask in-house SMEs and reps to submit presentations, practice videos, competitive insights, or any assets they think might benefit the team as they prepare for the coming year. You can curate, repurpose, and share this content.

#3 Harvest In-Field Intel

Marketers who are enabling sales must produce content for both formal training and reinforcement as well as just-in-time learning at the moment of need. Tap into the knowledge of your sales team for assets such as role-playing videos that show “what good looks like,” competitive intel from the field, and best practices from your top performers.

#4 Make It Mobile

Use a mobile platform so that formal sales collateral and informal learning is available from anywhere at any time. You want sellers to be able to get the latest intel to handle objections and close deals no matter when or where they find themselves.

#5 Go Virtual

When you can’t bring your reps into the home office for training on new materials, the next best thing is video. Use recorded video instead of live web calls to explain how new content assets should be used. This will allow reps to watch and absorb the content at a pace that fits their varied schedules.

#6 Capture and Repurpose

Your national sales meeting, annual kickoff, or other sales meeting are great opportunities to introduce new products and features that can energize the team. Capture any live presentations on video and break them into small, searchable clips. After the meeting, reps can easily refresh on these topics as they need them.

#7 Collaborate with Sellers

Be transparent about your goal of improving and fostering communication between marketing team and reps, managers, subject matter experts. You want to encourage peers, experts, and coaches to share strategies and best practices with marketing so you can create content that drives deals and improves results.

#8 Leap Across Time Zones

Collaborate asynchronously to gather content ideas and buyer intel from reps in different time zones using video messaging that allows for in-line commenting and recorded video responses.

#9 Gain Insight

Gather and mine analytics from coaching, collateral usage, and call performance to tie actions with outcomes. Gain insight into which sales content pieces are moving the needle, as well as which sales conversation topics, learning content, and exercises are correlated with success. When you know what content is working—and what’s not—you can make sales collateral even more effective and stop wasting time on activities that don’t get results.

#10 Invest in the Right Tools

Mastering sales content management means investing in the tools you need. You could cobble together multiple platforms with a range of capabilities, but the most efficient approach is having learning, content, collaboration, and insight all in one place. When you implement a robust sales enablement platform, you save time and resources and gain the ability to scale across your organization.

Learn More

To learn how to accelerate your results with modern sales enablement, download our eBook: Demystifying Sales Enablement: How to Plan for the Next Normal.