3 Metrics You Should Be Tracking for Sales Content Effectiveness

You have a sales content library full of collateral, videos, reports, eBooks and more. But do you know how effective that content is? Is it helping to move buyers through the pipeline and to close deals? Are your sellers even looking at the content?

Proving the impact of your sales content can be tricky. You must connect assets to opportunities and track the right metrics to measure effectiveness.

You might already monitor several common metrics to show how well sales and marketing content is doing. These include upper funnel and attribution metrics such as pageviews, time on page, social media likes and shares, bounce rate, and number of leads.

While those are important measurements that can shed light on how well your content drives traffic to your website and generates leads, they don’t track the impact your content has on deals.

With deal content tracking, you tie specific assets to individual deals in progress—all the way through the sales cycle. From the first eBook a prospect downloads to the last case study they read, deal content tracking shows how and when your sales material influences the deal and contributes to actual dollars.

How to Track Deal Content: 3 Metrics

To track deal content, you must measure three sales content metrics.

1. Content contribution: Content contribution measures the revenue contribution of each asset. This metric allows you to see how your content contributes to individual deals. To do that, tag each opportunity and track the use of sales content by each sales rep.
2. Content lift: Content lift is the difference an asset makes. This is an even more precise measurement than contribution. By calculating the difference in average deal size in a given quarter between closed opportunities that had shared content and those that didn’t, you can determine the revenue lift of a content piece.
3. Cycle velocity: Cycle velocity is how quickly a deal closes. To measure the impact of content on velocity, calculate the average time spent in each stage across all closed deals. Then compare that to the time spent when content is shared. See if there is a difference in time to sale when a rep shared an asset during that stage and when they didn’t to determine if the average time the prospect spent in that stage decreased.

Effective Sales Content: Measure, Optimize, Repeat

Measuring and optimizing your content is an ongoing process. Once you launch your content tracking strategy, you then need to measure content impact. You’ll want a platform that allows you to easily see key data points, such as:

• Type of content driving the most views—by sellers and buyers
• Content that is shared the most externally or not getting used at all
• Content shared by the most reps
• Reps who consume the most internal content
• Reps who consume the least content

Based on those insights, your team will continue to learn and adapt, uncovering gaps within your existing framework, iterating content, and identifying new opportunities to refine your strategy as you evolve.

Creating Content That Sales Will Use

An important part of this process is ensuring sales and marketing are aligned and that you have an accurate and reliable feedback loop—a system for capturing feedback from customers, prospects, and salespeople that enables marketing to continually improve its content and messaging.

It’s very easy for sales reps to say content doesn’t work, their client isn’t interested, and the content sits untouched. But give your sellers an opportunity to provide feedback, and marketing can transform the content into valuable assets that move the needle on deals.

Marketers need input from the people the content is meant for: sellers. Communicating with sales teams and getting their feedback can help marketers elevate sales assets with the messaging, concepts, and language they need rather than marketers making decisions themselves.

Sellers, as well as sales managers and subject matter experts, have the background and buyer experiences required to inform content, allowing marketers to repackage the knowledge in easily digestible and distinctive ways for sales teams.

If the two teams aren’t available for conversations, sales can still support marketing by using asynchronous video to identify and share relevant selling situations. This can be a prospect call recording or even an informal recording of the rep sharing a “win” story or a new competitor they encountered.

Asynchronous video frees marketers to view the video when it’s convenient, and gives insights from real-life scenarios they can use to develop better content.

And when your marketers share content with the sales team, they can amplify the value of every asset by providing context. What is the purpose of the content? What are the main takeaways? Where should it be used? Who should sellers share it with?

When marketers take that extra step, sellers are more informed and more confident that they are sharing the content with the right prospects. And if a seller comes across a piece of content weeks or months later, they won’t be confused. They’ll know precisely how to use it.

When sales and marketing are aligned, marketing can create valuable content that prepares reps for any selling situation. And by measuring key sales content metrics, you’ll know for sure how effective the content is in moving deals forward and generating revenue.

Learn More:

Download the 3 Cs of Sales Content Measurement and learn how to drive revenue with sales content.