What We Learned from our Webinar with Sirius Decisions

We recently had the opportunity to co-host a webinar with our friends at Sirius Decisions.

It was great collaborating with them to tell the story of how content has become both a blessing and curse for organizations and showing how best-in-class companies use and deploy content to increase sales, get larger deals, and close faster.

In today’s post, we’ll explore several of the key takeaways and lessons we learned from industry expert Peter Ostrow of Sirius Decisions. In fact, the webinar was so packed with valuable information that we decided to make it available on-demand.

5 Key takeaways from Fixing the Content Problem: Strategies for Effective Sales Enablement

1. It’s not just marketing; it’s not just sales

Here’s a painful fact: 65% of sales content created by marketing is never used by sales. 65%! When sales teams can’t find, use, or get value out of content, multiple job roles and departments such as sales enablement, portfolio marketing, sales operations, channel sales management, ebusiness, chief marketing and sales officers, are all impacted by the need to fix this content problem. Everyone should be aware of what kind of content is going into sales reps hands and what content is working.

2. Best-in-Class Sales Asset Management means

• Content that helps with both buyer and seller needs
• Sales assets that are relevant, findable, usable, and measurable
• Metrics on things like if reps like the content, if they use it, and if it makes an impact
• Improved rep productivity
• A strong focus on creating content that wins deals

3. Audit your content

To ensure that content is impactful, don’t just create another dumping grounds for content. The content that is available should be easy to find and use, as well as effective. Forcing reps to sort through thousands of documents will not help. Some questions to help you get started:

• What assets exist today?
• What assets exist, but need to be updated?
• What assets don’t make the cut?
• What assets need to be created?

4. Reps need access to the right content at the right time

Do buyers really care if it takes a couple of extra hours or days to get the information that they’re looking for? YES. Keeping a buyer waiting is basically sales un-enablement. Buyers need what they want as soon as humanly possible. The goal is to ensure that reps have better knowledge, better skills, and better info at the point of need.

5. Final Takeaway: It's all worth it

Implementing a successful sales enablement program can take time, people, and work. So why bother doing it?

All in all, the right platform gives you an important way to connect sales and marketing teams in a way that simply can't happen through email, file sharing, or intranets. It gives reps the confidence that they have everything they need to focus on providing value to the customer.

Businesses that empower their sales teams while activating and engaging buyers with the right messages outpace their competitors by a significant margin, and this leads to larger deal sizes, faster closes, more sales, and a better customer experience. So whether you're planning your first or working on a bigger, better sales enablement initiative, we’re here to help.

We want to hear from you! What are your takeaways? Share in the comments below.