How to Get Sellers to Fall in Love with Your Sales Content
The struggle to create content that sales loves is real. For some marketing teams, in fact, their story is a tragedy, with sales using only 30% of the enablement content that marketing creates. Sometimes it’s a matter of sales and marketing not being in alignment. And other times, the two might agree on the goal, but content misses the mark, can’t be found, or can’t scale.
How do you get sellers to love your content—make it something they regularly use to stay informed, nurture prospects, and add value to conversations they have with buyers?
Allego’s chief marketing officer, Wayne St. Amand, and the company’s senior product marketing manager, Jake Miller, answered that question in a recent webinar, A Marketer’s Guide to Creating Content Sales Will Love (and Actually Use!). During their event, they identified four steps to address the problem and ensure sellers use the content that marketers create in the most impactful ways.
4 Steps to Create Sales Enablement Content Sales Will Love
1. Co-create Content with Sales
How you create content is critical to making it relevant and getting sales to perceive it as valuable. To ensure you start out on the right foot, implement a content life cycle that incorporates field collaboration and learning, St. Amand says.
“You might think you know your market really well, but your sellers know it even better. They are the ones talking with prospective and existing buyers, and their information is much more current and relevant,” he says.
“You have to think of sales as your content creation partner,” St. Amand adds. “If you go off and build content without early collaboration with the field, you’re probably going to be a little bit off as you distribute that. And the more off you are in that content, the less likely sales will use that content.”
In addition, you want to collaborate with sellers to create agile content for internal use, which can often be more valuable than formal training content. Examples include:
- A video that accompanies a presentation that explains how to deliver the presentation
- Seller-created videos that include up-to-the-minute competitive intelligence
- Personalized videos in which sellers share success stories and best practices with other reps
For front-line feedback, you can use a conversation intelligence solution that allows you to listen to recordings of sellers delivering content to buyers and hear the language buyers use with sellers. In addition, you can use that information to refine the content.
Marketers don’t get direct face time with prospects and buyers, Miller says, so they need these capabilities to get insight into how sellers and buyers engage with content. It increases the relevance of everything marketers do.
2. Distribute the Content
After you create the content, you must get it into reps’ hands at exactly the right time. You can’t follow the saying “if we build it, they will come,” Miller says.
The best way to do that is to create a sales content library that is mapped to the sales process and sellers’ playbooks. Your library should also be easy to browse and intuitive to your sellers. “Determine the first thing a salesperson is going to be thinking when they go to search for something, and make that available when they’re browsing,” Miller says.
Use AI to give sellers content recommendations, personalized content, and deal-appropriate content. Other helpful digital tools include predictive search, mobile access, and digital sales rooms.
“You can co-create great content with your sellers, but if they can’t find it or can’t distribute it well, it’s pointless,” St. Amand says.
3. Activate the Content and Engage Your Sellers
Marketers spend a lot of time building content and often want to throw it over the wall to sellers, simply putting it in the content management system or sending an email. But when you do that, the content gets lost and sellers rarely use it.
Instead, you want to activate the content by adding some context—what’s the purpose of each piece and how should it be used? With content activation, you:
- Combine learning, content, and collaboration
- Deliver knowledge and insights at the time of need
- Ensure sellers understand each asset’s value in the sales process
Making sure sellers know how to use content is the last mile of content creation, one that marketers sometimes overlook. If you can reach that final destination, your content will be even more valuable.
4. Track the Content
Only by tracking content and measuring usage will you know if sellers like and are using these resources. One way to do that is to use a system that keeps tabs on when a piece is used and by whom or, better yet, links content use with deal progression.
You can also:
- Track buyer engagement through the sales process
- Analyze actions compared with outcomes: Did a piece of content speed up the sales process, cause a buyer to make a faster decision?
By tracking content, you will understand the market significantly better, identify the best content to produce, and deliver content in the sellers’ moment of need.
Content management alone is “table stakes,” St. Amand adds. You should be doing that. But if you deliver content in context, your content becomes more useful to sales. And it can be applied during the sales cycle to facilitate and speed up the process.
“Content has to be available and valuable in the moment of need for the seller,” he says. “And you not only have to deliver the content but also provide the context surrounding how to use it and why it’s valuable. If you can nail those things in addition to all the table stakes items, you’re really going to be in a position where you are creating content sales will love and that they will use.”
Learn More
Watch the webinar, A Marketer’s Guide to Creating Content Sales Will Love (and Actually Use!), to start creating content your sellers want and know how to use.
