Sales reps increasingly count on quality sales content as businesses digitize their marketing and sales operations. While their options grow, effective, streamlined sales content management will be vital to competitive sales organizations.

The importance of Effectively Managing Content in a Sales Organization

Marketing collateral and sales content include a growing inventory of slides, animation, GIFs, web content, video and other tools to influence customer engagement. But sales reps spend on average 440 hours a year—about 22% of their time—searching for the right content, says the Aberdeen Group. For fast-paced sales organizations, the ability to effectively manage sales content is crucial to success.

Common Concerns

The CMO Council reports that 56% of sales and marketing professionals claim their companies do not have established processes to coordinate the two areas. Several issues commonly interfere with sales reps’ and marketing teams’ efforts to manage sales content.

First among them is dealing with duplicate content. A top content management tool that centralizes marketing and sales collateral will decrease the appearance and risk of duplicate content appearing in front of reps and in presentations. This helps ensure brand voice and messaging remains cohesive across the organization.

The same tool should keep materials up to date, automatically. Reps should be able to be sure that marketing-sourced slides, for instance, are still fresh and relevant.

Making sure the most relevant content is surfaced can be tricky. According to CSO Insights, 52% of sales managers cannot be sure their teams are delivering consistent messages. Sales engagement statistics and viewer analytics address this.

The Best Way to Manage Sales Assets is Within a Sales Engagement Tool

A sales engagement platform is a system of engagement that compliments a system of record—like a CRM—and is comprised of five key components: content management, communications, predictive analytics, CRM integration, and partner applications. This combines all the benefits of Sales Enablement Tools into a single integrated platform.

Indeed, a best-in-class sales engagement platform provides user-friendly asset organization, readily sharable content, and common and valuable information. Specifically, it will boost the quality and facility of content by:

• Providing a single hub for sales content, marketing collateral, tools, and presentations
• Updating content to make sure it is accurate and timely
• Controlling content access by individual reps and by team managers to allow for customization and oversight by using permissions
• Creating and recommending content by sales stage, sales role, sales target or industry
• Using engagement analytics to manage content and guide reps to the appropriate next step

The Hub of the Matter

Collecting all relevant content in a single hub allows sales reps and teams to easily organize and customize content based on product line, sales stage, industry, content type and other categories. The right content can be found using collections, tags and search.

Resulting marketing and sales content collections can be labeled for personal or published for team-wide use. Consequently, sales reps and teams are in control of which version of content they are viewing and using. Best-in-class companies are 1.4 times more likely to align content with sales stages, according to Aberdeen.

Further, a best-in-class sales engagement platform will make it easy to tailor a presentation for your customers and prospects. You can combine multiple assets that can be used in live meetings or shared as trackable links. The selected assets can be reordered at will and previewed to gauge presentation size and impact.

Once a sales presentation is ready, you can click within the same content tool to enter an online presentation or meeting right away, create a trackable link and log that activity to their CRM, or save the presentation for later. Personalizable videos would also be housed in a content management system, with the option of being added to presentations or emails.

Tailored for you

In addition, a best-in-class sales engagement platform will offer group-based permissions that are tailored to map out your selling process. As a result, sales reps across teams see the right content and tools at any point in the sales cycle. Best content should allow automatic updating of content and content access. Retiring and archiving content should be equally simple.

A premier sales engagement platform presents more competitive management tools. Slide-by-slide engagement analytics allow insight into content investment over time, how individual reps and teams are using approved content across communications channels, and even how effective that content is at actually engaging buyers.

With this data, the platform and can also recommend content based on engagement analytics to guide reps to the appropriate next step.

Best practices in managing sales content management takes growing advantage of mobile devices. A competitive sales engagement platform extends to mobile phone and tablets via apps to equip sales reps on the spot.

Nearly 60% of sales reps believe they have too many sales tools—and 55% of them view their company’s sales tools more as obstacles than facilitators, according to Accenture.

Removing the complexity of sales content management is liberating to any sales organization.