As a Marketing Leader, you may think content is your domain.  You worry that your content is part of the 65% of marketing content that goes unused by sales teams.  Are these rogue sales reps, or has the role of content and the sales reps changed in the selling process?

With the popularity of solution selling and similar sales methodologies, organizations are increasingly transitioning from the “feature sale” to tailoring product and service offerings to solution categories.  As a result, sales teams must be both marketers and sellers as they identify customer needs and define customized offerings.

Savvy marketing teams are now taking advantage of the power of next generation Sales Engagement Platforms that move beyond sales enablement and allow sellers to become natural extensions of the marketing team.  But just having the right Sales Engagement Platform delivering approved and recommended content isn’t enough.  Marketing teams need to enable sellers to do three things: 1) seamlessly customize content, 2) personalize outreach based on every interaction with the account, and 3) measure and track sales content ROI.

Enable Sellers to be Great Marketers
Marketing teams are creating more content than ever before as organizations leverage sophisticated segmentation strategies and optimize channel specific content (web, social, email, online meetings, in person meetings).  The proliferation of content from which sellers can choose from – and the need for customizing the content – translates into the average seller spending 440 hours per year searching for content that matches the needs of target buyers.

Delivering the “master” marketing presentations and email templates with glossy graphics and snappy messaging isn’t enough (at this point, we’re all familiar with the email pitch sent to the CTO of Amazon Web Services).  Marketing teams need to empower reps to easily create stunning and customized presentations based on their discovery process – including key trends aligned to buyer personas, defining the appropriate solution based on needs analysis, and integrating relevant industry customer references.

Deliver Hyper-Personalization based on Engagement
CSO Insights finds that 70% of sellers do not validate prospect interest during the sales cycle, meaning valuable buyer cues are being missed.  While sales teams can access basic email metrics, they lack a consolidated view from all touch-points within an account (including emails, online or in person meetings, social) and specifics into the drivers of prospect interest.

Using a Sales Engagement Platform, such as ClearSlide, delivers insights on exactly when and how specific viewers engage in second-by-second, slide-by-slide detail — even distilled by channel (web, social, email, online or in-person meetings).  Hyper-personalize outreach based how buyers actually respond within the moment.

Agree on Sales Content ROI
Marketing teams regularly report ROI on their campaigns, but measuring the effectiveness of sales content has always been a black box. Research finds that 76% of marketers think their content is helpful but only 46% of sales professional agree.  Using customer engagement analytics allows individual sellers to learn from their own success with content and scale across deals — and sales leader to scale best practices across teams.  Marketing teams finally have an objective measure of sales content ROI to guide future investments and work with sales teams to continually improve.

Sales and marketing teams needs to move beyond discussions of alignment to a more meaningful conversation about enabling sellers to become great marketers.  A complete Sales Engagement Platform supports the transition of sellers being a valuable extension of marketing with seamless content customization, hyper-personalization, and a common understanding of sales content ROI.  See how the Economist has successfully enabled its sales teams using ClearSlide.