The role of sales documents in the sales process

Sales documents play a critical role throughout the sales process. Done right, they not only provide essential information about a product or service but also address a potential buyer’s specific concerns, offering tangible evidence of the benefits that can be expected from the proposed solution. Aligning sales documents with each stage of the buyer’s journey establishes trust and confidence, ultimately increasing the likelihood that a prospect will convert to a sale.

To better understand the role sales documents play in the sales process, consider a scenario in which a technology company is trying to secure a deal with a potential client in the healthcare industry. The client needs a software solution that can streamline data management and improve operational efficiencies. 

In this context, a well-crafted case study can be highly effective. In an ideal world, this case study would feature a current customer who faced similar challenges to the potential buyer. It would also include details about how the technology company’s software was successfully implemented, the specific problems addressed, and the positive outcomes achieved. 

This example illustrates just one of the many uses of sales documents. Incorporating a case study and other relevant sales documents at key points in the sales cycle significantly enhances a seller’s ability to connect with prospects and demonstrate the practical value of their solution. Ultimately, this leads to faster deal cycles and increased win rates.

The connection between enablement and sales documents

Because sales documents are so vital for winning deals, sellers need easy access to them. That’s where sales enablement comes in. Sales enablement centralizes sales documents, ensuring that the latest, most relevant resources are at sellers’ fingertips. That way, sales reps don’t have to waste time searching for the right assets or worrying about which version is the most up-to-date — approved materials are quickly discoverable and ready to use. 

In addition to organization and accessibility, sales documents must be customized according to each buyer’s unique needs, challenges, and objections. Sales enablement tools help sellers tailor their pitches to each buyer, contributing to a positive customer experience. Prebuilt templates with approved messaging and customization options enable sellers to quickly personalize presentations for maximum impact.

Today’s sales enablement tools also provide organizations with the insights and data needed to understand content effectiveness. Robust analytics assist enablement leaders in tracking internal content usage while helping frontline teams identify buyer preferences. 

In a nutshell, sales enablement empowers sellers to use sales resources strategically and enhance their effectiveness. It optimizes the entire document lifecycle from discovery to delivery and unlocks the full potential of your sales team to connect, convince, and close deals.

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Best practices for sales documents

Sales documents can vary widely in performance. The most effective ones are well-crafted, compelling, and delivered at the right time. For guidance, here are five best practices to keep top of mind as you prep sales documents and fine-tune your sales documentation process:

Tailor sales documents

Customizing sales documents to resonate with each prospect’s needs, challenges, and interests is essential. First, gather insights into specific pain points, industry trends, and preferences. Then, personalize the content to demonstrate that you understand their business and how your product or service will address their unique challenges.

Map documents to the buyer’s journey

A well-stocked sales document repository has resources that align with each stage of the buyer’s journey (awareness, consideration, decision). Recognize where your prospects are in the sales funnel and use your sales documents accordingly, anticipating common objections at each stage.

Use interactive content

While multimedia elements such as videos and infographics make your sales documents visually appealing, interactive content is even more engaging and memorable. For example, interactive quizzes or assessments offer prospects insights into their needs or challenges. The answers provided can also be used to improve customization.

Track and measure effectiveness

Analytics tools demystify how prospects are interacting with your sales documents. You can monitor a wide range of metrics, including time spent on each page, click-through rates, and document downloads. Feedback like this will help you identify which elements are most effective, as well as those that could be improved.

Leverage a sales enablement tool

Implementing a sales enablement platform to centralize all your sales documents ensures that your sales team has easy access to the latest and most relevant materials. Sales enablement streamlines the distribution process and maintains version control to ensure that everyone is aligned and using the most up-to-date materials.

Incorporating these best practices into the preparation of sales documents and your sales documentation process can enhance the effectiveness of your sales strategy overall, helping your teams achieve growth.

Deliver the right sales docs at the right time

At Seismic, we make it easy for clients to organize a central hub for sales documents for quicker discovery, personalization, distribution, and tracking. Our sales enablement solution ensures sellers are equipped with the knowledge and resources needed to deliver the right sales documents at the right time. To learn more, check out Seismic in action by watching these short, led-by-you demos that address common sales challenges.

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With haphazard content practices like these, governance is nearly impossible. Plus, marketing teams are left in the dark and have no way of knowing which content resonates or how often assets are being used. This is a no-win situation that results in: 

• Client-facing teams wasting time digging through dated assets.
• Clients receiving lackluster, irrelevant content from sellers and advisors.
• The inability for compliance managers to monitor what sellers on the frontlines are sending.
• Marketing teams that don’t have clarity about what messaging is landing in the market.

Thankfully, there’s a better way: content governance. 

What is content governance?

This is the formal content governance definition we use here at Seismic: Content governance is a framework that establishes the roles in content creation and maintenance, the standards that will be adhered to, and the processes in place to ensure high-quality, up-to-date, and curated content for buyer engagement. 

In short, content governance is about excellently overseeing your organization’s sales content marketing strategy. It’s what protects prospective and current clients from seeing outdated, irrelevant content, and it’s what protects organizations from putting their name on non-compliant, off-brand collateral.

Why is content governance important?

Without content governance, organizations suffer from challenges that negatively impact their revenue. Three of the biggest ones are:

Misalignment

Unsurprisingly, mixed messaging about what content should or shouldn’t be used makes client-facing teams skeptical of new initiatives and, subsequently, delays results. A content governance framework aligns entire go-to-market (GTM) organizations by establishing standards that ensure everyone’s using messaging and content that’s directly connected to desired business outcomes.

Seller productivity

A lack of content governance leads to seller frustration, confusion, and lost deals. When frontline teams don’t feel like they have on-brand, relevant content to share with their clients throughout their different deal stages, they’re between a rock and a hard place: they can spend copious amounts of time creating mediocre content, or just accept that they don’t have relevant content to share. This hurts morale and reduces productivity. But by offering well-governed sales content via an enablement platform, reps have the content they need at their fingertips.

Content chaos

We’ve been in the sales content management space too long not to know this: Where there is content sprawl, there is confusion. Content chaos hurts both sales and marketing team performance, but thankfully a good content governance model leads to a stronger partnership between the two departments. A content governance process ensures any piece of content someone finds in their sales content management system (CMS) is compliant, customizable, and current. This reduces seller friction and gives marketers the insights they need to create more of what works. 

How to create an effective content governance framework

Wondering what it looks like to implement content governance best practices? An effective content governance framework needs a healthy mix of strategy, technology, people, and process. There’s no one-size-fits-all way to roll out a governance program, but there are three vital elements of the best programs we’ve seen. These are:

1. Establish and define roles and responsibilities

Ending content chaos starts with a clear delegation of tasks and ownership. Together as a sales and marketing organization, agree upon permissions around who can create content, who can edit content, who should review and approve content, and who should audit and clean up content periodically. 

By sorting people neatly into these four buckets, organizations can provide adequate training and enablement for each role so everyone understands their scope of work and responsibilities.

2. Design content workflows and processes 

Once everyone knows their role, it’s time to make the creation, approval, sending, and archiving of content a repeatable process. That’s easier said than done, but this list of questions and considerations is a good place to start:

• Do we have clear definitions of what content is and is not appropriate for our brand?
• How do we want to train our content owners? How often do we want to deploy training?
• What are our content expiration standards, and who’s responsible for archiving content?
• How frequently should we conduct content audits? Who should be involved?
• What consistent naming convention do we want to use?
• Do we want to provide promotion or use-case guidelines for each piece of collateral?
• If content is customizable on a client-by-client basis, how do we communicate that?

Answering these questions — and sticking to those answers — is much more manageable with sales enablement tools, and we’ll touch on that later in this explainer.

3. Create policies, standards, and procedures

This element of a content governance framework is really just the deployment of the workflows and processes you establish based on your answers to the questions above. Stack hands internally on what the ideal state of your content creation, approval, and sending would look like, and then turn those best practices into concrete policies and consistent procedures. 

A successful implementation of new content processes will directly impact the quality of content in your broader organization. 

Quick reminder: Don’t forget to establish a few metrics for success up front to track the impact and ROI of your content management and governance efforts.

The value of a sales enablement tool

For a content governance strategy to turn into action, companies need a robust, well-integrated sales enablement tool. 

The findings in the Seismic 2023 Value of Enablement Report confirm this. After surveying 600+ respondents in sales, customer success, and enablement roles, we learned that without enablement technology:

• Reps spend an average of 10 hours per week tracking down, comparing, or revising content,
• 83% are often unable to locate the content they need when interacting with prospects and or clients, and 
• 90% of those who don’t have access to the correct content say they find themselves comparing versions.

Inefficiency reigns supreme without the right technology in place. However, with a sales enablement platform, organizations streamline and scale their governance efforts because client-facing teams only have access to the latest versions of content, and all of them are compliant, on-brand, and approved for use.

Benefits of content governance

Organizations with effective governance experience several benefits, but for time’s sake, we’ll focus on these three:

1. Improved content quality: Well-governed content is higher quality, period. From pre-approved customizable templates to simplified versioning, content governance processes equip client-facing teams to surface, personalize, and send only top-notch content. With a sales content management solution, teams can even integrate with their favorite tools — like Salesforce, SalesLoft, Outlook, Adobe Experience Manager, and more — to generate compliant, specific content on a client-by-client basis.

2. Increases content usage and ROI: Did you know only 60% of content created by B2B organizations goes unused in the field? This is often due to two reasons: most sales content is unfindable, and most sales content is unusable. A content governance framework ensures client-facing reps only see and share high-value, high-impact collateral. When it’s all stored in one place, they can stop browsing SharePoint and Google Drive for that PDF from last April and find what they need in seconds in their content management system.

3. Improve seller productivity and efficiency: 97% of respondents from the Seismic 2023 Value of Enablement Report cited quick access to the right information as something that helps them speak to clients from an informed standpoint. With faster access to better answers, it’s no wonder sellers are more productive and efficient with well-governed content.

Control content chaos with Seismic

Content governance is something Seismic handles for thousands of organizations around the globe, and we could handle it for your organization, too. 

Take our customer, Citrix, for example. They’ve used our robust enterprise content management software to review and approve more than 4,000 documents, pages, and links; all content uploads and updates go through one of three approval workflows to ensure everything’s on-brand and compliant before any of it ever is available to their base of 2,000 sellers and 200,000 resellers. This is what scalable, simplified content governance looks like. 

Think Seismic could make your dream content governance plan a reality? Schedule a no-pressure demo today to find out. 

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Conversational intelligence tools track and review customer interactions, allowing customer-facing teams to form a deeper understanding of their conversations with prospects. Conversation intelligence software can record, transcribe, and analyze phone calls, social media conversations, email exchanges, SMS, and more. By capturing data in real time, these tools provide invaluable feedback that sheds light on how to improve customer engagement and sales outcomes.

How does Conversational Intelligence work?

A conversational intelligence platform uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to record voice and text data and combine it with sentiment analysis to understand emotional intent. Using these powerful technologies, conversational intelligence technology can recognize patterns and then predict current and future buyer needs. It also offers recommendations to reps that they can use to drive intelligent conversations — effective communication that increases the value of prospect interactions. The marketplace is taking note of this powerful new tool: according to MarketsandMarkets, the conversational AI market is predicted to reach over $12 billion by 2026. 

Let’s look at a few of the key features of conversational AI software:

1. Call recording: The ability to capture interactions and transcribe them to create a record of every transaction is a central feature of conversational intelligence. Beyond just providing reps with a clear reference for each conversation (and the key points that came up), this supports training and coaching initiatives, enabling managers to review past interactions and coach reps on improvement.
2. Transcription: Conversational intelligence software can transcribe audio into text instantly, making it easier to review conversations, search for critical messaging, and even share with others for feedback. These transcriptions also serve as valuable resources for performance reviews and training, because they provide a tangible record that a manager can refer to when assessing strengths and weaknesses.
3. Real-time analysis: The technology also works to collect helpful data points, analyzing language patterns, keyword usage, and conversation pacing to offer a comprehensive view of the interaction. In addition to analyzing calls after they happen, some tools even provide real-time insights, identifying emotions like confusion or hesitancy that the sales rep could address in the moment.

Ready to dig in? See G2’s list of top conversational intelligence software providers to get more information about different options available. 

Why is Conversational Intelligence important?

Today’s buyers crave genuine interactions. It’s not just about making a quick sale or answering a question; they want to feel heard and understood. For reps, this means a fundamental shift from transactional interactions toward genuine relationship-building. To do this effectively, sellers need more than just good instincts — they need conversational intelligence.

To remain competitive, customer-facing teams can’t afford to overlook conversational intelligence. Gartner predicts that advanced analytics will become common and top sales organizations will leverage data from buyer interactions to build winning engagement models. 

Conversational intelligence drives modern selling by taking away a lot of guesswork. By focusing on customer-facing interactions, organizations may experience the following benefits: 

Deep insights

Conversational intelligence pulls out actionable information from past conversations, shedding light on buyer sentiments and needs. This makes it easier for teams to craft outreach (and tweak their approaches) for each individual prospect.

Continuous learning

By pinpointing areas of improvement, these tools help reps become more effective throughout the various stages of the sales cycle .With data at their fingertips on what has worked in the past — not just for them, but for other reps as well — they can quickly upskill and grow their contribution to the team.

Replace intuition with data

With only a gut feeling to go by, understanding why a customer chose to go with a competitor can be challenging. Conversational intelligence provides real data that can help inform more accurate learnings about successful and failed deals.

Predictive selling

Instead of being reactive, teams can be proactive, as conversational intelligence tools help uncover customer needs (even before they are voiced by the customer). This foresight allows sales teams to anticipate concerns and address them preemptively, streamlining the sales process.

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How to use Conversational AI

Every conversation holds clues to better performance and, ultimately, more closed deals. Conversational intelligence allows reps and go-to-market (GTM) leaders to tap into these interactions regularly, with a clear roadmap to optimize strategies and improve overall team performance. 

Here’s a look at some of the use cases for conversational intelligence among sales teams:

Review interactions at scale

From managing team performance to organizational reporting, sales managers are exceptionally busy, leaving little time to review calls between reps and their prospects. Auto-generated summaries help managers easily identify key phrases, messaging, and content that were used in meetings. This enables managers to review many interactions quickly and get a clear picture of team performance without lengthy individual reviews. 

Update sales methodology

What worked yesterday might not work today. By tapping into conversational intelligence, leaders can identify what drives positive outcomes and what doesn’t. They can use this to regularly update playbooks and enablement strategies based on real, solid data. 

Improve and reinforce training

Every team has its strengths and gaps. With insights pulled from call data, leaders can see where the team could use more education or support. Whether it’s a product refresher or mastering a sales approach, managers will know precisely where to target training. 

Deliver personalized coaching 

84% of leaders told Seismic that more training, coaching, or upskilling could help them close more deals. Conversation intelligence helps managers pinpoint the strengths and areas of growth for each rep, allowing for tailored coaching that makes a meaningful impact. 

Replicate success across the team

Got a team member who’s knocking it out of the park? With conversational intelligence, you can spotlight the tactics or habits that high performers use and share them with the entire team. This collaborative approach not only celebrates success but also creates a culture of shared growth and learning — and that can improve retention down the road. 

Gauge the effectiveness of content and messaging

It’s not just about clicks or downloads — it’s about the people. With a closer look at buyer preferences and behaviors through conversational intelligence, teams can understand what customers really want and like. By tracking specific keywords, topics, and questions, marketing teams have end-to-end visibility into the performance of their content and messaging and the insights to iterate and improve.

Empower effective engagement with Seismic

Conversational intelligence is just one of the many AI innovations that are transforming the enablement space. Seismic’s generative AI capabilities accelerate every aspect of go-to-market activities so customer-facing teams can move faster, engage effectively, and close more deals. Learn how The Seismic Enablement Cloud^TM incorporates AI to help teams deliver smarter content, proactive enablement, and focused training and coaching. Or, get a demo to see AI in action.

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No seller should work alone — they require the support of marketing teams that can enable them with content to effectively engage prospects. Sales enablement materials are critical for reps to confidently communicate the value of a product and demonstrate their industry expertise. Sales content is both internal and external-facing; internal sales content is aimed at educating employees, while external content showcases a company’s products or services to prospects.

Sales enablement content examples

What is sales content? Sales content can cover everything from foundational persona documents all the way to product training, sales scripts, and customer-facing marketing. Here are a few examples of sales enablement content you’ll want to consider for your team:

• Persona documents: To communicate effectively, sales reps need to understand a buyer’s motivations, needs, and pain points. Buyer personas equip reps with research and insights on each target audience, allowing them to connect the dots on how a product solves a buyer’s challenge and helps them achieve their goals. 
• Product training: Product training, such as product marketing one-pagers, manuals, and use case demos, delivers information on features and benefits, as well as context on how a company’s product fits into the broader industry. 
• Competitor research and analysis: Battle cards and competitor marketing materials help reps understand the market and set them up to better communicate product differentiators or persuade clients to switch.
• Scripts: To scale outreach while maintaining consistency, call scripts, demo presentations, and email templates get your sales team on a consistent path. Standardizing this type of sales enablement deliverable ensures a strong brand message and makes it easier to update them in the future. 
• Customer-facing marketing materials: These assets provide education on an industry challenge or topic rather than overtly promoting your products. Whether it’s a blog post, case study, ebook, or video, injecting thought leadership into your sales enablement assets drives engagement with prospects. 
  
  

What is a sales enablement content strategy?

A sales enablement content strategy lays out why you’re creating content (goals and audiences), what you’ll do (formats, tactics, schedules), and how you’ll measure impact (metric-based benchmarks). A content strategy is most effective when documented. This allows you to track progress, make updates as needed, and align stakeholders. The Content Marketing Institute found that 81% of B2B marketers believe a documented strategy is beneficial since it aligns team members around goals.

Why is a sales enablement content strategy important?

Sales enablement content is proven to benefit seller confidence, prospect engagement, and bottom-line revenue. Here are just a few of the ways content can support your business: 

1. Improve the sales process: 57% of the buyer’s journey takes place before a prospect ever reaches a rep. Sales enablement content can prime the prospect with information and education before they reach the rep, as well as ensure that reps are ready to come out of the gate strong when they connect with the prospect for the first time.
2. Enhance go-to-market alignment: A sales enablement content strategy ensures that every rep is working off the same information, including clear audience analysis, product definition, and strategic brand messaging. Organizations with strong alignment are shown to deliver “38% higher sales win rates and 24% faster revenue growth.”
3. Increase seller performance: Sales content helps reps address challenges and offer solutions, as well as improve the efficiency of the process by providing templates and scripts that reduce manual effort and increase the scale of their outreach. 
   
   

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What does great sales enablement content include?

Not all content is created equal. Effective content creation for sales enablement requires a targeted approach that considers the needs of your audience and communicates a consistent message with clear and concise language, engaging stories, and data-based evidence:

• Tailor content to the persona and buyer’s journey. Use examples and language that are relevant to each buyer’s needs. Content that’s tailored to a specific audience and their stage in the funnel is more likely to get a response and build trust with your prospects. 
• Bake consistent, repetitive messaging. Before writing anything, make sure to identify your core messages. Highlight these clearly throughout the piece. Repetition ensures that your message sticks and is remembered by readers as a key takeaway. 
• Use clear and concise language. Straightforward language is easier to read for busy buyers. Content should be quickly digestible, with sub-headings and short paragraphs.
• Include engaging stories. Use engaging stories to draw in your prospects. Including examples and customer stories will help them envision themselves using your product.
• Build in data-based evidence. Prospects are looking for validation, so don’t hesitate to include statistics and studies from reputable, recent sources.

How to create a winning content strategy

It’s time to put your strategy in place, and while it might not always be a linear process, there are a few steps that are critical to creating a strategy that delivers results. 

1. Audit existing content. Review your organization’s existing sales enablement content, and identify which assets are still relevant and usable. Some may just need an update, while it may be time for others to retire. 
2. Analyze usage and performance. Take time to review sales enablement content analytics to see how it’s used and how it performs. If you don’t have a tracking tool in place, you might survey your sales team for anecdotal feedback. 
3. Talk to your sellers. Gather feedback from your sales team on their biggest challenges and what types of content might be most effective for them. 
4. Prioritize customers. The primary goal of your strategy is to meet the needs and pain points of your audience. Frequently ask yourself, “Is this content valuable for our customers?”
5. Create a scalable and repeatable process. The key to an effective, long-term program is developing a consistent and efficient system for creating and distributing sales content. This includes a means of producing content, as well as infrastructure, like sales enablement content tools, that make content discoverable to sellers. 
6. Organize and store content easily. Nothing is worse than docs that get passed around over email or lost on a personal Google Drive. As your content program grows, make sure you invest in infrastructure, such as a sales content management tool, to manage sales content. 
7. Enable sellers. Provide sales the tools, training, and resources they need to effectively use sales enablement content. Don’t forget to establish a way for them to give feedback. 
8. Evaluate metrics and performance over time. Implementing a reporting/tracking system for your content will allow you to understand its performance over time and make informed decisions on when to create new content or retire what’s not working. 

Ready to do more with your enablement content?

The Seismic Enablement Cloud is a unified solution that streamlines the process of creating, managing, and distributing sales enablement content. At Seismic, we provide the rights tools that enable sellers to find, personalize, and share memorable content with prospects or customers, including: 

• Content management: Organize your content in one centralized location, and give your reps the ability to search for materials in an always-current content library.  
• Content personalization: Reps can easily personalize content and deliver a targeted message to prospects based on their persona and stage in the buyer’s journey. 
• Content distribution: Send content faster, while maintaining compliance – helping alleviate the workload on reps and enabling them to scale. 
• Content analytics: Track the performance of sales content and access detailed analytics on its usage and effectiveness.

Discover Seismic’s sales content management capabilities, or get a demo. 

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The evolution of sales playbooks

Sales playbooks have been integral to sales success for decades. But, as buyer journeys have shifted, sales playbooks have also evolved. Let’s take a brief look at how far they’ve come in recent years. 

Why are sales playbooks important?

We’ve already mentioned how helpful sales playbooks are when it comes to navigating rapidly changing sales processes and evolving buyer preferences. Sales playbooks also positively impact your entire GTM team and promote ongoing company growth. In fact, one study found that companies with well-defined sales playbooks and processes are 33% more likely to be high performers. The win rates also exceed 50% for two-thirds of companies that have these in place. If that isn’t encouraging enough, here are some of our other favorite benefits.

Decrease ramp time

New reps have access to a step-by-step guide that they can follow to engage with customers and learn important information.

Improve productivity

Because reps know where to find important information, they spend less time looking for what they need and more time interacting with buyers.

Drive consistency

Playbooks create and clear, concise, and easy to follow processes for every function of the GTM organization.

Increase effectiveness

By equipping sellers to navigate various scenarios, they can quickly and efficiently interact with buyers and close deals faster.

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Buyers also want the content they receive to be personalized and informative. Content that is irrelevant to a buyer will simply be ignored. So, in order to get the content experience right, organizations need to create content that helps them to build relationships with buyers and, ultimately, generate more revenue.

What is sales collateral?

Sales collateral includes any document or materials that sales reps use throughout a deal cycle. While there are many different types of sales collateral, the primary purpose of collateral is to educate, inform, and engage prospects so they’ll move closer to making a purchase decision. Effective B2B sales collateral gives buyers more information about your company, its products and services, and how they help customers solve their unique business challenges.

What’s the difference between sales collateral and sales enablement collateral?

Before we dive into examples of common collateral, it’s important to understand the difference between sales collateral and sales enablement collateral.

Sales collateral includes the sales and marketing materials that are designed to support the sales process. Sellers use sales and marketing collateral with buyers and customers to educate them on your products and services. These are intended to be external-facing and used during sales presentations, meetings, and other communication with buyers.

Sales enablement collateral is broader in scope. It includes materials, tools, and resources that empower and enable sellers to perform at their best. Sales enablement assets equip and support sellers with the knowledge, skills, and resources they need to succeed in their roles. Sales enablement documents include both customer-facing materials (sales collateral) and internal resources like training content, sales playbooks, messaging desks, and competitor analysis materials. 

Sales and enablement collateral are equally important because they both help sellers do their jobs quickly and effectively. In this post, we’ll dive into specific examples of sales collateral and how they impact your company’s bottom line. 

Common sales collateral examples

Regardless of the type of collateral you send buyers, it should clearly convey useful information that addresses their questions and needs. Some of the most common collateral materials include:

• Blog posts: Blog posts are one of the best formats for building awareness with new buyers. They demonstrate thought leadership, helpful knowledge, and expertise on a variety of topics. Blog posts have high shareability and are great for sellers to share on social media and in emails.
• eBooks: Similar to blog posts, eBooks effectively promote and raise awareness of your organization. They also provide helpful education on common challenges.
• Case Studies: Testimonials are powerful sales materials. They provide tangible and social proof that your company has helped others navigate and solve similar challenges and pain points.
• Research reports: Research reports, also called white papers, often include third-party research that positions your company as a market leader. Organizations may also conduct their own research on a specific trend or topic and share the findings. These are best for presenting research findings, facts and figures, and other specific data. 
• Product demos: Personalized demos are a direct way to show buyers the ins and outs of your product while demonstrating how it helps them solve their specific challenges.
• Knowledge bases: A knowledge base or FAQ site provides a solid collection of articles and reports created by your organization. These bolster a buyer’s confidence in your capabilities and availability to answer their questions once they become a customer. 
• Newsletters: Newsletters can help keep your brand top-of-mind, share important company news, and foster deeper relationships.

Why is sales collateral so important?

Sales collateral is an important tool in the sales cycle. In fact, 95% of purchasing decisions are directly influenced by content. Sales collateral helps sellers:

Build credibility

Sales content that provides relevant and personalized information adds an extra layer of credibility for your sellers and organization.

Drive engagement

A great piece of sales collateral paired with a friendly seller is a powerful combination that leaves a lasting impact with buyers. As a result, they’re more likely to engage with a seller and continue the conversation.

Close more deals

82% of buyers review an average of 5 pieces of content before making a purchase. Without the right content delivered at the right time, deals will stall and potentially end as closed-lost.

Mapping sales materials to the buying process

Today’s buying process is more complex than ever. The best sales collateral aligns with the buyer’s journey and supports buyers as they move from stage to stage. Let’s take a closer look at these stages and what types of sales collateral is most effective for each. 

The first stage is awareness. Buyers have identified a challenge they want to solve and are actively researching information to better understand the problem and possible solution. Awareness-level content brings buyers to your site, introduces your company and products, and provides helpful information. This type of collateral often includes eBooks, blog posts, and webinars.

Once a buyer discovers your business, you need to deliver relevant collateral that keeps you at the top of their consideration. This is when sellers start conversations, build relationships, and learn more about the buyer. Because they’re likely considering multiple vendors or options, sales collateral needs to show how your product can fit into their business and help them reach their goals. This is when case studies and personalized demos are useful.

Over time, buyers will narrow down their options and make a final decision. So, it’s important to provide materials that facilitate conversations, foster authentic relationships, and reinforce the benefits of partnering with your organization. Pricing guides, case studies, and competitor comparisons are essential during this stage of the deal cycle. 

The buyer’s journey doesn’t stop once a prospect becomes a customer. Now, it’s time to drive satisfaction to encourage retention and growth. By providing FAQ’s, newsletters, and customer-only events, your organization will build stronger relationships and encourage customers to become advocates.

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Sales collateral best practices

Assess your sales materials

First, take inventory of your current sales collateral library. Gather all your content, then take a step back to review each piece. Consider if it supports your organization’s goals and objectives. This will help you identify what type of collateral is missing. And remember, if one part of your collateral becomes outdated, it doesn’t mean the entire piece is useless. Search for ways to keep the parts of content that works while discarding anything that’s no longer relevant or up to date.

Tailor collateral to the buyer’s journey

It’s important to understand the process your buyers take to make a purchase decision so you can customize your collateral accordingly. Remember, personalized sales content is far more engaging than generic marketing materials. Give your sellers the ability to quickly and easily customize content for each buyer.

Talk to your sellers

The people who have the best ideas and feedback about your content are the ones who use it each day. Ask your sellers what content they find most useful or used most often. At the same time, find out what they rarely use or would like to see created to better address their needs.

Track and measure collateral effectiveness

Monitor content analytics such as open rates for email attachments, engagement with digital collateral, and conversion rates at different stages of the sales process. This will help you refine and improve your collateral over time.

Leverage a sales enablement tool

Let technology be your partner! A dedicated sales content management system organizes, stores, and manages sales collateral. Let’s learn a bit more about the value of an enablement tool and how it helps organizations manage collateral.

The value of enablement tools for sales collateral 

A recent survey of more than 1,200 full-time sales, enablement, and customer service professionals found that enablement tools help organizations effectively manage and use their sales collateral. In The 2023 Value of Enablement Report, 9 in 10 respondents report using enablement tools in their job, and 99% of them agree that it makes their jobs easier. Let’s take a look at why organizations need enablement technology. 

Time saved

Sellers in organizations without an enablement tool spend an average of 10 hours per week searching for and updating sales and marketing materials. However, respondents at organizations that use an enablement tool save 13 hours each week.

Confident sellers

It’s also worth noting that quick access to sales collateral enables sellers to not second-guess themselves. 97% of sellers say that quick access helps them speak to buyers from a more informed standpoint. Comparatively, 51% of respondents at organizations without an enablement tool say that they have misspoken during a sales or customer call. 

Increased productivity 

88% of respondents say that an enablement tool allows them to be more productive in their roles. When sellers can quickly locate the right content at the right time, they can shift their focus to other high-priority and revenue-generating activities. However, productivity significantly decreases at organizations without enablement technology. 91% of respondents agree that not having access to the content they need makes them feel less productive. 

How to organize sales collateral

Sales collateral only works if it’s easy to find, personalize, and share with buyers. Effectively storing and organizing sales collateral is crucial for ensuring that your sales team can access, use, and distribute materials effectively. Here are some tips organizations can follow to streamline sales collateral management and organization. 

Say goodbye to sales content chaos

Sales collateral is a valuable tool for every go-to-market team. But in order for sales content to be as effective, it has to be easily accessible, engaging, and personalized. Sales and marketing teams use Seismic’s sales content management tool to power content accessibility and personalization at scale. With Seismic, sellers can find useful collateral, customize it for each prospect, and share it in a matter of seconds. The result is faster deal cycles and more engaged buyers. Want to learn more? See Seismic’s content management platform in action.

The post Sales collateral best practices appeared first on Seismic.

What is a sales content management strategy?

Because sales content is so important, organizations need to have a well-designed sales content management strategy in place. Sales content management is the process of creating, organizing, storing, and sharing content in one central location. This ensures that sellers can easily find, personalize, and share relevant content with buyers at the right time.

Why sales content management is important

Sellers are working in a more competitive and ever-evolving sales landscape. Because of the transition to remote and hybrid workforces, along with changing buyer preferences, go-to-market teams have to embrace virtual selling to find new ways to connect with buyers and create meaningful relationships.

Buyers are also researching products and services, comparing competitors, and looking at customer reviews before they talk  to a sales rep. So, when they finally engage with your sales team, they expect to receive useful information that answers their specific questions. The ability for sellers to address a buyer’s needs and deliver relevant sales and marketing content at the right time is the one of the best ways to keep them informed and moving through the sales cycle.

Benefits of content management

Creating a single source of truth for your sales enablement resources is extremely valuable. Not only will it help sellers become more successful in their roles, it can also:

Improve productivity

Sellers currently spend nearly 70% of their time on non-selling activities and that includes searching for content. But when sellers know where to find  sales collateral, they spend less time looking and more time focusing on their top priority: selling.

Promote accurate messaging and content usage

On average, 65% of content that’s created by marketing goes unused by sellers. Instead, reps spend time crafting their own content which increases the risk of delivering inaccurate information or inconsistent brand messaging. Sales content management increases the likelihood that marketing-produced and approved content will be seen and used by sellers.

Streamline and accelerate the sales process

By giving sellers access to relevant content that can also be personalized, they can better provide prospects with content that’s engaging, relevant, and useful. This can accelerate deal cycles and move prospects through the buying process much more quickly.

What is a sales content management system?

In order to create an effective content management process, more organizations are turning to sales content management systems (CMS). A content management system is a type of software that stores sales and marketing content all in one place. This provides go-to-market teams the ability to search and find the right collateral right within the sales enablement app. The best content management software also does more than store content; it also automates processes, provides reps with customization flexibility, and recommends additional pieces of useful content. This functionality helps sellers quickly provide the most relevant information to buyers and move deals forward.

How to use sales content management tools

Sales content management systems are a great way to streamline the sales process and create a simplified workflow for your sales team. Here are just a few other ways that go-to-market organizations can use this type of sales enablement tool.

Engage with buyers before and after meetings

In the world of virtual selling, every moment sellers have with a buyer matters. Sellers can easily access and share relevant content before and after meetings so they can spend that time asking and answering questions and building meaningful relationships. Buyers can revisit and share that content with other stakeholders as much as they like.

Maintain compliance

Content management systems also ensure that the content sellers send is up-to-date, on-brand, and compliant with industry or company regulations. CMSs give sellers as much or as little flexibility for content customization as sales leaders want them to have. Teams can also use this sales enablement software for content approvals before it’s shared with both internal and external audiences.

Define user permissions

A sales content management platform also gives administrators and leaders the ability to create user groups and set various permissions across each group. First, this ensures that users only have access to the content they should. For example, a sales team that is responsible for selling a specific product would only see the sales collateral that’s been assigned to their user group instead of seeing content for each and every product your company offers. This also makes it easier to organize content so that sellers have quick access to the most relevant content. Additionally, administrators can determine how sellers can save assets and share content with prospects.

Update content assets automatically

Because a sales content management system creates one golden source for sales enablement materials, teams can easily update content in one place instead of tracking down each location where it may be stored. The updated content is then pushed out to those who have access to it as a way to ensure that everyone has the latest and greatest version.

Track content usage and engagement

Marketing teams spend a lot of time and resources creating high-value sales collateral but ,oftentimes, they don’t know if or how that content is being used. Content management systems are a great resource for tracking the content sellers search for and share. It also provides sellers with data on how buyers engage with the data. These insights are a great resource for organizations as they plan and strategize their sales enablement content strategy over time.

Sales Content Reimagined

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Features and functionality to look for

If your organization is ready to implement or update your sales content management system, there are a number of things to consider before making a purchase. The best sales enablement software for your team needs to solve the challenges that your sellers face while also optimizing the sales process. Here are just a few features we recommend reviewing.

• File support: Your sales and marketing content likely lives as PDFs, slide decks, documents, videos, and more. Make sure that whatever sales content management system you move forward with supports all of the file types that your organization uses.
• User settings and controls: Some content management systems also let leaders and administrators set specific permissions for content customization. If your organization is part of a highly-regulated industry or wants to ensure content remains on-brand, look for a tool where you can update settings that give as much flexibility for editing as you need.
• Accessibility: The shift to virtual selling also means that the mobile workforce and use of mobile devices has increased. Look for a management tool that gives sellers easy access from both computers and mobile devices.
• Integrations: Your CMS is likely only one part of a much larger sales enablement strategy. Be sure the tool you select integrates with the other tools in your sales tech stack to ensure a seamless workflow for your go-to-market teams. Or, look for a unified platform that includes all of the tools that your team needs to use on a daily basis.
• Analytics and reporting: It’s essential to review how your content impacts sales deals and revenue. Be sure your content management system provides robust data and reporting capabilities so you can track the content sellers use, what type of content engages buyers most, and how content is performing throughout the sales process.

Manage sales content with Seismic

Is your organization ready to improve its sales content management process? Seismic’s leading sales enablement software features the CMS you need to easily create, store, update, and share content. This provides sellers with the right content that they need for every interaction which improves the time spent selling and overall win rates. Read how one customer improved the likelihood of a deal closing by 35% by delivering content with Seismic. Or, get a demo to learn more about Seismic’s sales enablement and content management tools.

The post Sales content management guide appeared first on Seismic.

Content analytics is the data and insights that offer a comprehensive view of how and when content is shared, who consumes it, and how it influences revenue. Content analytics provide organizations actionable insights to optimize content and workflows, enhance storytelling, and improve business outcomes.

Why is it important to track content performance?

Content performance data will help you identify areas that need improvement and show you where to shift your focus. After all, if a specific piece of content consistently outperforms another, using the more successful content can increase ROI. Here are just a few reasons why it’s beneficial to track content performance.

Identify most and least used content

Good content is one of the most powerful tools a company can have. When used correctly, it quickly builds trust between you and your consumers. By viewing your content, they should be able to glean all of the basic information about you that they need.

But how do you know whether or not your content is helpful? Identify the kind of content your reps are using, how they use it, and how often. It should contain information regarding the following topics:

• Who are you (as a business)?
• What do you do?
• What are your company values?
• What do you have to offer potential consumers?
• What makes you unique, and why should the audience be interested?

Determine how content is being used at each point of the deal cycle

If you have yet to perfect the art of the sales funnel, content analytics will help. It shows you how effective each type of content is relative to when you implement it. This will allow you to track patterns and pinpoint the optimal time to use different content pieces. You need this because even the best content can be ineffective if you time it wrong.

Understand how content influences deal progression

The main reason to use content analytics is to track what content is working ideally and how it impacts your business’s sales. If you are making content without tracking its performance, you may be putting time, money, and effort into something that is giving you minimal return. By keeping track of your content’s effects on deal progression, you can make sure that you only use content that benefits your business’s bottom line.

Uncover what type of content is missing from your organization

Content analytics does more than tell you which content is effective, which needs to be gotten rid of, and when to use it. It also helps indicate content opportunities  that your business can use to improve sales and audience engagement.

Content metrics to track

Content analytics can be used by every team within the organization. Marketers use content analytics to understand what content sellers use and how well it resonates with prospects. Sales reps can use content analytics to see how long buyers engage with content and use these insights to personalize their outreach. Sales and enablement leadership use content analytics to identify winning workflows and scale them across the organization.

So, how do they capture these insights? There are several key metrics that help go-to-market (GTM) teams capture a comprehensive picture of their activities. We’ll review each of them across the GTM lifecycle.

Content management metrics

Content management is the practice of collecting, maintaining, and publishing your organization’s content. Content analytics is a crucial component of content management, especially when tracking content freshness and what content reps are looking for.

• Content freshness: Content freshness is a term used to refer to how new, up-to-date, and relevant your content is. Stale content will not catch your target audience’s attention and, if it’s bad enough, can even discourage leads from doing business with you.
• Content searches: The right content management software can help you determine what content reps are looking for and whether they run searches that produce zero results. Tracking content searches will tell your marketing team which content is still relevant, must be updated, or can be done away with.

Content management is a big task and isn’t something that your employees can do manually or by hand. Implementing content management software is an investment that all businesses should make.

Content usage metrics

Before content is shared with prospects, it is first shared with sales reps. In order to create valuable content, marketers need to understand what’s popular with sellers. The following metrics will help you understand content usage:

• Downloads: How many times have sales reps downloaded content.
• Shares: How many times has an asset been shared by sales reps.
• Edits: Are sales reps modifying or updating content to personalize it for buyers?
• Uploads: Track how many new assets are created and added in a given period of time.

These metrics tell the story of how marketing and sales create and consume content. By understanding how and when sellers interact with content, marketers can work more efficiently and produce more of the content that sellers need.

Content engagement analytics

Buyers engage with content that helps them resolve their business challenges. The amount of time a prospect spends viewing content, as well as the links they click tells an important story. These insights allow for more meaningful conversations and help revenue teams determine how content influences opportunities. There are a handful of metrics that allow your GTM organization to measure engagement, but here are four types of analytics to start with:

• Average page views: How many pages do readers view after engaging with a specific piece of content
• Median view time: How engaging is the content you share with prospects? Measure content effectiveness by determining how much time is spent engaging with content.
• Engagement by sender: Identify the sellers that receive the highest engagement on the content they share with buyers.
• Engagement by content: Identify the content that yields the most engagement and drives more opportunities and deals. 

By combining these metrics, your GTM team can begin to create a comprehensive picture of buyer engagement. When your team understands which content drives more views, the longest view times, and who generates the highest engagement, you can understand what resonates with your buyers and begin to scale best practices. You can also use these metrics to set benchmarks that your team can use to measure performance over time.

Content value and ROI

At the end of the day, content is only as valuable as its ability to create opportunities. In order to understand how valuable your content is, you need to understand how buyers engage with it throughout their journey.

Content by sales stage: Monitor the content that buyers engage with at different stages of their purchasing journey.

Content influenced opportunities: At the end of a closed deal cycle, identify which content the buyer engaged with and whether it led to a closed-won or closed-lost opportunity.

Identifying where buyers engage with content during their purchasing journey helps determine when content is most effective and how it helps progress conversations. By understanding which content helped win or lose new business, your sales reps can use these insights to tailor their content experiences for future buyers.

The perks of using content tracking tools

Content analytics is a must-have for all businesses. Still, it can be daunting for smaller companies or those that are new to the concept. But what if it didn’t have to be? Content tracking software makes the process significantly easier and more efficient. Here are just a few things that content tracking software can help you accomplish.

Pull data and reports for actionable insights

Content tracking tools offer many new and improved ways to gather, store, and organize data and content reports. These can then be used to fine-tune content usage strategies, pinpoint weak spots in your process, or identify any content you may be missing.

Share key data across the team

While having this information is a big step in the right direction, miscommunication, misplaced documents, and a lack of cohesion across teams can lead to significant setbacks for your company. Fortunately, content tracking software offers optimized ways to share data across teams and team members without it getting lost or misunderstood. It also gives them the ability to access it from any location at any time, in case they need access outside the office.

Dive into content data with Seismic

Now that you know why you need sales content analytics and content tracking software, where do you get it? Well, that’s simple. You can find all the content-related software you need through Seismic.

Seismic’s sales content analytics gives you a complete picture of prospect engagement, actionable insights, and a customizable dashboard to get your information delivered the way you want it. Want to see it in action? Click here!

The post An introduction to sales content analytics appeared first on Seismic.

Even more surprising? Many marketing teams have yet to crack the code to improve their processes and technology to keep up with new demands. After all, in today’s predominantly digital sales environment, B2B marketing teams face an unprecedented number of requests to create and activate personalized content that enables sellers to interact with prospects and move them through the buying journey. But it’s not feasible for marketers to field continuous requests and create unique content for every buyer.

What is marketing enablement?

Marketing enablement empowers marketing teams with the right tools, resources, and information to effectively create content that sellers can use to educate and engage buyers. It also provides marketers the necessary data, best practices, and technology that enables them to align with sales teams and make strategic business decisions. By turning to in-depth insights, marketers can measure the impact of their efforts and better align with sellers to orchestrate campaigns that drive revenue.

The ultimate goal of marketing enablement is to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing activities. It helps marketers better understand their buyers, create compelling campaigns, and equip sellers with the content they need to interact with prospects. Marketing enablement can drive even greater results when combined with a sales enablement strategy and solution. This creates a go-to-market enablement program that streamlines content planning, organizes sales collateral, and accelerates the sales process.

Marketing enablement vs. sales enablement

It’s important to note that marketing enablement and sales enablement are two distinct yet related concepts. While the overall goal of marketing enablement is to streamline and improve marketing activities, sales enablement equips sellers with the knowledge, content, and tools they need to engage with buyers and close deals.

While they support different areas of the business, they both improve the buyer experience and drive revenue. They also rely on the effective use of content, data, and technology to support their respective team and activities. It’s important for both marketing and sales enablement to have a customer-centric mindset that prioritizes the needs and pain points of their buyers to create personalized experiences. 

The marketing and sales divide

The need for marketing enablement has never been greater. This is rooted in the fact that marketing and sales teams are frequently misaligned. In fact, 90% of marketing and sales leaders identify disconnects in strategy, process, content, and culture that hold back GTM efforts​. 

This lack of alignment creates gaps between marketing and sales. As a result, sellers don’t understand how marketing content is relevant to their sales cycles because it isn’t contextualized for specific opportunities. Marketers often lack this visibility and don’t have the insight needed to identify what content is actually used by sellers and if it drives revenue. This results in lost efficiency and performance across the entire GTM organization. In Seismic’s 2023 Value of Enablement Report we found that

• 60% of the collateral that marketing creates goes unused by sellers.
• 63% of sellers say that the content they use isn’t personalizable enough for customers.
• 97% of reps don’t have access to the content they need.
• 40% of sellers say that content is irrelevant to their clients’ use cases and industries.

In order to bridge the divide, teams need a marketing enablement strategy that ensures they’re creating the right content to drive meaningful and personalized buyer experiences. More leaders recognize the need for enhanced collaboration and communication, too. Hubspot found that 44.8% of marketers said that sales and marketing alignment has become an important business initiative over the last year. 

How does marketing enablement work?

Marketing enablement helps to align the goals of the entire GTM organization so everyone has a clear understanding of the organization’s objectives, audiences, and enablement strategy. Let’s take a look at three key areas where marketing enablement helps teams create an effective sales content marketing strategy. 

Project planning for sales enablement content

Marketers need the ability to create an all-encompassing plan that orchestrates marketing activities and content to relevant campaigns and buyers. But this takes intentional strategy and planning. A marketing enablement plan helps marketers create a roadmap for the content and assets they need to create a specific campaign, initiative, or goal. Marketing enablement strategies are often complex because they have so many moving parts and stakeholders. Project planning helps marketing teams prioritize initiatives and allocate resources accordingly. 

Strategic content audits

Content audits are often difficult because of the amount of manual work they include. They often take place across separate tools and systems, and it’s challenging to identify what content is stale and needs to be refreshed. Effective marketing enablement relies on technology that makes it easy to identify old content, refresh it, and store it so sellers have access to the freshest content. This ensures that sellers and others in the GTM organization tell an up-to-date and consistent story.

In-depth insights 

All too often marketing teams hand content over to sellers and that’s it. After that, they don’t know if sellers actually use the content, if buyers find it useful, or if it contributes to revenue. With marketing enablement, teams can track key content analytics and get a comprehensive view of how and when content is shared, who consumes it, and how it influences revenue. These analytics provide marketing teams with actionable insights so they optimize their content strategy across the buyer journey and make smarter marketing decisions. 

What are the benefits of marketing enablement?

Marketing enablement can have a measurable impact on businesses. Companies that leverage marketing enablement to align their GTM teams often experience faster growth, higher profits, and satisfied buyers. Forrester found that companies with highly aligned marketing and sales teams grow 19% faster and are 15% more profitable. More companies are realizing the benefits of marketing enablement, too, with 87% of marketing leaders noting that collaboration is critical to business success. 

What to look for in a marketing enablement solution

Because enablement is so beneficial to GTM organizations, the marketing enablement tool you invest in is extremely important. Marketing enablement technology provides marketers with everything they need to effectively carry out their roles and align their activities with larger business objectives. Marketing enablement solutions cover a wide range of tools and capabilities that are geared for different aspects of your enablement plan. We recommend using a tool that includes: 

• Content management and activation: Support content production, distribution, and governance so sellers have the content when they need it. 
• Strategy and planning: Prioritize initiatives, manage requests, and collaborate cross-functionally in order to create a winning enablement plan.
• Orchestration: Execute campaign strategy, content creation, and measurement across channels
• Analytics and insights: Leverage data and analytics to understand which content is effective with specific audiences and improve content experiences.

The 2023 Value of Enablement Report found that enablement technology is extremely popular, with 82% of respondents saying they use it in their role. And, a resounding 99% of those respondents agree that it makes their jobs easier.

Make your marketing efforts matter

Marketers need to be able to focus on content that drives deals and dollars, expedite production, and empower sellers to access and personalize content fast. That’s where we come in. Seismic’s sales and marketing enablement platform enables marketing teams across the globe with full-funnel visibility and analytics so they can easily identify the most impactful content and deliver more of it—all at scale. Learn how one customer creates and surfaces more than 4000 pieces of content to thousands of sellers. Or, get a demo to see Seismic in action. 

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