Developing useful and effective sales content is still an uphill battle for most marketing teams. There’s immense pressure to provide compelling materials for the sales team to present to customers, but too often, marketers are working with blinders on.

Research from CSO Insights highlights every marketer’s worst nightmare – only 30 percent of sellers say they have the content they need for sales calls.

Despite best intentions, marketing teams rarely get the chance to join salespeople for customer calls and in-person meetings—to see or hear how they react to the materials and gauge how they perform “in the wild.” More often, content just gets tossed over the wall to sales, with only anecdotal feedback from sales reps to inform future iterations. The disconnect results in a lot of finger pointing, which puts the two teams at odds and can negative impact results.

This misalignment is not due to lack of good intent.

Aberdeen Group research shows that 60 percent of Sales teams have a high priority need for content that improves differentiation, and over 50 percent lack sales content that maps to the buyer journey.

Best-in-class organizations have started to address this expectation gap—in fact, they are nearly 2x better, according to Aberdeen—by understanding the dramatic changes that are occurring in B2B selling and investing in more modern tools.

Buyer expectations are changing—they are already highly educated about your company, competitors, products, and yes, even your foibles.

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They need content that specifically addresses their concerns and provides a deeper dive into the value prop beyond just a list of features. And, buyers need expert interaction, more individual attention, with rich media content like video, demos and the ability to take control over their own experience.

As buyers’ expectations increase, it puts more pressure on marketers to ensure that the content they create maps to the types of materials buyers need at the right stage, and accurately measures true engagement with content.

Here are some tips to improve the marketing ROC – Return on Content:

Move away from static presentations. Provide rich, multimedia experiences that not only wow buyers, but also give them exactly what they need to know. Interactive content that allows the buyer to self-navigate and explore the content they care about most is measurably more effective than attachments. Giving buyers interactive, on-point content cuts to the chase and allows them to get the information that matters and answers their most pressing questions.

Make content readily accessible. Sales teams should spend as much time with customers as possible, not spending time searching for content across multiple content libraries or systems.

One recent study by the Alexander Group found that salespeople spend as little as 15 percent of their time actually engaging with customers because they’re tied up compiling materials, logging activity into the CRM, and performing other administrative tasks. Help alleviate this burden providing the tools sellers need to access sales content from anywhere, on any mobile device. When sellers have instant access to content at their fingertips (even offline), they can close deals faster.

Empower sales to tailor content on-demand. Too much sales content is still “one-off”—meaning salespeople download content, create their own versions, and store content on their hard drives. Provide a library of proven slides, media, and documents that individual sellers can choose from, a la carte, to build customized presentations for individual buyers—but that always link back to a common repository that marketing teams can manage and tune.

Provide a scalable way to listen to “game tapes.” Marketing is tasked with not only crafting the perfect message and materials, but also making sure they’re delivered properly. But doing that in a vacuum is nearly impossible, and traditionally it’s hardly practical for marketers to attend lots of customer meetings.

A more modern approach is to add sales call recording capabilities that allow marketers to review the “game tapes,” listening to the whole meeting or just specific portions.

Roll out a new pricing slide? Call recording allows marketers to easily “listen in” on how 20 reps pitch the same slide. This enables marketers to hear exactly how the seller presented each slide and how the customer reacted, questions asked, etc., which is probably the most valuable data marketers could have in preparing content for sales..

Scientifically analyze materials. For too long, evaluating content performance has been anecdotal, with sellers providing their own opinions and commentary about how buyers react.

Now, with digital tools, marketers have the ability to scientifically measure results with hard data gathered directly from the customer. Today’s tools can collect detailed, accurate metrics on presentation open rates, viewing time, which specific slides buyers spent the most time on, if the presentation was forwarded and to whom, and even which slides kept the customer engaged during a live meeting, versus losing their attention.

By looking at customer engagement analytics marketers can better understand how specific materials and slides are being used and how they’re performing (or not, as the case may be).

Build-in continuous improvement. Once you’re moving in the right direction, analyzing performance and taking a pulse on how materials are landing with the customer, you’ll obviously want to use that knowledge to tweak and improve.

Use customer feedback to adjust messages, designs and flow, and use call recordings and slide replays from top performing salespeople to train and coach other reps on best practices. I also sit down every two weeks with my sales counterparts to review what content is working, which slides are not resonating, and listening to recorded slides and presentations to learn how the sales team is landing key messages.

While the digital revolution has given marketers plenty of web-based metrics—A/B testing, click-thru rates, page views, downloads, etc.—quantitatively measuring the effectiveness of the content itself has remained a mystery. But new tools and platforms are emerging that provide an entirely new set of metrics for marketers to measure content performance, or ROC., and impact sales performance and revenue. Today, open rates don’t matter—engagement does.

About the Author: Michael Schultz is the VP of Marketing & Business Development at ClearSlide, the Platform for Sales and Marketing Success that powers valuable, genuine business conversations and enables organizations to achieve better business outcomes.

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