Marketing automation platforms provide value in helping organizations capture more leads and simplify daily lead generation tasks. However, one of the most impactful parts of the best marketing automation platforms is lead scoring.
Every time new leads come in, marketing automation platforms score, rank and determine what the best next steps are to nurture leads and ultimately turn them from prospects into customers.
The concept of scoring can also turbo-charge a company’s sales enablement strategy. Rather than scoring leads, sales enablement professionals and marketers can apply the same idea to sales content.
Scoring sales content allows marketers to better understand the value of each asset in the selling process, and provide the intelligence needed to deliver advice to sellers so they can get prospects from “meh” to “yes” faster.
The 3 C’s of Content Scoring
The key to content scoring is to go beyond just basic usage tracking. To reap the most benefits, marketers and sales enablement professionals should follow the 3 C’s of Content Scoring – context, consumption and consequence.
- Context
Context is the type of engagement and scenario where the sales rep used the content. Useful information like the prospect’s industry, competitors, stage in buyer’s journey, prospect’s location and more, will help uncover the who and where.
- Consumption
Consumption helps marketers and sellers gain a better understanding as to how the content was used, consumed and shared. The usage can be further broken down to understand how the seller used the content. Was it used for preparation? During the meeting? Or sent as a follow-up after the meeting?
- Consequence
How did the content help improve the business outcome? For consequence, teams need to think through the deal and seller impact. Consider the following questions:
- Did the deal size improve?
- Is the seller seeing an improvement in their sales quota by leveraging this content?
- Are teams noticing an accelerated sales cycle?
By keeping the 3 C’s of content scoring in mind, marketers and sales enablement professionals can improve their content and sellers can improve their quotas.
Content Scoring Method
To score the content, use the 3Cs as inputs into a machine learning model. Integrating a sales enablement platform with CRM will guarantee that content consumption is tied back to outcomes.
As sellers begin to use content, marketers and sales enablement professionals can take a look at the sales enablement platform to see an automatic tracking of record usage, consumption, sharing and consequences. Every time a piece of content is used, the system will rebalance its score to improve the accuracy of data over time.
The platform can also optimize sales recommendations by looking at the sales rep’s calendar to see upcoming meetings, pulling information about the prospect, opportunity and account.
Having this context will help identify the best content for the seller to use during the meeting. This process can be automated ahead of each meeting so the sales enablement platform proactively sends content recommendations in an email.
Additionally, content scoring enables marketers and sales enablement professionals to have better visibility into content effectiveness. Be sure to leverage a sales enablement platform that incorporates machine learning in the solution. Utilizing intelligent solutions can automatically track content used in sales meetings, providing marketers easier access to insights on what types and pieces of content are closing deals.
Be sure to look beyond simple content management. While a content repository is great for collecting and storing sales collateral, it doesn’t do much for the buyer’s experience.
To take the buyer’s experience to the next level, sellers need additional tools built into a fully-integrated sales enablement platform. The ability to track and leverage context, consumption and context is key to understanding what works best, and what to do next to drive each unique prospect and engagement process to success.
In today’s business landscape, measurement is key to optimizing success. To benefit from the content scoring method, marketers and sales enablement professionals must ensure that their sales enablement platform integrates with their CRM to tie recommendations, content and tools to gain optimal success.
In doing so, marketing and sales teams can align on the best content for the right situation and take their buyers from “meh” to “yes” at faster rates.
About the Author: Tom “The ROI Guy” Pisello is an entrepreneur, speaker, and author of Evolved Selling™: Optimizing Sales Enablement in the Age of FRUGALNOMICS. He joined the Mediafly team in 2018 through the acquisition of the company he founded and led, Alinean Inc. In his role as Mediafly’s Chief Evangelist, Tom is responsible for developing new practices for sellers and marketers to communicate and quantify business value to increasingly frugal buyers. He also leads Mediafly’s Advisory Services group in helping companies evolve their selling practices from transactional to value-led.