As a marketer, I’d like to think that the content I produce for sales is always 100% spot-on and customer-ready… that every word on the page or graphic in the PowerPoint presentation is perfect as-is. After all, marketing knows the customer, knows the product and knows what is best for sales, right? Therefore, sales will take what my team provides and use it verbatim, right?
Wrong.
First of all, we don’t always get it right. But regardless of “right or wrong,” any sales rep who wants to meet their numbers is going to take the standard sales presentation and enhance it to customize for their customer. They might add a customer’s logo, customize the agenda in the presentation, or detail benefits specific to that prospect—all important things that show the rep is paying attention and isn’t just issuing cookie-cutter pitches over and over.
This is the best practice used by top performing sales reps. Unfortunately, customizing the presentation for each sales call or online pitch takes time.
Often, to make these changes, a rep must download the presentation from their sales content repository, make edits, save it to their local hard drive, upload to their presentation software or email client, and then present to the client. In addition to being time consuming and onerous, this process complicates version control and sales content performance tracking.
To save time and help your sales reps be more effective, a sales enablement platform should make it easy to customize and engage the customer. Not all platforms are created equal, so to maximize efficiency, consider these best practices that reps find helpful for on-the-go editing and content remixing.
Content Customization
Perhaps most importantly, reps need the ability to customize any document, presentation or spreadsheet easily and quickly and keep it in their sales content management platform—no downloading or uploading. If a rep is waiting in the lobby for a client meeting and needs to make a change, it must be fast and easy.
Some platforms allow editing in limited areas and scope. Highspot provides the option for complete customization leveraging Microsoft Office online, with one-click editing and automatic saving. You choose what works best for you. But the key is to enable your sellers to follow best practices and to make it as efficient as possible.
Content Remixing
Often a sales rep will prefer to pick and choose slides from many presentations to fit the needs of their customer. In particular, in regulated industries reps must stick with approved content. In this case, organizations can provide a master deck of approved content, and reps can create a presentation from a mix of approved content. Remixing does not allow sellers to modify the content of a slide, but enables reordering of slides within a presentation, or mixing slides from multiple “master decks” to create exactly the content they need.
Immediate Presentation or Email
Efficiency is key, and reps continually report that they need to be able to immediately email or present modified content directly from their sales enablement platform. The perfect scenario for a sales rep is to make the edits and press send from within the same window. Removing steps saves time, which means more time for selling.
Data and Analytics
Lastly, a critical component of sales enablement is the ability to track content and pitch performance. One of the more powerful analytics is the ability to track how front-line field reps are changing content in order to get real-time feedback on message quality and customer engagement. By identifying decks that have been modified, analyzing what content has been changed and working with the field reps to understand the reason behind the changes, you can quickly iterate and improve content quality to meet the changing needs of the market.
Easy-to-understand analytics are important, so don’t overlook the importance of data availability for both marketing and sales. When reps send pitches and other materials straight from the sales enablement platform, you’ll get metrics on customer engagement and how materials resonate. The ultimate measure of content performance is ‘Influence on Revenue,’ which provides the ability to track which content was most influential in helping close sales. If you’re ready to make these capabilities available to your field, I’m pleased to report that Highspot can do all of the above, and more. In fact, we recently announced a partnership with Microsoft that has enabled us to offer the unique ability for sales reps to customize and edit materials real-time from within the platform.
If you want to see a more thorough explanation of how easy it can be to empower your sales reps with “one click” editing capabilities in your sales enablement platform, check out this webinar entitled, Empower Sales Teams to Customize Content for Greater Success, to learn more.
