What if every time your marketing team produced a piece of content, you knew its inherent value? If every one-sheet, whitepaper, presentation, and infographic was so measurable you knew if it worked or didn’t? Imagine the productivity improvements and bottom-line impact (not to mention employee satisfaction) that could result in such progress.
In a recent post on the SiriusDecisions blog, Sharon Little explains how using revenue as a north star for content production can transform an organization’s quality and performance of sales content. She argues that this approach saves time, minimizes production of unnecessary content, and creates more value for both customers and the sales team.
To focus content production on the highest revenue driving pieces, Sharon suggests you:
- Understand financial projections for the year ahead for all offerings, as well as any mid-year changes to the plan, and map the selling motions for the highest revenue segments.
- Document the buyer’s journey for all selling motions that represent 10% or more of your revenue.
- Map content accordingly, filling any gaps. Sales enablement leaders can take this exercise a step further and map training initiatives as well as content. Review this documentation on a quarterly basis.
- Be aware of upcoming demand creation campaigns, along with any pricing or packaging changes. Both activities will have associated revenue models. Ensure the content strategy is in place to support major campaigns and mitigate shifts in pricing or packaging.
Once you’ve done these fundamental steps, here’s where the measurement comes in — and where you can make the revenue connection in actual dollars and cents!
Modern sales enablement platforms can measure content usage throughout the sales cycle, and therefore can analyze content’s effectiveness in moving customers through the buying process including its impact on revenue.
While not all marketers have revenue goals, all marketers can be revenue marketers with the help of sales enablement solutions. Sales enablement bridges the gap between marketing and sales to turn content into revenue. Importantly, this bridge can also help neutralize the finger pointing between the two that so often stalls progress and hinders sales success.
How so?
Sales enablement’s closed-loop analytics let you understand which pieces customers respond to with absolute certainly, enabling mapping of content back to revenue results and letting you optimize content over time. When marketers know what works, they know where to focus their energy and can build a well-informed roadmap of content to create in the future and deliver better, faster, more impactful materials.
Recently, SiriusDecisions published a study that frames just how much organizations spend on content creation each year. It’s more than you might think, and in the associated study brief, you can read the results firsthand and understand some key insights to the implications of content creation costs for B2B organizations. Download the study with our compliments here. If you want to have this opportunity to hear research-backed suggestions directly from one of the leading voices in sales enablement and turn your organization’s content into bottom-line results, check out this SiriusDecisions webinar entitled Connect Sales Content to Revenue to learn more.
By getting a handle on your content creation costs and implementing a structured, measurable approach to content development and deployment, your organization can turn content into revenue time and again!
