It’s no secret that the current economic uncertainty is a serious concern for organisations of all sizes. This puts more pressure on businesses and individuals to drive results- particularly sellers and marketers. In fact, in our recent European State of Sales and Marketing Alignment 2022 Report, 67% of sales and marketing respondents identify the cost of living crisis as one of the issues likely to have the greatest impact on their KPIs over the next year.
With the continuous need to perform, it can feel like a constant uphill battle for marketing teams to have the confidence to consistently create quality sales content that will resonate with the buyer and drive revenue.
Our research also found that 52% of sales and marketing leaders in the UK agree that they don’t understand which assets are driving results with potential prospects. This, combined with sales reps spending countless hours a week searching for the types of content they need to support sales activities, creates a negative domino effect from the bottom line up, ultimately hurting your business.
It’s more important than ever to make the right decisions now, to pave the way for a successful future for your business by ensuring your marketing and sales efforts are being delivered at the right time, to the right people.
So, how do you get there and ensure that every effort your team is making counts?
Boost Confidence With Real-time Metrics
The ability to deliver quality content to salespeople is challenging in itself, but ensuring that the content is delivered at the right time, to the right people for that specific selling scenario is another. Over a fifth of salespeople state they are not confident in measuring the effectiveness of sales content for closing deals. At the same time, marketers feel the pain of not having complete visibility into how their initiatives and marketing content impacts revenue and business growth. This pain point is shared by over a quarter of marketers, who report not feeling confident in demonstrating the ROI of marketing initiatives.
When marketers are confident in the messaging behind their marketing content, it makes the process of attracting and retaining customers much easier.
A simple way to achieve this is by leveraging a sales enablement tool which provides access to valuable data which clearly shows what content is performing, and more importantly, what content is not. When both teams are aware of what content messaging and formats are driving results, marketing teams are better equipped to replicate and optimise content and sales teams will have an increased level of confidence when delivering it to prospective customers.
Content Marketing Metrics vs Sales Metrics
While it’s important to have individual team performance metrics, you also want to ensure you have aligned content and sales metrics to ensure both teams are optimising workflows effectively and working from a strategy that is set up for success.
Here are some metrics that both teams typically tend to track:
Content Marketing KPIs
Content Marketing teams often use digital marketing KPIs to measure the impact of their content marketing strategy. Metrics include:
- Search engine optimisation (SEO)
- Keyword ranking
- Social media engagement
- Conversion rates
- Email unsubscribes and click-through rates
- Webpage engagement via Google Analytics (bounce rate, page views, user experience)
These metrics are great for content marketers who want to measure the impact of their content marketing strategy and how it is resonating with customers and provide insights at a high level, but they don’t provide the granular data required to truly understand what messaging is driving revenue or what messaging is supporting closing a sale.
Not having access to these data points makes it difficult for content marketers to truly understand what is truly contributing to revenue. Sales enablement takes away that guesswork by providing actionable information on how buyers are interacting with content, which helps content marketers to remove the guesswork and highlights the top pieces of content which are generating revenue for the business.
Sales KPIs
Sales teams use a variety of benchmarks to optimise their sales process and ensure they are prioritising the right sales activities for the greatest success. Metrics focus on sales funnel performance like marketing qualified leads (MQL’s), sales qualified leads (SQL’s), customer conversion rates and sales cycle length, as well as, individual sales rep metrics like average lead response time, follow-up attempts, and closed/won.
While these metrics provide insight into who’s hitting their targets and numbers, they can switch sales teams’ focus onto who’s hitting the numbers, rather than focusing on their main goal which is closing deals. Without access to these metrics, however, it makes it difficult for sales teams to adjust their strategy and ensure they are heading in the right direction. Analysing the progress of sales teams allows sales leaders to track what their sales team is doing right, and what they can change to drive results. With sales enablement, sales leaders can visually see the progress of their sales team over time, making it easier to review, analyse and improve the performance of sellers.
The Answer To Aligning Your Metrics Is Sales Enablement
When marketers and salespeople work together to measure and track the same metrics from a single scorecard it ensures that both teams are aligned when it comes to optimising their performance and driving results. It also ensures both teams are working together as one team to make strategic decisions to drive revenue for the business.
Content Scorecards within Highspot is a powerful tool to demonstrate the impact of the content published, including insights into content usage, engagement, role within the sales cycle, and its impact on business outcomes. Having access to this data is especially powerful for marketing teams when crafting their content strategy. It ensures that marketing and sales teams are both aligned on delivering the right content to the right buyers to secure quality leads, ultimately boosting your ROI.
How to Optimise Content
Up-to-the-minute data arms both sales and marketing teams with the information they need to understand why a sale went well, resulting in a well-rounded workflow.
Taking the time to analyse the data and metrics of your content helps to guide your understanding of what is resonating most with buyers which provides you with valuable insights to help inform and improve future content and the overall marketing strategy.
Having the ability to clearly measure the success of content is not only a way to share data with the sales team on what works but it also guides both teams on how they can optimise the performance of their collective efforts for future activities, to ensure that the messaging and sales approach resonates with buyers.
The data and metrics help both teams to identify progress, gaps, or opportunities within content to inform decisions, optimise performance, increase win rates and guarantee ROI.
Align To Win
When sales and marketing teams are aligned they’re more likely to succeed. If you want to ensure reliability in driving repeatable revenue for your organisation, having a central platform which provides actionable insights is key.
Sales enablement platforms such as Highspot ensure that both marketing and sales teams are aligned on the message and purpose of content, how sellers can access and leverage content, and how content can be improved for the future.
Want to understand how to improve your content performance? Download the European State of Sales and Marketing Alignment 2022 Report for tips and insights on how to do so.
