Content.
‘Content’ comes in many forms and is used in many ways throughout the marketing and sales processes, but one thing’s for certain: Content is the backbone of the sales conversation – it’s the starting point of most conversations and you can’t close a deal without it.
And yet, 65% of content created for sales is wasted and the biggest complaint from sales with respect to content is that they can’t find it.
Sales relies on marketing to produce content. Most marketers recognise that the days of producing a one-size-fits all content library and “tossing it over the fence” to sales have long-since passed. Savvy marketers know that content needs to talk to the unique buyer, should be mapped to the selling stage, industry, geography and so on. For large organisations, this practice creates 1000s of pieces of content, which any given rep must swim through to find the piece they need. The trick of course, is making sure sales can find what they need when they need it. When done right, however, the benefits are staggering.
The folks at Aberdeen Group have spent a lot time researching this, and recently published a few pieces of content detailing the importance of sales enablement and the benefits it provides. Their conclusion? Sales Enablement is a “Must Have.”
It’s all About That Content: Why Sales Enablement is the New Must Have
This SmartBrief looks into the ways a thorough sales enablement strategy helps marketers deliver the right content at the right time while helping sales teams thrive. It hits on the importance of closed-loop analytics in the content cycle, citing that sales-enabled sellers are 3X better at using predictive analytics to understand how buyer content consumption impacts the likelihood of sales deals to be won or lost, which makes it easier for them to go after the deals that are most likely to come to fruition.
This, of course, makes perfect sense. When sales can give marketing feedback about what works and what doesn’t, marketing can up their game and improve content based on real data.
Building Toward a Sales Enablement Win: Where Should I Start?
Aberdeen’s more in-depth KnowledgeBrief explores how you can use sales enablement to help your sales team grow revenue 100% faster and meet your marketing business objectives (MBOs) this year. It was penned by Peter Ostrow, the VP of Research at Aberdeen and expert in sales processes and efficiencies, and dives into content’s role in high-performing sales organisations. Peter explains how investing in sales enablement can yield measurable business results that create multiples of the value on the initial investment, if deployed and measured effectively.
No Longer a Luxury: Why the Best-in-Class View Sales Enablement as a Must-Have
The last element rounding out this trifecta of valuable research is a full study of more than 250 end users in sales leadership and sales operations organisations that was developed to help understand how best-in-class organisations use sales enablement to improve sales effectiveness.
Aberdeen found that organisations with structured sales enablement programs saw:
- 62% higher team quota attainment
- 205% higher revenue growth
- 725% higher sales velocity
- 23% higher lead conversion rate
These numbers are truly incredible and offer strong support for deploying a sales enablement solution sooner rather than later. In fact, the study showed that more than 60% of best-in-class sales organisations have a formal competency in sales enablement for a good reason: it works! Organisations with this visibility see an 85% sales quota attainment, more than three times more than the worst performers.
Download this report with our compliments and see for yourself why Aberdeen says that sales enablement is no longer a luxury.
If all of this information has piqued your interest in learning more, be sure to check out this on-demand webinar (available until June 2016) co-presented with Peter Ostrow from Aberdeen. You’ll learn how to:
- Create a more efficient library of market-facing content
- Leverage the power of user feedback to curate the most effective messaging
- Discover immediate insights into how buyers and prospects react to pitches
- Analyze content effectiveness in real-time, and convert this intel into better pipeline management
- Integrate the entire sales enablement lifecycle into CRM
If you’re looking to use sales enablement to drive better business results in 2016, you don’t want to miss this session – you’ll leave with a solid understanding of how to turn content into revenue.
Access the on-demand webinar now!
I hope you find value in this research, and can use it to help within your own organisation as you plan your sales enablement efforts in 2016.
