2. Use Your Best Content:
The Sales and Marketing Lifecycle
Overview
Every day your team sends hundreds of presentations, proposals, and other collateral to customers. This sales
and marketing content is long-lived and is the face of your business to your prospects. And it can make or
break a deal.
If sales people are using poor quality materials, their relevance to the end customer will suffer. Potential
customers use your material to build their own internal business cases and to advocate on your behalf to their
teams. If they aren’t equipped with great content they’ll be less effective.
So, you must ask whether your teams are using the most effective content. Are they using case studies that
resonate with the right market? Are they using accurate product information in their proposals? And are they
using proven, high-ROI content at the right stage in the sales cycle?
The reality is that the most important content – the content that drives major transactions – often goes
unmanaged. Sales people struggle to discover the best marketing material to use in a given pursuit. Marketing
never knows whether their content is valuable. And the result is marketing materials don’t get more effective.
This can change. Sales and marketing teams can use the content lifecycle to deliver great content that closes
deals.
What Is the Sales and Marketing Lifecycle?
To address the problem we need to understand the content lifecycle—how sales and marketing content is
discovered, used, and improved. Doing so allows us to learn how sales and marketing can collaborate to
get higher quality content into the hands of sales teams at the right time and in the right context.
3. Discover Can sales instantly find the great content they need in the right context?
Can sales find content that their peers succeed with?
Can marketing control the content that can be used?
Learn Can marketing see which content is generating real business?
Can marketing spot important content usage trends?
Can customer-facing teams provide feedback to improve content quality?
Enhance Can marketing quickly adjust content based on feedback and insights?
Can content be reviewed and approved fast?
Is the best content quickly distributed to customer-facing teams for use?
Discover the Best Sales and Marketing Content
Let’s look at an example of a sales team building a new proposal. Your sales teams want to send the best
proposals possible to their prospects. But pulling together a great proposal isn’t easy. They may need
datasheet materials provided by product development. They may use product benefits from the marketing
department. And they might need important company data from the sales operations team.
But how do they find the right content efficiently? With thousands of old proposals, hundreds of datasheets, and
other pieces of content stored across the company it is a major challenge. That’s why teams will often default to
what’s at their fingertips. And that could be old, outdated, and ineffective content that doesn’t put your company
in the best light.
So, the root challenge is one of discovery. It must be simple for sales people to quickly locate the exact content
that they need at the right time. Let’s look at the principal elements that make for an effective content discovery
strategy.
Discover Content in Context
When a sales person speaks to a prospect in the banking context
industry in Germany, they are in a specific context. The
content that will likely resonate best with the target is tuned to
address their pain, their industry, their geography, and more.
Simply sending the generic datasheet that you store on your
desktop is not enough.
So, how does the sales team locate the right content? The
critical first step is to establish context. Ask yourself “what are
the parameters that determine an effective sales pursuit?”
Does your product deliver value differently depending on
the industry? Do you have multiple product lines that deliver
different benefits? Are there different messages at various
sales stages?
4. Using these vectors you can determine how to help sales teams discover the right content. You should tag
or organize content based on the categories that matter to your team. Or better still, if you can automate the
grouping of your content and surface it in context you can accelerate this process. So, a sales person will find
relevant financial case studies when looking at a datasheet on your solution for banks.
Find Winning Content
It’s not enough to find content that is relevant. Teams should also discover content that is going to lead to
closed business. How do they find winning content? You are already collecting data about which marketing
campaigns translate into closed business. You already know which products are successful and should get
more investment. But do you know which content is successfully delivering closed business?
Right now if your sales team searches your content vault for a financial services proposal they’ll get a set of
search results. And all of those results will be weighted the same, whether they led to a win or a loss. That is
not an effective approach.
Start gathering data about whether a proposal led to a win. Learn which datasheets are translating into
furthered customer conversations. Find out what the ROI is on a specific presentation. Uncover which content
sales colleagues recommend as most effective, and make this data available to sales teams when they search
for content. That means sales people can quickly locate ‘winning’ proposals that resulted in closed business.
Control What Gets Used
Not all content is created equal. Product data gets
Right now if your
out-of-date, presentations lose their effectiveness, sales team searches
and proposal content grows stale. So this content
needs to be constantly pruned. Ineffective sales
your content vault for
and marketing materials should be sent to an a financial services
archive and the best content should be promoted
and surfaced to sales teams. proposal they’ll get a set
of search results. And
Eliminating ineffective content can be done by
deleting, archiving, or adjusting permissions. all of those results will
Establish a content team that evaluates which be weighted the same,
content should be removed from active usage.
Promoting effective content can also be achieved whether they led to a
by the use of recommendation engines, activity win or a loss. That is not
streams, and surfacing content in the appropriate
context. Use tools that allow you to suggest useful an effective approach.
banking case studies when a sales person is
looking at a financial services proposal.
5. Case Study: Discover Great Sales Content
This major telecommunications company has offices spread around the globe. The international nature
of their team complicates how sales and marketing work together to prepare customer proposals.
Marketing is challenged with how to surface great new datasheets and other materials to sales. And
sales can find it difficult to locate the right content for a given situation.
-- Grouping Content by What Matters - The company has dozens of products and operates across
numerous geographies. So, it can be difficult for sales teams to select the right materials. To meet
the challenge, they grouped content by product names, geography, industry, and other elements.
This allows the team to simply select a grouping and all relevant content is instantly surfaced.
-- Find What Works for Colleagues - With so many employees, it is important to harness their
expertise to determine what content should be used along the sales process. The company uses a
recommendation engine that looks at how teams use content to surface new, relevant presentations
and proposals to colleagues.
-- Enhance Content Quality - The marketing team then uses a ‘collaboration hub’ to centralize
feedback and input into their customer-facing content. Changes to proposals and other content can
be made, reviewed, approved, and re-distributed to the right team members.
Learning How to Improve Sales
and Marketing Content
Marketing must make sure that sales teams always have
the best content available. But presentations, collateral,
and other critical content have been overlooked and
improve
unmeasured. Important customer-facing content simply
goes unmanaged. Marketing needs to understand what
content
content is working effectively and how to improve it
going forward.
But how do they gather the right information to make
smart decisions about which content to promote,
enhance, or eliminate? Without analysis of whether
your content is working, sales teams will continue to
rely on simply ‘what’s close’ rather than on ‘what works
best’. Let’s take a look at what insights marketing, sales
operations, and other teams should generate to make
better decisions about how to manage their customer-
facing content.
6. Access What Content Works and Why
There is a common, false assumption about marketing content.
That is, once it is produced and placed into a content management
solution that the job is done. But that is not the reality. The truth is
The truth is
that when you have critical content it must be constantly curated. that when you
That means sales teams should use the best content for a given
situation. And marketing should invest in and promote materials
have critical
that are effective. content it must
The best way to measure the effectiveness of content is to track
be constantly
back to how well it performs in a sales situation. Did a proposal curated.
lead to a closed deal? Did a datasheet translate into a successful
customer visit? Marketing should gather this data and associate it
with the material used in a given pursuit. This allows the team to
quickly uncover what content is most effective.
That includes looking at which content performs best in different contexts. Did a presentation drive business
in financial services but not manufacturing? Is a piece of collateral more effective early in the sales process?
Marketing teams already use this approach in their email campaigns and website content management. They
must now apply it to the collateral that sales people rely on day-in and day-out.
Spot Important Usage Trends
To make intelligent decisions about what content to promote and what to eliminate, marketing needs to
understand how datasheets, proposals, and other materials are used by the sales team. If sales people are
heavily using one datasheet repeatedly, marketing needs to evaluate whether it is the best possible content.
And if good content is not being accessed by sales teams, then marketing should promote these materials to
the team. Intelligence about usage trends allows marketing to answer questions like the below.
Content has It needs to be re-promoted to the sales team
It should be re-evaluated for quality by marketing
infrequent use It needs to be assessed for how discoverable it is
Is a product or geography being effectively marketed to?
Content has Should a marketing campaign help support the market the content is focused on?
Do we need additional content to support its use?
frequent use Are there other sales teams that would benefit from this content?
Content is Do additional pieces need to be created to support other contexts?
Does the material need to be adapted to better support other contexts?
only used in a
certain context
7. Gather Feedback to Improve Quality
Marketing must always improve the quality of its content. Already we’ve seen that you can improve quality by
using sales data to determine marketing content effectiveness. But there are also more qualitative elements
that can help you improve quality. That involves gathering feedback from users of content.
Did a sales pitch derail at a certain point in a presentation? Are there consistent challenges with understanding
the benefits of a particular product? Does your marketing message fail to engage prospects? These more
intangible elements need to be understood. Providing a simple feedback mechanism to gather input allows
marketing to determine how content can be revised and improved.
Case Study: Intelligence Boosts Content Quality
This major technology company sells dozens of different technologies to customers globally. The complexity
of their product offers and distribution model make it a challenge for sales people to surface and deliver the
best content possible to their prospects. One particular case relates to the delivery of sales proposals.
-- Staying in Control Even at High Volumes - Because of the volume of requests for more information
this company’s RFP (Request for Proposal) response team recognized an area to enhance performance.
They knew that many pieces of technical and business content could be reused across multiple
proposals. The RFP team can take advantage of similar content that was tailored for the financial
services industry. And they needed to use content that had been proven successful in past proposals.
-- Organizing Documents for Fast Access - The content that the company’s pre-sales and RFP response
team develops is extremely valuable. Important content for preparing an RFP includes win information,
vertical data, technical information, and success stories. So it has to be quickly retrieved. But first, how
should it be organized?
The company knew that organizing content with custom metadata makes storage and retrieval
simpler. They defined set attributes like geography, customer vertical, submission date, software
product, and other unique identifiers. And they used tools to make it easy for users to set-up their
own custom metadata fields. Then users can apply standardized metadata to a document.
But even more, teams should investigate technology that will automatically organize content based
on the attributes that matter to your team. This can radically improve the discoverability of great
content by sales teams.
-- Surfacing Content You Weren’t Aware Of - With so many team members creating great content, there
is a wealth of resources available to be searched. But often there are marketing documents that a user
may not be aware of and not know to search for.
Users receive targeted recommendations of new, relevant, and interesting documents that are listed
based on how much they are helping colleagues. Plus, global activity feeds surface new content and
comments from colleagues. That makes it easier to quickly find a new template or other important
information.
8. • Intelligence Improves Content Quality - These content tags can be surfaced throughout their content
tool, based on the appropriate context. So the sales team can not only search for content, they can
also surface related and suggested content that can be more effective in their pursuit.
Critically, the company organizes content based on its ROI and results. Did the proposal lead to a win?
If so, these documents should be surfaced first – through searches or automated recommendation
engines. The ROI data allows marketing to determine whether or not to promote specific proposals.
It lets the team know whether content is missing and needs to be added. The result of this intelligence:
higher quality proposal material gets developed.
Enhance Sales and Marketing Content
Because your sales and marketing content is so critical, it must be curated. It is insufficient to simply place
all of your content into sales’ hands and hope for the best. Marketing teams must continually improve content
quality and manage it to boost discoverability by the sales team.
In the previous section we looked at the kinds of data that should be collected for marketing to determine what
changes to make. Now let’s look at how marketing can work together with sales to improve content quality.
The process of improving content quality must be efficient. Marketing needs to quickly identify the gaps in the
marketing materials. Sales operations must weed out ineffective proposals. And the team must ensure that the
best quality content for a given situation surfaces for customer-facing teams. Let’s take a look at how we can
streamline these processes.
Adjust Content Quickly Based on Insight
As feedback comes in around your marketing collateral, you
should act promptly. Perhaps you need to gather input from
the development team around new product features. Or,
insight
maybe you need to refine the text by pulling in a new writer.
Or, you might need to collaborate quickly with colleagues in
pre-sales to enhance the impact of your content.
This quick collaboration around content requires simple
content management tools to get the job done. Simply
emailing documents back and forth between colleagues is
a recipe for lost input and delay. A more effective approach
is via content management tools that assist with managing
versions, feedback, collaboration, and enhancement.
These kinds of tools radically simplify the refinement of the
documents you create.
9. Review and Approve the Best Contents Possible
Once content has been refined, it needs to be approved by the right parties. Important collateral can’t simply be
thrown over the wall to the sales team. The product team should evaluate content to make sure it puts features
in the best light. Sales leadership may need to review a proposal for quality and consistency. And marketing
will want to evaluate whether content is on-message.
But review processes are often time-consuming and error prone. A survey of 1,400 global professionals
discovered that email was the primary vehicle used for managing approval processes. But when a proposal
is emailed to ten parties for their approval, you get ten replies with ten attachments, and too much complexity.
Teams need a simple, automated approach to handle reviews.
For industries where content is subject to regulatory regimes, this kind of review and approval is especially
important. So, audit trails that identify when a document was approved and by whom can provide a solid
foundation for ensuring that only authorized content is released into public hands.
Distribute the Best Content Possible
Once content has been refined and approved, it needs
to get back into the hands of sales people. But simply But simply emailing
emailing the team won’t be enough. It is critical that
content is delivered to sales teams at the right time in the the team won’t
right context. That requires marketing to look into how be enough. It is
content has been used, and how it should be surfaced.
critical that content
Returning to our discussion of sales vectors, ask yourself is delivered to
what determines when content is useful. Is it determined
by stage in the sales process? By product? By prospect sales teams at the
industry? Regardless of the vector, it is important to tag right time in the
your documents with the right descriptor so sales can
efficiently discover the content. Learn which vectors right context. That
matter to the sales process and which are used by sales
teams to ensure that content does surface.
requires marketing
to look into how
Not every piece of content is relevant for every user. In
fact, in some cases you may want to explicitly block
content has been
content from being used by certain users. That means used, and how it
when content is curated marketing should be careful to
manage content permissions.
should be surfaced.
Conclusion
Sales and marketing content is vital to the success of any sales pursuit. You need to deliver the most effective
content to your prospects in order to accelerate deals. By following the content lifecycle, you can enhance the
quality of your content and ensure that sales teams are always delivering the best message to the market.
