We hear a lot these days about “sales enablement.” While there are various definitions, sales enablement boils down to helping your sales team be as successful as possible.
How do marketers develop sales content within their companies? Is the content useful to the salespeople for whom it is developed? Where is it stored and managed so salespeople can access it? How is it measured?
These are just some of the questions CMI set out to answer in our latest survey, Creating Content for Sales Enablement. All respondents indicated they are involved in some way with creating content for their company’s sales teams. We heard mostly from content marketing/content strategy leaders (39%), marketing leaders (28%), and content creators (24%).
The survey defined:
- Sales enablement as the process of providing your sales team with the content, information, and tools they need in order to sell effectively.
- Alignment as a collaborative working relationship that results in positive business results,
The report, sponsored by Vidyard, refers to aligned and nonaligned groups. The aligned respondents rated the alignment between marketing and sales in their companies as excellent, very good, or good. The nonaligned respondents rated their alignment as fair or poor.
The big picture
Most of this study’s findings suggest the need for:
- Better communication and collaboration
- Better analytics and success metrics
- Better use of marketing technology
Here’s why:
- 68% agree their content teams create content for specific stages of the buyer’s journey; however, only 39% agree their sales teams use the right content at the right stages in the buyer’s journey.
- 60% agree their marketing and sales teams tell the same brand story; however, nearly one in four disagree.
- 54% agree marketing and sales have shared access to data about customers and prospects; however, nearly one-third disagree.
- While most (65%) agree salespeople can easily locate sales content in their companies, 42% indicate they lack the ability to produce personalized sales content quickly.
Alignment plays a role here. The aligned group fares better in these areas. But they aren’t that far ahead on shared access to data about customers and prospects, an area where most companies can improve. And both the aligned and nonaligned groups indicate they lack the ability to produce…Read More
