It’s a phrase we’ve all heard a thousand times: Content is king. And when you have the right content, you start conversations, demonstrate value, and address pain points with buyers in ways no sales deck can.
So it stands to reason that the more content you have, the better. Right? Well … no. That’s not really true at all. And we all kind of know that deep down. So what on earth does “content is king” actually mean?”
What’s the matter, really?
When we ran our 2021 Modern Selling Study Report and asked B2B sales and marketing professionals what their greatest challenges were, an interesting problem came to light: today’s greatest sales challenge is having access to relevant content. And nearly one-third of sales organizations reported that relevant content is completely inaccessible when needed.
What do these results tell us? One thing’s clear, it’s not the amount of content that’s the issue; it’s how well you organize content and how accessible it is that matters most. That’s what crowns the content.
In other words, too many organizations prioritize quantity over putting the right measures in place to make sure that they can actually access that content. This miscalculation leads to the common problem of content clutter. When you’re amassing sales enablement content with a “more is better” approach, the whole thing quickly becomes a never-ending—and ultimately fruitless—task.
But organizing sales enablement content doesn’t have to be a Sisyphean task (check us out, classics refs, and helpful advice. It’s the total package). Let’s look at what makes it feel that way, and how you can fix it.
Having a “content hub” isn’t enough
In addition to identifying the biggest challenges facing today’s sales teams, our Modern Selling Study Report also found that the number of sales teams reporting content access issues skyrocketed by 45% since the pandemic began. Such a substantial rise suggests that it’s only getting harder to share content and make it visible.
How can you solve this problem? Dumping every blog post, case study, and one-pager you’ve ever produced into a content hub might seem like an easy fix, but it fails to address a bigger problem. Too many businesses ignore the buyer experience when it comes to organizing content.
Putting the buyer experience at the forefront of your content strategy means framing, organizing, and using your content to address specific stages, problems, and questions customers encounter during their buying journey. In other words, it means putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and asking, “What do I need?”
When you think about content through the buyer’s eyes, it’s easier to make your content truly useful. Suddenly, it’s not just one big, amorphous mass of information that you’re trying to contend with all at once. It’s a collection of different tools you share with your customers to get to a solution together.
Use insight to optimize content
We could talk all day about why organizing your content around the buyer experience is a good idea, or we could just show you what happens when you do it right.
Let’s start with Bossard, the leading international supplier of product solutions and services in industrial fastener technology. When they found Showpad, they were still using a 1,000-page catalog as its primary sales tool (talk about boulders…). As you can imagine, that catalog quickly became outdated. Plus, having just one unwieldy resource meant that sales reps didn’t have a way to follow up conversations with any kind of helpful content.
Finding Showpad let their sales and marketing teams digitize their catalog and make it available simply using the sales reps’ iPads. Along with several other sales enablement materials, like videos to help explain complex products, they could now access (and share) instantly.
Today, the team has a bundle of sales enablement tools at their fingertips, depending on what the buyer needs at the time. What’s more, the marketing team can now easily see which content the sales team shares, what buyers are reading, how often, and when, giving them insight into what buyers find most useful. New material is also created both at the request of the sales team and from data available in Showpad.
Partnerships that fuel sales effectiveness
Like many successful companies before them, Just Eat Takeaway had seen massive growth in a short window of time. But with growth comes growing pains. Even as they hired more account managers, new customer accounts kept pouring in. Just Eat’s account managers soon found themselves each responsible for a portfolio of hundreds of accounts. That’s 800-1,200 customer visits and business reviews per year.
Just Eat needed to enable their account managers with a better way to have relevant, guided conversations with their customers. In 2020, they began working closely with Showpad development partner Bridge to build a custom Showpad Experience app that could bring their sales enablement vision to life. And so the Data Sauce Experience app was born.
The Data Sauce Showpad Experience app pulls key customer performance metrics (like average order time and average order volume) from Salesforce, Tableau, and a data lake into an intuitive dashboard that visualizes the data in a customer-friendly way. Letting account managers pull all the data they need for their customers in seconds—all within Showpad.
Account managers now have the freedom to customize data dashboards ahead of business review sessions to help the data tell the right story. This guided customer experience, paired with easy-to-follow data visualizations, empowers Just Eat’s account managers to have more meaningful conversations with customers, leading to high user adoption and more post-meeting actions.
Just Eat’s account managers now spend more time having valuable conversations with their customers. Their Data Sauce Experience app enables account managers to have insight-led and collaborative discussions with their customers about next steps. This has increased post-meeting actions by 40% and led to more opportunities for cross-sells and up-sells.
Accessible content is useful content
We’ll give you one more story of a Showpad customer solving their content puzzle for customers. TVH, a global distributor of forklift trucks and seller of spare parts, wanted to mobilize its sales team. But while each rep had their own tablet, they were only really using them to check emails, not to access and share useful content.
Once the team started using Showpad, however, they could organize and distribute their product information around the buyer experience. This access caused a drastic change in utilization rates, which shot up to 95%.
In this case, there was a direct link between making content accessible and enabling the sales team to succeed. Once sales reps had the right tools, they could do their jobs better and address customers’ questions and concerns with useful material that aided in decision-making.
Organization increases utilization
These examples prove an important point: enabling your sales teams with organized, accessible content relevant to your buyer’s journey will always be effective.
The more you empower your sales team with content that’s informative, contextually relevant, and tailored to actual customer problems, the more valuable that content will be for everyone involved. And the process of finding the right content will feel less burdensome.
To start giving your sales team the tools they need to succeed book a demo with one of our expert team today.
