July 16, 2024
The Ultimate Guide to Digital Sales Rooms
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First things first, one of the sellers' most important tasks is to find the relevant content piece and share it with the prospects when they need it.
It’s a simple statement, but not as straightforward as it looks.
Going through multiple documents and finding the most relevant one for the buyers will take time and personalizing it will require even more time and effort.
Simply put, the system provides a coherent environment for sellers to organize all their content assets, along with a pre-defined search mechanism that allows buyers to instantly locate any content of their choice at any moment. It includes a variety of content types for internal and external purposes, including presentations, whitepapers, case studies, brochures, and product demo videos, all of which can enhance sales.
A well-established sales content management system helps sellers locate the right content in no time, share it easily with buyers, manage user permissions, and audit and measure each content’s success in terms of ROI. With this effective system, sellers can be more productive and focus their efforts on selling rather than dealing with content chaos.
The modern buyer journey is a complex one. Buyers' preferences in B2B buying have undergone significant changes, making the process more challenging for them today. Modern buyers are dedicating most of their time to conducting self-research on various products.
Even before they make their first contact with a vendor, they have thoroughly researched various products through websites, marketplaces, and reviews, among other sources. They still contact buyers for information they couldn’t find online, and that’s where buyer enablement plays a key role in serving them.
Sellers must use this approach as their foundation to serve modern buyers. To give them the best buying experience, sellers need valuable sales assets in different forms that can fit with the dynamic needs of every buyer.
However, the problem arises when sellers become overloaded with excessive content during this process.
Result? They can't locate or access the content at their convenience. They are experiencing a lot of friction and are unsure of how to locate their target content to share with their buyers. Marketing teams produce different types of sales collateral that are valuable for sales. But what if all these assets went unnoticed by sellers, or if proper updates were not pushed? Either way, it’s a huge waste of time and effort for both the sales and marketing teams.
Here are the reasons why you should establish a sales content management system:
Now you’ve already known how much significance every piece of sales content in your library holds that can directly impact your deal closures. A well-structured strategy is essential to managing this high volume of sales collateral uniformly throughout the organization.
A sales content management strategy is a framework that determines the types of content assets to create and organize, both internally and externally, to meet the objectives of the buyer or customer.
It's more like a content marketing strategy, where every asset is sales-focused, customized based on the respective buyer's demands, and mapped to the buyer's journey.
Here are the things you should consider while designing your sales content management strategy:
Ultimately, if your seller doesn't use your top-notch sales content or if your buyer doesn't derive sufficient value from it, all your efforts are in vain. Therefore, before embarking on the content creation phase, it is crucial to consider how your sellers will find and distribute the content and how it aligns with the buyer's journey to maximize benefits for the buyer.
Perform a sales content audit to know the current state of your sales content library and identify the gaps. Also, interview your salespeople to find out where they are missing and what types of content they need to provide value to their buyers. This will give you a picture of what's already there and what you need to produce.
Today, buyers are consuming different types of content formats, ranging from pdfs and micro-demos to interactive demos. With the previous auditing step, you may know what assets have already performed well and what your buyers are expecting. Based on this data, along with market trends in your industry, list the types of assets you should start creating and prioritize them for production.
You can't create sales content editorials in the same way you would do for a social media content calendar. It requires a proper timeline and guidelines that are in sync with product feature updates. The misalignment between product, marketing, and sales forced most sellers to use expired collateral in their sales efforts. Having a sales content calendar that is more aligned with the product, marketing, and sales team will help to keep on track with the creation of updated, appropriate assets.
An effective sales content management system allows you to track every action a buyer takes on your sales content, enabling you to understand their preferences and identify the most effective strategies. Additionally, you can determine which content garnered the most shares among the stakeholders in the buying committee. With these data points, collect critical insights to double down on the best content and guide the marketing team for the future works.
Creating sales content takes a lot of time and effort. In the end, it’s all about dollars invested vs. earnings. By calculating the costs associated with the creation, storage, and distribution of a content asset, as well as the value it adds to successful deals, you can accurately assess the return on investment (ROI) of your sales content production. This process completes the cycle of an effective sales content management strategy. This aids in determining the effectiveness of the strategy and determining the necessary steps for corrective action.
Every company is making their utmost effort to produce a substantial amount of sales content. But the winner is the one who rightly organized it. Because multiple tools and platforms are used inefficiently instead of a single source to store and handle sales content, sellers often feel overwhelmed, and they lack the ability to engage buyers with relevant, concise information. This also heavily impacts having outdated, irrelevant assets in the library.
In terms of sales content, marketing teams must work for the assets that buyers and sellers need. Period. If it’s not aligned, then everything would be a mess. However, the primary cause of this misalignment is the absence of a single source of information. Marketers should get exactly what sales teams are craving, and sellers should know whether the content production is in sync with the buyer’s preferences or not. This is why many sales teams frequently encounter difficulties with marketing, and this issue persists.
Personalized content is no longer a luxury. It became a new normal in sales. Today’s buyers are disappointed if the content is not customized to their needs. This simply leads them to gravitate towards sellers who cater to their needs. But personalization is not an effortless task, and it requires a lot of time and effort from the sellers' side.
‘Can you share that deck with me once again, please?’ is the common message that every seller could get if they don’t have a single content repository to showcase to their buyers. In the jungle of email threads, every attachment is getting lost, and both sellers and buyers find it very hard to locate and find the asset instantly at their needed times.
The disorganized content across various traditional platforms leaves sellers unsure of whether the buyer has opened their content or not. They simply attach their best assets and hope buyers open them. This further exacerbates the use of irrelevant, outdated assets in sales, leading to poor buyer engagement.
With sophisticated categorization and filtering options, sellers don’t need to spend more time on manual searches and sharing with their prospects. They just need to enter the tag or relevant phrase to instantly locate the right piece that the buyer demands.
Every company has prospects spanning across different industries and use cases, and they need different content at various stages of the sales cycle. A sales content management system provides a strong centralized system where you can tailor and organize all that content into easily accessible buckets that you want.
It’s quite normal for sellers to make errors, like sharing an internal confidential document instead of the deck that the prospect asked for. Organization-wide access management between teams is very crucial, and sales CMS offers extensive capabilities and workflow for individual content pieces to assign owners, share permissions, and meet other approval criteria.
The buyer experience is all about delivering the things that matter most to the buyer at the right time. No one wants to wait for hours and days to receive your deck and take decisions in the deal cycle. Sales CMS plays a key role in delivering a memorable buyer experience through instant, relevant content sharing at the right time.
Sales CMS provides deep insights on buyer interactions with each individual content piece, which helps uncover what content resonates a lot with buyers and impacts the deal. With these insights, both marketing and sales teams can craft data-driven sales content strategies to create assets with a high probability of success.
Whether you are an emerging sales team or an established team seeking new sales content management system, it is crucial to confirm that the tool you are evaluating has the following features. There is no one size fits all, but these are all the rudimentary things that an effective sales content management software should possess.
As today's buyers' preferences and ways of consumption are so dynamic among different segments, it is very important to have a system that supports all content types, such as pdfs, excel, word documents, PowerPoints, images, videos, interactive demos, etc. At different stages of the deal, sellers need different combinations to move forward with the deal. Through email attachments alone, it is impossible to share large-sized assets. A digital sales room facilitates hosting large-sized assets without any buffers and helps to generate easily shareable links for all types and content sizes that buyers can access without any hiccups.
Every sales team has their own sales content bank to assist their buyers. But some could’ve handled the content bank through traditional tools like Drive, Sharepoint, or Dropbox. So, while you are switching to a new sales content management system, it should provide an effortless import option and be able to sync with the tool you have already been using. This will help you have a seamless transition.
Integration is a crucial part of achieving productivity. No one enjoys using ten different apps and switching between them for each task. Today, every sales team has their own sales tech stack, which spans email providers, CRMs, automation tools, storage systems, and miscellaneous AI tools. Your sales content management system is going to be part of this tech stack, so you should ensure that it provides integration support with most of the tools that you are already using in your stack. This will help you achieve maximum sales efficiency with a seamless workflow for your sellers.
The discoverability of content is the core objective of an effective sales content management system. To achieve that instant discoverability, your system should provide effective tagging and consolidation options to bucketize all your content pieces. You should be able to consolidate your assets based on a variety of factors, such as content type, audience segment, persona, buyer journey stage, region, campaign, industries, account type, themes, and so on. It may look overwhelming, but once you’ve adapted to this level of depth in consolidating your content, you can manage your sales content like a charm at any scale your sales teams are operating at in the future.
All sales collaterals are not equal in terms of confidentiality. Any of your sales reps can access certain sets of collateral, while dedicated AEs can only use others due to ticket size and other confidential factors. Your sales content management system should be flexible and protected to allow for dynamic user access and permissions between the leaders, team members, and your buyers.
This is an essential part that completes the loop. Make sure your content management system provides analytics and reporting features that present the success and performance of every asset you’ve created. You should measure the performance based on sales engagement, interactions, and their impact on the deal's success. This way, you will have robust data on which assets are working well with buyers, which helps measure the return on investment made for all your sales content efforts.
Last but not least, your buyers are evaluating multiple vendors round the clock, and if you are not providing support to present your content while they are searching on their mobile, it's a huge opportunity loss in the deal cycle. Ensure your content management system provides mobile support to offer a flexible buyer experience when accessing the content.
Most issues with sales content among sellers, stem from the sharing of outdated and irrelevant content, which can lead to deal slippage. Having a single central repository with proper workflow and approvals in the system can minimize this. By implementing this measure, your sellers are aware at any time and get exposure to the latest updated assets in the portal.
With so many free tools available, it's easy to get caught up in a mix of tools for your sales process. However, in the long run, this approach can lead to decreased productivity. Establish a centralized content management system that serves as a shared environment for the product, marketing, sales, and customer success teams, ensuring everyone aligns with a single process and stays on course.
Establish a process of categorizing measures for each asset that you produce and move to your pipeline. Starting this measure in your early stages will help you build a strong foundation that can withstand scalability in the future, both in terms of content and sales team members. At the end, this process will only help to minimize your seller's time spent searching for the asset.
Sales content production is not about a single person's or a separate team’s decision. Every team should align themselves towards a common goal, as it directly impacts on the company's revenue. To achieve this, ensure regular training for every team member and foster cross-functional collaboration across the teams to transfer knowledge from the buyer's end to content production.
Sales content management is not a process that can be done once in a blue moon and forgotten away. Buyer journeys and preferences are evolving, and new products emerge every quarter. Your successful pitch deck from the previous year may no longer be relevant today. It’s all about doing consistent sales content audits every quarter and regularly iterating based on the content performance metrics and insights that you’ve collected from your system. This will only help you stay relevant with your buyers.
Are your sellers struggling to manage your sales content library? With Buyerstage's content management system, your sellers can easily create, store, organize, and share the right content with buyers, all with one magic link. This could potentially reduce the time your sellers spend on selling and improve their interactions with buyers, leading to more successful deal closures. If you want to experience it live, book a demo with us, we are happy to guide and help your sales.
