Sales professionals are by nature customer-centric. After all, it’s customers who determine the content we pitch, provide feedback and insights that drive our business strategy, and of course, make purchase decisions and keep our business moving forward.
By allowing reps to find, customize, and share sales content from one easy-to-use interface, deeper customer connections can be established. The end result: faster conversions and higher sales.
This article examines how reps are using a combination of media formats and engagement options to maximize every customer touchpoint throughout the sales cycle – and how modern sales enablement technology is making it all happen.
Personalization for Better Performance
The first step in deciding what type of content to pitch is by asking yourself a few key questions: What information would benefit my prospect most? What do they already know, and what can help close this deal? And importantly: How can I customize this piece of content to relate directly to my prospects buying needs?
Best-in-class sales reps already know that customizing a sales presentation for each customer is crucial. By making content more relevant and personalized in each situation, you’re speaking directly to their individual needs and fostering a deeper customer relationship. For starters, you’ll want to find a sales enablement tool that allows you make live edits or modifications to a document within the platform you’re already using. This step avoids wasting valuable time and helps sales reps operate more effectively and work more efficiently.
Of course, before you can fully understand what type of content works, it’s important to track where, when, and how it works. Measuring smart content analytics is the first step to utilizing insights that can improve your content and your customer’s perception of that content.
The Measurement and Management of Customer Engagement
Once you’re communicating with a prospect, you’ll start to learn more about their business needs – what piques their interest, what hasn’t worked for them in the past, and ultimately, what value your product or service can provide them. Meaning if you’re not measuring their feedback and tracking their engagement along every step of the sales process, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.
Harnessing customer insights via sales enablement gives you a golden ticket to performance optimization. Once you’ve got the data on your side, you can close the feedback loop between what your customer needs from sales, what sales requests from marketing, and what marketing ultimately produces for the customer. Knowledge is power – and knowing what your customer really wants to see based on their content engagement provides real competitive advantage.
Engaging Customers in the Digital Age
The best sales enablement tools and technology improve performance by helping reps have consistently effective engagements with prospects and customers throughout the buyer’s journey. This means that sales reps are constantly in contact with their customers from start, to negotiation, to finish, and they’re often navigating this journey via the implementation of new technologies. Here are four of the primary features customers are seeking a modern sales enablement platform:
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Sales Content Management: An effective sales content management system should rank your content by what is most relevant and what has performed the best in the past, without any need for prolonged searches.
Sales Playbook: A playbook shows sales reps targeted content for each of their prospects. This tool highlights the importance of personalization we discussed above, and highlights what and when a seller is most likely to need this particular item.
Sales Pitch Service: This is a capability that lets you track your customer’s engagement while you are mid-pitch. During your presentation you’ll receive alerts as your prospect clicks through content, lingers on a slide, or skips over a section entirely.
Engagement Analytics: Every stage of the sales cycle can now be tracked with smarter sales content analytics. You can now measure the smallest details to unveil the largest impacts on your company’s conversion rates.
These tools are just a few examples of what reps are using to gain the visibility and insight they need to optimize their sales content. In the end, their ultimate goal is still to be engaging more effectively with their customers and closing more deals.
Selling as Social
At the end of the day, selling is a social act. And amid all of these new media formats and engagement options, all that really matters in the end is how deeply your customer connections have been established. Your job is ultimately to deliver more value to your customers – with the key to success being cultivating the greatest level of engagement possible.
You’ll soon find that the stronger your customer connections are, the stronger your sales strategy becomes.
You’ve provided an excellent set of questions to ask about content development. They should compel marketers to examine how situations appear from the customer’s perspective. Without that insight, the best marketers can do is to create stuff, send it different places, and hope some of it steers buyers in the desired direction. Many companies operate exactly that way.
The tools you described seem valuable to vendors for developing insights about how their own content is used, and whether it’s effective. But prospects uncover and use a wide range of content in making a buying decision, much of which – I’m assuming – is ‘off the radar’. Do you have any recommendations for how companies can best fill in the gaps?