Delivering the right content to the right audience, and at the right time, is critical to B2B sales success. The impact of unused content not only includes the cost of wasted effort but unrealized sales revenue as well.
According to Sirius Decisions, 70 percent of content goes unused. Three common faults emerge when studying this costly problem, all of which are correctable: too much generic content, inconsistent use of sales tools, and information that salespeople and buyers can’t find.
Take a look at your current practices and see how youcan apply these strategies to reduce costs and increase sales.
1. Personalize Your Content
Forrester Research reports, “Sixty percent of business buyers report that vendors give them too much content, and most say what they get is useless.” The fundamental issue is that vendors often overwhelm buyers with “one size fits all” content that focuses on the product instead of its value to the buyer. Unless content is personalized for the recipient, they’ll ignore your message and move on to the next vendor.
Think quality, not quantity. Buyers want educational and insightful content that shows the possibilities for solving their problems and taking advantage of opportunities. You can reduce the incidence of underperforming content by focusing your content creation strategy on personalized content.
Value selling tools, for example, are one way to provide helpful information that is unique to each buyer. By estimating your solution’s fiscal impact on an individual organization, you can capture the buyer’s attention and accelerate the sales process.
2. Organize Sales Enablement Tools
All too often, sales reps download content, modify it to fit their style and use it repeatedly. In fact, Quark Software reports, “Only 14% of respondents fully agreed that their sales team is always using the most up-to-date and approved content.” This seemingly innocent problem though can have implications ranging from slight embarrassment to compliance infractions.
A more effective approach is to organize content into a sales playbook or sales enablement platform. Sales playbooks and sales enablement solutions provide sellers and sales teams with a single source of up-to-date, approved content. Content creators can also track content engagement and reduce the time and money spent on content with low utilization and value.
3. Promote Your Content
With firsthand knowledge, I can say that content that never sees the light of day is content that is a waste of time and money. And it’s not a stretch to conclude that content that is poorly promoted, stored in hard-to-find locations or linked to from obscure places on a website, is underutilized as well.
The implications of hidden content are huge. Veelo reports, “Sales reps waste 7 hours per week looking for content.” From a marketing perspective, tremendous efforts go into attracting visitors to a website. These potential buyers remain anonymous, however, because the content intended to convert them to a lead is not prominently featured on the website. Keep in mind that promoting content is just as important as creating the right content in the first place.
Conclusion
Creating content is costly and sometimes fails to deliver the expected ROI. Improvements can be made by following the mantra of personalize, organize and publicize. These principles can help reduce spend on ineffective content and grow revenue.
Resources
Connect with David Svigel on LinkedIn.
Join the Value Selling for B2B Marketing and Sales Leaders LinkedIn Group.
Visit the ROI Selling Resource Center.
