Fact: 82% of consumers expect an immediate response from brands when it comes to marketing and especially sales questions, according to a report created by Hubspot. This is quite an important aspect when it comes to deciding if they want to keep collaborating with the company. Having a library filled with sales content would speed up answers.
How can you act quickly and satisfy these requirements? By making good use of a great knowledge sharing platform, with an integrated sales content library.
It’s not a secret that most B2B organizations generate most of their revenue by using sales and marketing tactics. In the ideal scenario, the marketing team is preparing the sales team for success, with content, while the sales team offers valuable insights, so they can remain relevant to buyers.
You guessed it, the results of these two departments working together is the sales content library. But there’s still one big question that needs an answer: how can a business develop its own library?
The secret is to start building it as early as possible. This will make your team more productive, but will also help your business reach its goals more often and quicker. Let’s talk about some of the best tips you can use to put together your sales content library, shall we?
1. Organize your assets
Let’s say you want to start building your sales content library. One of the first things you should do is organize your assets in a logical way. Specifically, we’re talking about separating internal and external documents between them.
Internal assets should consist of any kind of content that helps salespeople, by offering them knowledge, but also insights and work processes. On the other side, external content usually refers to any collateral material that a brand develops to show potential clients. It can be in the form of presentations, sales decks, case studies, or pricing sheets.
2. Group your content by buyer personas
Another important aspect to keep in mind while developing your content library is the different types of clients. These types are called buyer personas and they provide your sales team insights that allow them to come up with relevant interactions with potential clients.
And yes, it’s very important to make this differentiation. For example, a VP of a large company will respond differently to a message than a small business owner. Therefore, working with different content assets, to satisfy the needs of different personas is mandatory.
3. Use only up-to-date content
It may be tempting to import all of your old content into your sales content library. But we would recommend performing a full audit beforehand, to make sure it’s still relevant.
While having a knowledge library is extremely helpful for a company, you should make a habit out of checking the status of your content. Try bringing in just your winning RFPs or due diligence questionnaires, for example.
Up to date information will always provide key insights about your products and/or services. This will allow your sales team to answer the most common questions received from prospects. As a bonus, if all the information is fresh, you won’t need to review the library before allowing the reps to use it.
4. Engage your core SMEs in the creation of the library
One of the goals of your sales content library is to provide your team enough information so they don’t need to bother subject matter experts for answers. However, this won’t happen if you don’t involve SMEs in updating the library, when needed.
Identify experts in each department and ask them to check their business unit’s content for the library periodically. Even though this could take them some time, at least in the first place, this approach is clearly better than calling on them each time a sales rep is stuck and needs extra explanations.
5. Include content links in your email templates
There will be situations when no matter how good and useful your content library is, at least some of your sales reps will come up with excuses for not using it. Therefore, it’s your responsibility to make sure this won’t happen.
One of the best ways is to create email templates they can use, and include in it links to relevant content. This will not only make it easier for them to access the information they need, but it will also save a significant amount of time.
Conclusion
Keep this in mind: sales enablement can be a real challenge, not to mention that it’s neverending. However, as long as the sales team has a great relationship with your marketing department, on an ongoing basis, and share insights to develop new, engaging content that converts, things become easier.
With the right tools, like a solid sales content library, able to complement your sales team’s workflows, ROI will be quick to follow. What does this translate to? Closing more deals than your competitors, who haven’t made the step forward and still rely on emails and spreadsheets.
Looking forward to finding even more about how knowledge sharing can help your business? Check out our coverage of some of the most important reasons why it’s crucial for success.
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