With more companies investing cash into creating content, it’s easy to clog up your content management solution over just a few months of content creation. For some marketers, that might not seem like a particularly big issue. After all, you made it, you know what the purpose is, and you know where to easily find it.

For salespeople, it’s not so easy. They don’t have a map in their heads of what’s new and what’s stale, and if they have to navigate through clutter, that’s time taken away from actual selling. Auditing sucks, but here are 3 good reasons to hunker down (and how to go about it).

Sales Content Isn’t Getting Used

First thing’s first—one of the most important sales content metrics you need to be tracking is what’s not getting used. Content that isn’t getting used is just content that salespeople have to sift through before they get to what they will use. Auditing doesn’t mean just getting rid of it—it means analyzing why it’s not getting used, which could be for a number of reasons:

• It’s duplicative
• It’s out of date
• It’s generic marketing content that doesn’t fit into the sales process
• It’s hard to get to (e.g., missing metadata, in the wrong folder)
• It’s off-brand, etc.

Like in a marketing content audit, take an inventory of what you have. Begin by with a simple count of what is and what isn’t getting used. Include where content is located in your inventory, along with usage metrics. You should also capture where that content is in the structure of your library.

Find what content is collecting dust and compare it to what isn’t. If you find out that salespeople are creating their own content and have access to it, include that content in your inventory; that’s the best way to see specifically what salespeople are looking for.

Actions you can take include:

• Cutting the content entirely (at least from your sales library)
• Adding keywords to make collateral easier to find (or incorporating it within a guided selling environment)
• Updating the look, feel, and/or tone to match more your popular content
• Create less generic versions of content suited for specific products, personas, or verticals

Content is Only Getting Used Sometimes or By Certain People

Popularity itself isn’t necessarily indicative of quality. Go one level deeper in your inventory.

Find out when content is getting used. When you conduct a marketing content audit, you should categorize content by what stage of the funnel it’s intended for (e.g., awareness, consideration, intent).

Sales content as we typically think of it falls into the intent and evaluation stages, where buyers are closer to purchase than awareness, but as salespeople engage prospects earlier in the sales cycle, that isn’t necessarily the case. You’ll want to categorize what stage of the funnel it’s intended for. You can then compare how you would categorize content to what stage it’s actually being used in by integrating your sales content management solution with a CRM. This can indicate if:

• You’re missing content for different stages of the funnel
• Certain content does better in certain stages
• Using certain content in one stage might be associated with a deal stalling or moving forward

Find out who’s using what. Your company doesn’t have one type of customer, and it probably doesn’t have one type of salesperson either. You can look at content usage using different types of segmentation including by sales rep performance, by region, by prospect industry, etc.

You might find out that some content might be incredibly popular when your sales organization is taken as a whole, but isn’t used at all by your top performers. You might find that salespeople selling to one industry have plenty of late-stage content, while those selling to another have none. Some next steps from there include:

• Guiding sales reps to the content that A-players use
• Removing or reworking content that isn’t used by top performers
• Creating content to fill gaps in segments (e.g., more relevant case studies or white papers)

Content is Getting Used Disproportionately

Marketers and salespeople have certain pieces of content they fall back to. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Sometimes we strike gold with a relatable video or a compelling set of data in a customer’s case study. But when a piece of content is performing on a whole other level and you don’t know why—that’s when you can run into problems. There are two big reasons to look into high-performing collateral when auditing.

The first is that, as we said above, just because something’s popular, doesn’t make it good (or mean it’s getting used appropriately). Once you’ve looked into when and who is using content, you can look at other things that might make collateral “popular” and make sure that the content’s usage isn’t getting artificially inflated:

• Are people presenting it because it’s one of the first items in the structure of your presentation app?
• Is it getting used, but isn’t associated with closed deals in your CRM?
• Do people reach it because they’re guided to it through an interactive questionnaire?

You could find that you need to change how sales content is organized, making sure good content isn’t nested too far down in folders and that content is properly associated with deals in your CRM. You could find that a questionnaire leading people to content isn’t asking the right questions. Make notes in your inventory including where content is in your app’s structure and number of closed or progressing deals individual pieces of content are associated with.

The second reason to dig into top-performing content in your audit is that, yes, often the most popular content is the best. Look at the best content within segments and broadly, and try to crack what makes them so good. List out the common elements of your best content in your inventory, and see how you can apply those principles to content that doesn’t perform as well.

This isn’t an inclusive list of reasons to do a sales content audit, but if you take the time to do it quarterly (or more often), you’ll be rewarded with better content, and salespeople who spend more time selling instead of looking for good content in a haystack.

Image credit: Please Clean Up Your Mess by Daniel Wehner | Creative Commons