Future proof your Revenue Enablement strategy
If there’s one constant in the world of B2B buying and selling, it’s change — which translates into massive and exciting opportunities for revenue enablement leaders and their teams. The way buyers want to buy is ever changing and sellers must adapt. Sales processes are becoming less linear. The makeup of buying committees has changed. There are more stakeholders involved in purchasing processes and they are more risk averse than ever. The stakes for sellers today are high and getting higher — which means they need enablement more than ever to empower and equip them to succeed in this new era of business. All roads lead to digital Over the next five years, Millennials and Gen Z – which currently make up more than 60% of the workforce – will continue to shape how we do business. These generations have grown up completely immersed in tech and continue to have high expectations for their buying experiences. An all digital (or primarily digital) future is not far off. In fact, Gartner predicts that 80% of all buyer-seller interactions will occur in digital channels by 2025. At the same time, the current economic climate is continuing to push organizations to get creative and find ways to do more with less. The era of “growth at all costs” is officially over, and organizations will need to reshape their tech stacks and strategies accordingly. Currently, 67% of revenue leaders are looking to redeploy cost savings from headcount to invest in innovative sales tech, and high performers are 44% more likely to be using or experimenting with AI. Our predictions for the future of fevenue (and enablement!) As we said before, B2B buying and selling is constantly evolving — but we’re willing to make some educated guesses on what the future holds. As we look to the future, we expect: To realize revenue success today and long into the future Centralize your data Every member of your revenue team should be drawing from the same data lake. It’s the only way to keep disparate departments aligned, avoid confusion, and create a cohesive customer experience. Plus, by maintaining clean, searchable, co-located data sets establishes a strong foundation to train Generative AI tools to support your revenue teams. Harness content’s impact The modern sales cycle includes very little face time. It’s only after buyers have done their own research that they’ll seek out a demo, and once that call is complete, sellers are placed right back in a black box. That means your content will be doing the selling when your reps are not in the room, so you must ensure it’s optimized for performance. Identify the most effective content for each persona and sales stage, then scale successful strategies across your organization. Implement and expand value-based selling The most compelling argument for onboarding any new product or service is financial incentive. Sellers must clearly articulate the dollars-and-cents impact of their offerings to prospective buyers, and value selling is a key strategy. Leverage analytics to pinpoint where your reps are successfully using this strategy and close the gaps with those who are not. Embrace Generative AI We’ve only started to see the beginning of how Generative AI can empower GTM teams. This technology is here to stay, and high-performing organizations are already experimenting with the tools that are currently at our fingertips. To reap the benefits of GenAI both today and in the future, you’ll need to establish a centralized data lake to fuel reliable outputs, and establish usage policies that encourage experimentation within established guidelines. Continuously optimize your revenue enablement approach Think of your enablement program as a constant work in progress. As new data and trends continuously shift, analyze those findings and tweak your strategy to identify new opportunities for scalable improvements. You should also be conducting routine content audits to ensure you’re placing compelling, accurate, on-brand, and compliant collateral in your sales team’s hands. This is the final installment in our series breaking down the research and insights from our State of Revenue Enablement report. If you missed any of the previous posts, you can navigate to them below, otherwise continue to follow our blog for more insights and research.
How to create & execute an interactive content strategy that sells
The coronavirus pandemic may have plunged us into a recession that lasted only two months, but it has forever changed the way we do business. As buyers have become increasingly digital, their expectations of sellers have evolved. If you want to win their business moving forward, your sellers have to evolve along with them. That includes having an interactive content strategy. Here’s why. Digital buyers require an interactive content strategy I have five and a half hours of Zoom calls baked into my workday tomorrow. Most days, I am tired of staring at a screen by 11am. But not so tired that I am willing to resume my 3-hour round-trip commute to the city. That is the reality for 54% of global workers who wish to continue working from home even after the pandemic has ended. With B2B buyers growing increasingly tired of screens and 80% of sales interactions occurring digitally and remotely by 2025, how do sellers expect to capture buyers’ attention and keep it long enough to close a deal? Content is critical – but not just any content. Today’s buyers require engaging, animated, and interactive content that successfully communicates the value your product or solution delivers. In this article, I’ll outline the three critical components of a winning interactive content strategy. I’ll also share how our team approaches them to create a superior content engagement experience. 3 critical components of a winning interactive content strategy As you begin your quest to transition from static to interactive content, the first thing you’ll want to evaluate is your copy. No, updating your copy won’t take you from static to interactive on its own, but it will help set you up for success. Take our story, for example. At Mediafly, we use our own sales enablement platform to manage, share, and present content. Our Insights dashboard offers us advanced analytics into how our content is performing (e.g. how long a specific asset or page in an asset has been viewed, how many times it is shared and by who, and if it contributes to revenue). In the early months of the pandemic, we saw a sharp decline in the amount of time our buyers spent reading our content. We knew they were still finding the content relevant because they were hitting every page of a guide or ebook, but the analytics clearly showed us they were skimming. Which made sense. A lot of parents lost childcare and were having to work nights and weekends to get their work done, mass layoffs put additional work on the plates of workers who stayed employed, and everyone was generally trying to do more with less. That left a lot less time for content consumption. Once we had this understanding, we knew distilling our copy down to the most important or insightful ideas and details would help us keep our busy readers engaged in the time they did have to dedicate to content consumption. We also took care to ensure every piece of content followed a challenge-based narrative – focusing less on Mediafly and our products and more on our customers’ business challenges and how our solutions help solve them. Doing so allowed us to add more value for our buyers. According to research findings released by ValueSelling Associates earlier this year, 87% of high-growth companies take this value-based approach to sales compared to 45% of negative growth companies. Before adding interactivity to increase content engagement, we first reshaped our copy into stories conducive to getting our ideas across to busy, distracted, and budget-conscious buyers. Key Takeaways: Design Once you’re confident you have compelling and relevant content to share from a copy perspective, it’s time to decide what format it should take. Remember that digital buyers need digital content. But let’s agree on one thing – a PDF on a screen is not digital content. It’s a static PDF…on a screen. Here’s an example: The left side is little dull, right? True digital content is animated and interactive, as shown on the right. To transform this piece of content, we leveraged the Presentify services we acquired for our customers to transform their content from static, linear PowerPoint presentations and pdf one-pagers to interactive, animated content experiences. Doing so helped us create a concept of no loose ends where our buyers flow seamlessly through a piece of content and related assets, digging deeper into areas they find most compelling or relevant to their specific needs. Although we now draft shorter, more succinct copy, we create more meaningful navigation within our content. We include buttons on the page to entice people to click and self-discover more about a topic, challenge, or solution if desired and at their own pace. We now think of content formats as tools to help us better tell our stories, reimagining manuals and brochures as digital flipbooks and embedding video testimonials within our case studies. By approaching each piece of content as its own little app, we create immersive experiences with more digestible stories that draw buyers in and bring our brand to life. Key Takeaways: Delivery Once you’ve reimagined your content, it is time to test it out with real-life buyers and see if it works. The best way to do this is to deliver your content via a sales enablement application that allows you to closely track success metrics and optimize accordingly. (Note: When I say “success metrics”, I’m not talking about vanity metrics like shares or views. How much time are buyers spending viewing your content? How many times are they re-visiting a specific piece of content? Is it helping drive deals forward to close? Those are the metrics that matter.) I mentioned earlier in this article that our content is managed and shared via our Mediafly sales application. Because of this, we are able to reconcile the qualitative feedback we receive from our sales team with the quantitative data from our advanced analytics and use the information to optimize the content engagement experience for our buyers. Having this insight allows us to continuously improve our content as we experiment with new formats and narratives. It also allows us to ensure the content our marketing and enablement teams create is actually leveraged by sellers in the right way and at the right time. Think about how your sellers consume content in their personal lives – Spotify, Disney+, Netflix, etc. They’re used to on-demand, app-like experiences at home, so why give them anything else at work? When you deliver your content to sellers via a sales enablement platform versus email or a content repository like SharePoint, you’re also creating a more interactive content engagement experience for your reps. They can take advantage of Workspaces (think content hubs tailored to a specific industry or buyer challenge), leverage AI-driven content recommendations, and provide feedback to marketers on content in real-time. When reps feel confident in where to find the content they need and in its ability to close deals, adoption rates skyrocket. Key Takeaways: A winning interactive content strategy produces results We only implemented our interactive content strategy a year ago, and we’re already achieving impressive results. Year-on-year, we’ve seen: Today, 59% of the content in our sales application is helping our sellers close deals compared to 1% in the early days of the pandemic. Because our new interactive content strategy better meets the needs of our sellers and customers, we’ve also been able to decrease our output, while increasing our overall effectiveness by 390%. And we’re just getting started. Are you interested in creating more compelling, interactive content for your buyers to help you drive sales? Visit our new Presentify workspace to learn more.
How to spring clean your sales content
I don’t want to jinx anything, but Oh My Goodness it is so much easier to feel hopeful when the spring arrives. The buds on the trees, daffodils waving their happy yellow faces around, longer, lighter days – all much-needed natural signs that things are on the up. At the turn of the year, we’re often fired up with the hope of transformation, but the reality is that in the world around us not much is changing. It’s still mid-winter. The days are dark – and this year they were darker than most. Maybe that’s why new year’s resolutions are so hard to keep. Come the spring, however, the urge to make a change – to get organized – feels much more organic. I want to throw open the windows, plant some seeds, make the most of every opportunity. The good news is, you can take this spring-cleaning energy and apply it at work as well as at home. Decluttering your sales content gets rid of the distracting cobwebby content of old and ensures you have in hand exactly what you need to see you through the year. Better still, clearing out your sales content almost never results in the discovery of a spider’s nest. (A good reason to prioritize your content over your garage.) Defining your system If you’ve seen any of the home organizing shows, you know that the system is everything. From labels to folding techniques, everything has to be done in a way that works for the household taking part, but which is also future-proof, and easy to maintain. That’s true for organizing your sales content, too. Your sellers need to understand the system in order to find the best possible content for every given interaction. That means it can’t just make sense to the people who are in charge of filing content. It needs to work in a logical, visual way that is accessible to all. Anything less and your content repository will be holding you back, not building you up. Sales enablement technology not only makes it easy to organize your content, but also helps you sort the wheat from the chaff by providing data-led insights into what works, and how to use it for maximum return. It’s a proven system for storing and organizing content – and it works whether you’re in the office, at home, or hiding in your (WiFi-connected) underground bunker. Once you have your system, you’re ready to begin with the real work: the spring clean. Start with the basics: what sales content is working for you? Knowing the answer to this question will make your content clear-out a lot easier. It’s not a question of whether or not a resource ‘sparks joy’ – but rather, whether or not it is helping sellers close deals. If you are already using a sales enablement technology that collects and analyzes data to determine content ROI – great! This part will be easy. If you are not, you are going to be reliant on feedback from sellers, which can be tricky to gather and even harder to measure. Once you have identified the best-performing content assets, take the time to analyze how and when they are being used. In an ideal world, everything will add up. The right content is being used in the right context at the right time with the right customers. In reality, things are rarely that straightforward. You might need to plan a workshop or prepare some training resources to help your sellers get the very most out of these high-performing assets. Reduce, reuse, recycle So you have found your high-performers. What do you do with the rest of it? Much like my garage clear-out, you’re going to have to sort it into piles. But your labels are: archive, optimize and repurpose. Archive – Some content simply doesn’t fit your brand or your strategy anymore. Give it a hug and let it go. You might want to keep a screen resolution proof for old time’s sake, but make sure you archive it somewhere well away from your sales application – you don’t want it to be used by mistake. Optimize – Some of those resources might just need a bit of a zhuzh – you know, the sales content equivalent of adding a belt to a sack-like dress. Figure out where the existing files are falling short – are they too text-heavy? Lacking dynamism? – and see if you can optimize them to match the success of your high-performing sales content. The beauty of tracking usage data is that you will be able to visualize when a resource starts working for you, and keep adjusting it until it is just right. Repurpose – And then there are those old bits of content that just don’t have a place in your current sales app. White papers that no one has time to read. Blog posts full of useful information but so far down the archives they’re just not getting the views anymore. Repurpose them. Turn them into social media posts, or even email signatures. Think of this as the equivalent of cutting up boring old blue jeans into oh-so-perfect jean shorts. You’ll be summer-ready in no time. Always be engaging One thing to keep an eye on with this year’s spring clean is how flexible your content is for both remote and in-person sales conversations. This time last year, a lot of marketers and salespeople expended their collective spring energy trying to adjust to a new way of working – we thought a lot about what was manageable, not what was possible. In the months since then, we have all gained a lot of experience, giving us a different perspective on what works and what doesn’t work for remote selling. All this should influence how you look at your resources as you give your content and strategy a refresh. With virtual meetings likely to continue to at least some degree for the foreseeable future, you might want to organize resources separately for in-person and remote meetings, or perhaps just consider whether more could be done to make your sales content equally applicable whether you are with your customers and prospects in person or not. For example, animated or interactive presentation content holds buyers’ attention in ways that static PowerPoint decks do not. Asking your prospect to interact with a file is a sure-fire way to ensure their engagement. If they are clicking through a menu, for example, you get to see where their interests lie and provide the information that is most relevant to them. Sales content that puts a spring in your step Spring cleaning is a rewarding process. Getting to grips with all the stuff in your house forces you to – in that most Kondo-est of ways – pick it up and decide where it belongs. At the end, everything has a place and a reason. You come out of it with a clearer idea of what you have, what you like, and why a wishlist is a far better idea than saying ‘Oh you know me, I’m happy with anything’ next time your birthday comes around. The same can be said for a content clear-out, which makes you take stock of all your assets and presses you to understand – with the help of the data you collect – what makes something good or useful, and why other resources have been forgotten. In that process lies the key to creating valuable content: learning from all the things you’ve created before, and understanding what you need for the future. The result? Content that adds value to the buyer’s journey, created and curated in a way that helps sellers to shorten cycle times, and which enables marketers to support business growth. And if that doesn’t make you feel full of the joys of spring, I don’t know what will.