Making the Business Case for Sales and Marketing Investments Part 2 delves into sales content management software and 3 benefits to present to your executive team.
Marketing1 spends hours developing, writing, and designing a variety of sales enablement content, such as sales presentations, competitive battlecards, datasheets, and more. Yet, 9 out of 10 sellers don’t use sales collateral since it’s “irrelevant, outdated, and difficult to customize.”2 Let me repeat that - 9 out of 10 sales people don’t use sales content.
Moreover, as we mentioned in Part 1 of The Business Case for Sales and Marketing Investments, sales continues to spend 30 hours a month searching or creating content!
From what we’ve heard from our customers, this scenario is all too common for sales and marketing organizations:
Our customer, Amy Wood, Director of Marketing, Talview, explained the situation this way, “Before Enable Us, we had no insight into how our content was being used by sales, and we were relying solely on sales sentiment. Enable Us reframes the conversations I have with my sales and executive teams. I can share data on how sellers and buyers are engaging with our content throughout the buying process and make smarter decisions as a result.”
According to the recently published Product Marketing Alliance survey, State of Product Marketing 2022, two of the top five responsibilities of product marketing are creating or updating sales collateral / internal-facing documents (82.2%) and sales enablement (79.1%). Yet, only 26% indicated that they had OKRs tied to asset utilization. With a majority of product marketing’s time spent on creating, curating, and maintaining sales content, the need for a sales content management and tracking system is a non issue for resolving this disconnect.3
It’s a system that helps manage the process for creating, curating, distributing, maintaining and measuring customer-facing and internally-facing sales collateral during the sales process.
We conducted a quick, highly unscientific poll on our LinkedIn page to determine what benefits a CMS software would provide. Based on this and our customers’ feedback, here are seven benefits that sales content management software provides:
Bonus -Jenn Glabicky, Global Head of Revenue Enablement at Marqeta commented on our poll, “Content alignment is another one, less of a chance for duplicative efforts for content creation andddd a way to version control!”
We completely agree.
You know that a content management system to organize, distribute, and measure your sales enablement content is a must. Yet, as we noted in our first blog post in this series, the prospect of an impending recession causes some organizations to cut back on sales and technology investments. There is a silver lining. According to the 2022 Gartner CFO Recession Planning Poll, 69% of CFOs are willing to increase spending related to digital technology and transformation.4
From our perspective, digitizing how sales collateral is managed is an important component to scaling sales and marketing organizations to close more deals more quickly. Otherwise, the opportunity costs associated with underused or unused content is high, over $2.3M annually for enterprise organizations.5 As such, we’ve pulled together three calculations to help you make the business case for investing in a sales content management platform to your executive team.
According to Glassdoor, a B2B sales rep makes an average of $104,000 annually or $285 daily. If sales spends up to 15 days annually seeking or creating content, that’s $4,273 in lost sales productivity per year. A sales CMS makes it easier for your sales team to find the right content to share with prospects based on their buying cycle.
Depending on your average sales deal cycle, the additional hours or days saved per salesperson equates to tremendous productivity gains focused on closing deals.
SALES PRODUCTIVITY GAIN:
PRODUCTIVITY COST: The cost to the company by not implementing a CMS platform
A central content repository enables sales to discover and send the right content tailored to the buyer’s needs. Not only does this reduce time spent on searching for content, but also lowers the time spent manually managing content across multiple platforms or spreadsheets.
According to Gartner, prospects are 2.8 times more likely to experience a high level of purchase confidence when salespeople provide constructive information during the buying process. Moreover, this resulted in purchases 3x larger and with less regret.6
Let’s assume that your average contract value (ACV) is $10,000. By optimizing the content your sales team provides during the buying process, the potential return increases to $30,000 in deal value.
POTENTIAL ACV INCREASE CALCULATION:
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Depending on the research, anywhere from 65%7 to 90%8 of marketing content is untouched by sales, with sales using an average of 17 content pieces during the sales process. That content must be "relevant, meaningful and properly timed to where the buyer is in the journey."9 Considering that a significant portion of a company’s marketing budget is spent on content creation (26-40%), boosting the discoverability and effectiveness of sales content is a significant opportunity for marketing to deliver immediate ROI to the organization.10
A sales enablement CMS provides in-depth data and analytics on seller behavior, such as views, downloads, shares, and time spent on content. When combined with a digital sales room, which we’ll cover in our next blog, marketing gains even more insight on what content resonates with buyers.
These insights enable product marketing to develop the right sales enablement content strategy that resonates with sellers and buyers, such as:
This results in considerable cost and time savings as this reduces the number of unused content pieces.
Let’s calculate the cost of not having a CMS solution. The average salary for a product marketing manager (PMM) is $121,000 annually.11 Since creating and updating sales enablement and content creation are top responsibilities for PMM, we’ll assume 33% or $39,930 annually of their time is spent on content creation. Today, since 90% of sales content is unused, this represents upwards of $35,900 or 30% of lost productivity for a PMM.
Here is the calculation:
PMM PRODUCTIVITY GAIN:
PMM PRODUCTIVITY COST:
The cost to the company by not implementing a CMS platform
We recognize the importance of sales and marketing alignment for sales collateral. Yet, all too often, there is an adversarial relationship between marketing and sales. Marketing spends time creating content that is underutilized by sales, with no insight into its effectiveness in the sales and buying processes. Conversely, sales wastes time searching for content, resorting to sharing outdated sales content or creating content from scratch.
A sales content management system resolves the “black hole” of sales collateral for both sales and marketing. Your sales team focuses less on finding content, boosting productivity on core sales activities. They discover and share up-to-date content based on buyers’ needs, which boosts your sellers’ credibility and can increase deal sizes. Your marketing team develops more targeted content that resonates with your sellers and buyers which speeds the buying cycle.
By investing in a sales collateral management system, sales and marketing collaborate more closely. Ultimately, this closer alignment can boost sales results, with companies 67% better at closing deals and sales teams experiencing 41% increase in meeting their quotas.12
