Training and onboarding are largely considered integral parts of a successful sales enablement program, but as sales enablement has evolved in recent years, there’s been a shift in the underlying mentality and processes behind that onboarding. Rather than onboarding, a one-time event in the beginning of a sales rep’s career, companies that have seen success with sales enablement have moved to “reboarding.” What exactly is this principle, though, and how can it ultimately save your company money?

Reboarding and Its Benefits to Your Bottom Line for Sales Enablement

What Is Reboarding?

Reboarding is the evolved form of onboarding. Onboarding traditionally happens one time when a sales rep or other employee becomes a member of the team. The idea behind onboarding is that it provides all the information and training necessary to acclimate that new employee into the company’s systems, culture, clients, products, and/or services.

What reboarding does is to take that spirit of learning and carry it through a sales rep’s entire career. It’s an ongoing, continuous process rather than a set, one-off session.

How Is Reboarding More Beneficial Than Onboarding?

Reboarding provides several concrete benefits over the more traditional onboarding model.

• Reps enjoy better retention of material.

When sales reps attend an onboarding session, it’s inevitable that the rep will not learn everything he or she needs to be successful in that position in that one session. Even if the information provided is thorough and comprehensive, people simply don’t retain all that information in one go.

Reboarding, or continuous onboarding, gives these reps the opportunity to learn various skills and information over time. If the training material is always available, reps get more chances to interact with that content and really learn and apply the information.

• Reps evolve with the trainings.

No company is continually static, and neither are sales reps. Throughout their careers, they are always learning and growing. If they are part of a company that embraces continuous training, those reps will always bring new perspectives and insights to these training sessions. This helps push reps to be their best, and it arms them with the tools to actually accomplish that.

• Trainings provide relevant, up-to-date content.

Many facets of sales enablement are relatively recent, and there are new schools of thought and ideas constantly surfacing. In an industry like sales, which is always in flux and always evolving, it makes sense that your training needs to be equally dynamic. A one-time training is only going to provide your reps with that small subset of informat Save & Exit ion. Instead, you should be constantly updating your sales training materials to reflect those new ideas, policies, and best practices. Reboarding keeps your reps up to date on both your company specifically and the larger world of selling as a whole, and it helps ensure your reps aren’t working off outdated, stale ideas.

• Integrating reboarding with technology promotes productivity.

Your goal with reboarding is to provide all this information—with as little intrusion and time requirements as possible. An easy way to make reboarding less intrusive, quicker, and more convenient is by integrating the training material into your existing sales enablement platform, CRM, or other software application. That way, no matter where your reps are in the world, they can receive this training, and it can be on their own schedules. This allows them to learn and then get back to the important business of selling.

• Evolve your reboarding program over time using analytics.

If you have a CRM or other software application, you have a wealth of analytical data at your disposal. Use that data to improve your sales team. Look at the numbers to determine what your sales team does well and what they might need more training on. (This can assessed for the whole team or for individual reps.) Perhaps your sales team is great at pushing prospects through the top of the funnel, but sales get stuck right before purchasing. You can use that information to customize your reboarding efforts and focus on what reps need to do to close deals. Reboarding gives you the time and space to see how these efforts work over time. By continuously providing training and tracking your results, you can see what training efforts are actually resonating and working.

• Give your sales reps a much-needed edge in the new sales environment.

Sales is harder than ever for reps. It’s an increasingly competitive landscape, and with the Internet, much of the buying power has shifted from the rep to the consumer. In this way, prospects often come to sales reps just as informed, if not more informed, than the reps themselves. Generally, consumers do their research—on your company and your competitors—before ever reaching out to any representative, so it’s vitally important that your reps are as knowledgeable as possible. They must provide prospects with genuine insights and helpful information in order to prove their value and secure the sale. Reboarding gives reps that competitive edge. It keeps them sharp, up to date, and at the top of their game.

Best Practices for Success with Reboarding

As with any facet of sales enablement, success does not come from a cookie-cutter formula. Every business is different, and what they need for sales success is also different. That being said, there are some techniques you can use to give yourself the best chance at success with a reboarding program.

First and foremost, include your reboarding material in your sales enablement platform or other application. Sales reps are always short on time, and task switching is a notorious productivity killer. Provide your reps with all the training material they need directly in one system that’s easy and quick to access. That way, in order to learn how to communicate with a particular persona or to determine a prospect’s common pain points, all your reps need to do is look within that platform. This content should be available for every persona at every stage in the sales cycle. That way, no matter who your rep is dealing with or how far he or she is in the buying decision, there will be helpful content to facilitate and progress that sales conversation.

Second, integrate video content into your training material. Video is faster, more convenient, and more engaging than text-based content, and, by virtue of being more interesting, it promotes better retention of the material. Supplement video content with supporting documents as necessary.

Third, make sure you have a team that’s always looking for and creating new content for your reboarding efforts. Say, for example, your company releases a new product. There should be accompanying content that trains your reps how to sell that product. That training could include product benefits, information about personas likely to buy the new product, common barriers or challenges preventing those personas from buying the new product, solutions to those common challenges and barriers, and so on.

How Can Reboarding Provide a Positive Return on Investment?

For companies loath to implement new sales enablement efforts, it’s critical to realize that reboarding can offer a company concrete dollars and cents. It does this in two important ways.

One, reboarding is an excellent way to make your sales enablement efforts more productive, and when you increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales reps, you start to see less prospects getting stuck in the sales cycle, more closed deals, and more revenue for your company.

Two, it’s very difficult to retain sales reps. Missed quotas can be discouraging, and rep turnover is very high in the one- to three-year window. However, if you can support your sales reps and provide them with what they need to be successful in their jobs, you can reduce that turnover rate. And with DePaul University’s study placing the cost of a sales rep replacement at upwards of $115,000, it certainly is in your company’s best financial interest to learn how to keep and maximize your existing reps.

For more information about reboarding specifically or how generally to make your sales team more effective, please feel free to reach out to a representative of Brand Fuzion today!

Nearly anyone who works with salespeople knows that time is their most crucial asset. The more time they can spend on core selling, the more productive they are going to be. On the other hand, the more time they have to waste on peripheral activities (searching for relevant case studies, updating records, and so on), the fewer hours they can devote to closing sales and increasing revenue.

Because sales reps are so incredibly busy, that is precisely why sales enablement is crucial to their success. Reps need organized, strategic content within an organized, strategic framework. This cuts down on busywork and wasted time, which is the quickest, easiest way to increased conversion and real return on investment (ROI).

To get the most value out of your sales enablement program, integrate these six tactics into your business approach.

Sales Enablement Program: 6 Ways to Be More Effective

1. Think of Content as More Than What You Provide the Clients

Yes, a huge part of sales enablement is content marketing and providing your sales reps with all the material they need when interacting with prospects.

However, too often sales reps don’t get the onboarding and training they need to effectively use all that content. If reps don’t fully understand what a buyer persona is or what the buyer’s journey entails, they can’t be expected to successfully use content that’s targeted to specific personas at specific points in the buying decision.

It’s crucial that training material (written and/or video) is embedded into any content catalog. Reps must be able to quickly and intuitively access this to learn about how to interact with a particular persona or learn about that persona’s specific challenges and barriers.

Without training, sales reps will simply not utilize all that content that was carefully crafted to push prospects through the sales funnel. With all those lost sales opportunities, your ROI suffers dramatically.

2. Avoid the Pitfall of Wasted Content

Wasted content is one of the biggest problems companies must learn to overcome. Sirius Decisions, Inc., found that 65 percent of created content isn’t even used (28 percent can’t be found, and 37 percent is unusable).

To have success with sales enablement and to see concrete benefits in terms of dollars and cents, you need to combat these two issues. After all, you certainly don’t want to spend time and money creating content that is either unfindable or unusable.

Your catalog of content must be intuitive, quick and easy to use, and organized. Remember, sales reps are always going to be short on time. They need a system that allows them to access the exact piece of content they need—with only a few clicks.

Especially when you’ve invested a lot of time into sales enablement and you have created a large database of content, organization becomes imperative. If a sales rep needs to address a specific issue a prospect is having, the rep can’t sort through hundreds of articles or case studies to find the relevant one. Rather, the database should be organized in such a way that the rep can search by relevant persona and stage of the buyer’s journey to find links to those relevant pieces of content.

3. Harness the Power of Microcontent

Good sales enablement strategy also means creating content that concisely and specifically addresses your prospects’ common problems, questions, and issues. Therefore, a lengthy ebook that’s thousand words isn’t necessarily helpful in the sales cycle—if the prospect’s question only relates to one small section of that post.

This is where microcontent can really help your sales reps. After you’ve accurately identified your target personas and the common questions and issues they face, you can create content that specifically answers those questions and addresses those concerns. These short, relevant pieces of microcontent can be linked within your content catalog, ensuring the sales rep can find them quickly and that the content itself effectively aids the sales process.

Microcontent drastically cuts down on the time reps have to spend altering existing content to be relevant to particular prospects. And again, the more time your reps can spend on core selling, the better off the entire company is financially.

4. Work toward Common Goals to See Increased Revenue

The goal of both sales and marketing should be to close deals and drive revenue. If there’s misalignment between your sales and marketing teams, and they’re working toward disparate goals, you’re wasting time and effort that could go toward increasing revenue. Think the problem isn’t that significant? A 2015 Hubspot survey found that this misalignment costs businesses about $1 trillion each year!

To combat this, ensure you have a good sales enablement system in place. It should contain the right content—both in terms of internal content for sales training purposes and external content for use when dealing with prospects. Also, the organizational system should be based on buyer personas and the different stages of the sales cycle.

All this, when done properly, can lead to improved quota attainment. Historically, quota attainment has been a big hurdle for companies. (In fact, about 54 percent of sales reps do not hit this number.) However, by implementing programs that make your reps more effective, quotas go up, and revenue follows.

5. Create a Framework That Increases Conversion Rates

If ROI is important to you, then your sales enablement efforts need to increase conversion within the sales funnel. (Increased conversion leads to more closed deals, which leads to more revenue.)

Especially since more and more people are involved in the buying decision today, the sales cycle has lengthened over time. Effective sales enablement can keep people moving through the sales cycle rather than stalling out. It can also make your company stand out when compared to competitors, which can also garner you more sales.

A huge key to this system working is making your content catalog easy to access and intuitive for your salespeople. Ideally, they could simply log in to a digital asset management tool that would gain them access to all the necessary files.

Organizing the system by persona and buyer’s journey means reps don’t have to dig and search for relevant content. Everything will already be linked within that sales enablement platform. This combats a huge problem for sales reps, which is the fact that 64 percent of any given day is spent on administrative duties.

When sales reps can access relevant, effective content with a few clicks—no searching or amending necessary—they can divert all their energy to core selling, and that’s when you start to see better conversion, quota attainment, and ROI.

6. Be Strategic with Your Sales Enablement Efforts

To be successful and effective with sales enablement, you need more than scattered ideas and various processes. You need a strategically created overarching framework. In short, you need a great sales enablement digital playbook. You must know who your buyer personas are, what stages they fall into within the buyer’s journey, and what content is effective to integrate into the sales process for a specific person at a specific point in the sales funnel.

If your framework integrates training content and content for prospecting as well as key messaging to emphasize when interacting with prospects, you have a significantly better chance at increasing the effectiveness and productivity of your sales reps, increasing your generated revenue, and increasing your return on anything invested in your sales enablement efforts.

For more information about tactics that could benefit your sales enablement plan, please feel free to reach out to a representative of Brand Fuzion, Inc., today!

Sales reps are constantly coming up against challenges and problems as they attempt to close deals and drive revenue. From wasting nearly a third of every day searching for or revising content to feeling frustrated at the lack of available content marketing training materials, sales reps have a lot to deal with in a day—and not a lot of time. If these problems sound familiar, know there’s a better way. By making an organized, strategic push toward sales enablement in your business, you can drastically reduce the problems your sales reps routinely battle and start to work toward better productivity and increased revenue.

Sales Enablement: Solving Real Problems for Sales Reps

Sales Enablement Starts In House

There is no single answer for what makes sales enablement effective. It’s about applying the general principles to find the solutions that address your specific problems. Therefore, one of your biggest assets is your group of successful sales reps.

These people are finding ways to genuinely connect with prospects, shorten the sales cycle, and close deals. If you’re thinking about building out a full sales enablement program, step one should be going to your top-performing reps and figuring out how they do what they do. One goal of sales enablement is to create a replicable, teachable system to all reps (new or otherwise), and your current performers possess much of that necessary knowledge base.

10 Benefits of Implementing a Sales Enablement Program

1. Increase Sales Rep Quota 

A best-in-class company is twice as likely to use a sales enablement program, and best-in-class companies enjoy 50 percent higher quota attainment than other companies.

2. Use Sales Reps Time More Efficiently

A sales rep’s time is extremely valuable, and any minute not spent on core selling is a minute not spent actively closing deals and increasing revenue. The average sales rep spends about 30 percent of the day looking for content or revising content to be more relevant to the prospect. No company can expect positive results and growth when nearly one-third of a sales rep’s day is needlessly spent.

Currently, on average about 65 percent of created content is never even used (37 percent is simply unusable or irrelevant, and 28 percent isn’t findable). Sales enablement can help with both these issues.

In terms of irrelevant content, sales enablement can implement the framework that gets your marketing team creating content that actually helps in the sales cycle. An estimated $2.3 million is lost in enterprise organizations due to underused or unused content. However, when your marketing team writes content that specifically addresses your company’s buyer personas at the different stages of the sales cycle, this drastically increases the likelihood that the content will actually be relevant and helpful to your sales reps. These processes limit the time (and money) spent working hard on content that will never be used.

Two, implementing an organized, intuitive content system, where sales reps can quickly and easily find what they need, will stem the tide of wasted time searching through file after file to find that one desired piece of content. Sales enablement, when done right, means your reps spend less time doing this kind of administrative work and more time selling.

3. Help Sales Reps Close Deals Faster

As more people have become involved in corporate buying decisions, the length of the sales cycle has increased exponentially. Creating hyper-targeted content that truly speaks to the buyer persona’s barriers and problems can quickly address those issues and efficiently lead that persona to the next stage. The faster your sales reps can close, the more deals (and money) they can generate.

Even if a rep has to deal with multiple personas in a particular deal, an organized, strategic content system will have whatever content is needed, and it will be quickly and easily at the rep’s fingertips.

4. Focus On the Digital Age

Sales enablement is largely based in selling in the digital age. It helps sales reps know how to be successful with the kinds of leads they encounter now, which do largely come through a company’s website.

5. Align the Sales Team and Marketing Team (and everyone else)

Proper alignment between marketing and sales is key to a successful sales enablement program. But it’s not just marketing and sales that need to be on the same page. Sales enablement should be treated as a business within a business, which effectively ensures all departments are working toward the same goal: doing everything possible to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the sales team in order to up revenue.

6. Assist in a Consultative Selling Approach

For a sales rep to be successful today, he or she needs to provide real value to the prospect. That means doing more than just answering a few surface-level questions about the company or product. It means taking a more consultative approach: learning about prospects and their challenges and finding creative solutions to address those. The more targeted and relevant the content, the more value it provides to the prospect. And when a prospect perceives a sales rep as truly valuable, it builds credibility and trust in that person, which leads to a better opportunity to close that deal.

7. Provide Helpful Training

Sales enablement is still relatively new, and many sales reps find themselves frustrated at the lack of helpful training material made available to them. Essentially, their companies tell them to sell in this new way, and then they don’t provide the road map to get them there. If a rep doesn’t know where to find content, doesn’t know how to talk to a specific prospect, or doesn’t understand that prospect’s core challenges going in to a conversation, there’s little chance the rep will build that requisite trust with the prospect.

A good training system, however, will inform the rep about the sales enablement processes, explain the reasoning behind those processes, and educate about how logistically to use the content system.

Good training will do more than just provide a tutorial on how to log in to a content system. It will explain the underpinning logic of the buyer’s journey and how content can play an effective role in the buying decision. It will also explain why the marketing team is creating content in a specific way. When sales reps see this whole picture, the processes make more sense, and there tends to be much greater buy-in and follow-through.

All this leads to more informed, more insightful sellers. Training can show reps how to deal with a variety of personas in a variety of situations—and still have success. These skills translate well to any subsequent selling position.

8. Provide Better Opportunities to Prospect Clients

When sales reps understand the whole picture, they can potentially go and find viable prospects through online channels, such as LinkedIn.

9. Experience Less Frustration

Not reaching a quota is stressful and frustrating for any sales rep. Nobody likes working hard every day only to see minimal results. When reps have this increased opportunity to reach and exceed quota, much of the frustration associated with the job can disappear.

10. Improve Selling—Across the Board

Sales enablement isn’t about teaching a rep to close a deal in one limited situation. It’s about how to have success in any given prospect interaction. Sales enablement helps reps understand the core messaging for a variety of buyer personas—no matter what stage of the buyer’s journey. They also learn how to qualify and deal with a number of objections. All this creates a more insightful, valuable sales rep, and an organized system ensures the content that rep needs is never more than a few clicks away.

For more information about how sales enablement can benefit every rep within a sales team, please feel free to contact a representative of Brand Fuzion today!

More and more companies are recognizing the need to invest in sales enablement tools and practices, but there’s still a lot of confusion among marketing teams regarding how best to go about that. The following are some essential tips to help increase the efficiency and efficacy of your marketing team’s sales enablement efforts.

Why Marketers Must Understand Sales Enablement

1. Bridging the Gap between Marketing and Sales

Companies have heard it repeatedly over the  years: marketing and sales need to be aligned in order to be more effective. This has led to increasingly integrated teams, which is great. However, it’s not about simply generating a lot of leads. It’s about getting qualified leads—leads that are more likely to result in closed deals and increased revenue.

If you’re seeing increased lead gen but minimal client conversion, your problem most likely rests with misaligned goals. Yes, marketing and sales need to work more closely, but that’s not enough. Their goals needs to be explicitly similar. That is, they both need to be working toward getting qualified leads and seeing better sales conversion.

To accomplish this, keep the following pointers in mind:

• A service-level agreement (SLA) between marketing and sales defines and makes explicit shared goals between the two groups.
• Both marketing and sales should be held accountable for revenue generation.
• To improve the quality of the generated content, both teams must quantify and track conversion at every stage. This identifies which specific pieces of content are working and which are not.
• In general, companies are better about aligning their marketing and sales. To get ahead now, it’s about marketers working with sales teams to implement the right tools to help salespeople achieve their quotas.

2. Adapt to a Changed Sales Funnel

As time goes on, the sales funnel becomes less and less linear. Prospects don’t simply progress from interest to awareness to purchase. Instead, information gathering is increasingly crucial to the buyer in the purchasing decision.  Today’s sales team needs to be prepared to walk a prospect through this complex journey.

This means:

• Content must be increasingly targeted to effectively persuade a buyer.
• There is no longer a clear time to hand off a lead to sales, so more collaboration between marketing and sales is necessary throughout the buyer’s journey.
• Content must be measured by conversion. This is a far more powerful metric than simple lead numbers.

3. Take Into Account Consensus Buying

In any given B2B sales decision today, twenty or more people can be involved in that buying team. As consensus buying becomes the norm, you must face the challenge of engaging all these personas. When the group goes offline to discuss and collaborate on this buying decision, neither sales nor marketing is directly involved at that point.

Your best weapon, therefore, is your content. Arm these key decision-makers with persuasive, relevant, targeted content that that is informative and proves your value. Every piece of content you provide should establish and build trust in your company, brand, or product and illustrate what sets you apart.

If, for example, you provide a generic case study that has nothing to do with the particular company you’re working with, when that team meets to finalize its buying decision, you haven’t provided anything of value to persuade that group. You haven’t established your competitive edge, your benefits, or your trustworthiness. And you’re minimizing the chance of that buying team coming back with a decision in your favor.

4. Time Is Your Biggest Asset—Don’t Waste It!

A staggering 30 percent of a salesperson’s time is consumed by looking for, creating, or customizing content for prospects. Salespeople today recognize the importance of good content when nurturing a lead, but they have to waste nearly a third of their time just to get that content into their hands.

To minimize this tremendous time sink, employ these two techniques:

1. Have sales and marketing work together to identify what content is resonating with particular leads. Moving forward, use that data to weed out ineffective content and help create more content that speaks positively to your leads.
2. Segment content based upon your buyer personas
3. Create a content catalog that maps content to the buyers journey.
4. Use a sales enablement platform (SEP).

5. Benefits of a Sales Enablement Platform

An SEP provides one place to put all your selling tools. This streamlines all sales enablement processes and allows marketers to get faster, more accurate feedback about the content provided to sales.

1. Integrate the SEP with analytics. Numbers don’t lie. Analytics immediately show what content is engaging and converting leads. A piece of content might seem extremely powerful, but if the analytics show it’s not effective, marketers need to be prepared to throw it out and learn from what is working. Analytics allow you to quantify a piece of content’s ROI, which shows you what types of content are financially worth your time and effort.

If a salesperson tweaks a piece of content, that’s great. But the changes need to be reflected and tracked within the SEP. That way, everyone can see if the changes improved the ROI. If it did, everyone can also learn how that improvement can be applied to other pieces of content to make them more effective.

An SEP facilitates this kind of insight and helps you eliminate the deadwood and use data-confirmed content as a model for future tools.

2. Carefully organize the SEP. A pervasive barrier to success continues to be marketing creating content that sales doesn’t use—either because it’s not relevant or because sales simply can’t find what they need. An average company spends 28 percent of its budget on content creation, yet 65 percent of content is never even used by sales. This is hugely wasteful and leads to the vicious cycle of marketers creating and creating content, while sales just keeps requesting more—because the content they’re getting isn’t accessible, easily found, or relevant.

Having everything centrally located in one SEP means sales has access to everything, and if that SEP is intuitively and effectively organized, sales can quickly and easily find the relevant content. For ease of access, pieces should be ranked based on what performs well for various selling opportunities (different customer sizes, industries, products, and so on). This way, high-performing content for a particular lead type will be readily at the fingertips of the sales team.

3. Ensure the SEP is for marketing and sales. Just because it’s called a sales enablement platform doesn’t mean it’s just for sales. This should be another aspect of sales enablement that both marketing and sales collaborate continuously on. It also highly facilitates closed-loop analysis. If either sales or marketing proposes a change to the SEP (or anything within the SEP), data can back up the suggestion and intelligently inform the decision-making process.

4. Make the SEP remotely accessible. Sales teams are increasingly spread across the country—even the globe. An effective SEP will be cloud based and mobile ready. This ensures team members, no matter where they are, can access and use the platform.

Sales enablement is a proven tactic. Companies that put an emphasis on sales and marketing alignment and sales enablement processes saw concrete results. Half the companies had at least a 10 percent increase in sales conversion, while 23 percent saw 20 percent of more. If you can identify your company’s best practices and make those practices repeatable, even new employees will be able to quickly and effectively hit the ground running. It requires collaboration, flexibility, and concentrated data analysis, but when that comes together, increased conversion (and revenue) often follow.

For more information about what marketing teams need to know about sales enablement, please feel free to contact a representative of Brand Fuzion today!

Sales Enablement content mapping is a pivotal step in the implementation of any sales enablement plan. It allows you to chart the organization of your content and create a more strategic plan for how you’re going to implement content into your selling process. Many companies have content at their disposal—in some cases, a lot of content—but it’s simply not being used effectively. Content mapping is a way to more strategically and thoughtfully organize, use, and analyze that content.

Sales Enablement Content Mapping : What It Is and Why It Matters

 What Is Content Mapping?

Sales Enablement content mapping is essentially a way to organize and categorize your content. Because every company has different types and volumes of content and different organizational structures, the specifics of what that content mapping entails are going to vary from company to company.

Most often, though, it’s as simple as a spreadsheet that organizes content by different factors (content publisher, content type, content description, targeted buyer persona, and so on). This aims to ensure that anyone who needs the content, specifically salespeople, can easily and intuitively find it.

The Steps Involved with Effective Content Mapping

1.  Identify the stakeholders.

The first step is to ascertain who’s going to be doing what with these various pieces of content. You’ll want to identify not only who creates the content but who publishes it and analyzes it after the fact. Determine who these people are as well as their roles in the system.

In a large company, there might be many people who deal with any given type of content. However, it’s best to have one publisher for each of these categories. That person can then manage the process and communicate directly to sales representatives. 

2.  Map the content.

Once you’ve identified stakeholders, it’s time to actually think about what content needs to be captured within this system. At this stage, it’s important to remember to be focused. Dedicate your time and energy to what’s most important for your salespeople rather than anything and everything content-related that a seller might need.

Time is a limited commodity for your salespeople, and they simply can’t sift through a burdensome amount of content. If, for example, you provide a salesperson with all your case studies rather than one or two highly specific case studies that apply to his or her selling situation, you’re just inundating that salesperson with content. If your system doesn’t provide precise information, you haven’t developed an organized, strategic plan of attack.

Remember also that the improvement process in this Sales Enablement content mapping stage is never complete. It’s always evolving and changing as your company evolves and changes, so waiting until the system is “perfect” or “done” is only going to delay the launch. Never lose sight of your number one job: making your map organized, easy to understand, intuitive, straightforward, and effective for your salespeople.

A content map, which will ultimately look different for every company, should include some or all of the following information:

• Content type.
• Publisher (including the one point of contact within a team or division who will manage this content type).
• A brief description of the content.
• Targeted buyer persona.

Limit the top-level content types to eight to twelve categories. For example, a content map could include:

• Case studies.
• Product marketing.
• Demo material.
• Sales training.
• Sales tools.
• Lead generation.
• Competitor information.
• Industry news.
• Prospecting (including e-mail templates, social media prospecting, etc.).

Note, these categories should be broad. If they are overly specific, your Sales Enablement content mapping will quickly become unruly, confusing, and ineffective. When developing these topics, have your most universal selling situations in mind. Get your content right for these common, repeatable situations before organizing and dealing with niche sales, sales in specific regions, and so on.

These categories should always be obvious and unambiguous. The last thing you want is a salesperson having to guess where content might be stored or any other employee guessing what category to file something under.

That single point of contact for a content type is also crucial. Even if an entire team or department handles that content type, having one person as the lead minimizes confusion and facilitates problem solving. 

3. Consider the buyer’s journey with Sales Enablement content mapping.

As is the case with every step in this process, the buyer’s journey is going to look different for every company—and it could even vary for different selling transactions within that company. With that in mind, the steps of the buyer’s journey are not set in stone. They are always approximations of the stages people typically go through when making a purchasing decision, but they are certainly an effective starting point.

While the buyer’s journey is crucial to creating the right kind of content, it is not the ideal way to organize that content. A case study, for example, could be requested at any stage in the buying process. Therefore, trying to organize your content around a given stage will only lead to confusion, since case studies are equally plausible in the lead stage and the negotiation stage. 

Create plans for common selling scenarios within your company, varying content according to key differentiators, such as product, region, and customer type. (After all, somebody expanding the account of an existing customer is necessarily going to need different content than a salesperson dealing with a customer who’s never even heard of your company.) Limit yourself to no more than seven crucial pieces of content that salesperson would need in that situation. Create these plans for the various stages of the buyer’s journey and then create a generalized plan (for any deal at any stage) from that information.  

This is by no means a static process. Start simple and refine as you go, examining what is and isn’t working and adjusting accordingly. If you wait for the system to be perfect, you’ll never even get it off the ground.

4. Integrate existing resources with the new solution.

If you’ve invested in content marketing at all, chances are you already have existing resources. For example, you probably have a content catalog where this content is stored. To effectively implement sales enablement solutions, your existing resources will need to integrate with your new changes.

This integration includes the CRM you’re using to track sales opportunities as well as tools that enhance selling, such as web conferencing to facilitate demonstrating the product or answering questions in real time.

If all you have to facilitate your sales enablement efforts is a slew of content, you’ve probably already discovered just how little help disorganized content can be. By changing how you organize (or map) your content, however, you can ensure your content is findable, usable, and effective in closing more deals and generating more revenue.