In addition to content that your prospects will find and consume. Your marketing team needs to create content that will help the sales team during the sales process. And that's where content is most relevant to sales enablement. Your sales team needs easy access to excellent content that's relevant while they're meeting with their leads. It could be that you already have a library of sales content, but are your sales teams really using it? Here's Jamie Shanks, CEO of Sales for Life with a quick test you can use to find out. >> One of the audits a marketer can do is grab a stopwatch, walk over to a sales professionals desk. And in a role based scenario, say you've been trying to talk to this particular chief marketing officer, and here's a pitfall or challenge that they just told you over the phone. And as you hung up to receive, you thought yourself, hold on a second, I think I've seen an infographic that can debunk the myth of what that person just said on the phone. Let me go find it and share with them. Start the stopwatch, and if in under one minute that sales professional can't find your content library. And then ultimately find that particular asset to share, they'll never do it. >> Organizing your content in such a way that your sales teams can find it within a minute is a high bar to clear. But if you don't clear it, your sales teams might never use any of marketing's content. This is one area where technology can help a lot. One simple way marketing can help sales reps easily share relevant content with their leads is providing them with email templates that either linked to the content or included in the email itself. While it might take several minutes for a sales rep to find the appropriate piece of content and write an email to share it. It only takes a few seconds for them to select and personalize an email template. But this brings up an important point. Even if your sales content is easily accessible, your sales teams won't use it if it isn't part of their process. And if that's the case, then your sales process is in serious need of updates. Here's Ryan Burke, SVP at InVision app. >> The sales motion is changing, right? So, one of the things that I sort of instilled in the team is we don't really sell, right? We educate, right? I mean we know that the buying process is sort of shifted to the buyer, and you have to react to that, right? And how do you do it? You don't sell people, you don't push into the market, you educate them. You know, how should they be using the product, how are other maybe innovative companies doing things? What are best practices, what is value you can add at every step of the process and cater to particular personas. And ultimately they're going to make that buying decision. >> If you've taken our inbound sales course, this is old news to you. But the reality is, most sales teams don't think of themselves primarily as educators. So start by working on changing your company's sales process so that content fits into it. But providing your sales team with relevant content isn't just about modernizing your sales process. Content can also be useful when a sales conversation stalls. Here's Steve again. >> You send somebody a proposal, they go into radio silence. You call six weeks later and you don't say this, but you kind of say this. Hey, it's me, I don't know if you remember me, remember me? Remember about three weeks he asked me to send a proposal, which I did. So I guess the purpose of today's calls to see if you got the thing I sent you, read it, like it, decided to buy from me, but for some odd reason forgot to tell me. So I guess that's why I'm calling today. Those kind of calls are useless. When you send an email or a call and you ask for an appointment, you ask for a decision, you ask any questions. You are essentially asking do you have any money? I'm calling you to get money. So I ask salespeople, what percentage of the times are they reaching out and asking for money? And for most salespeople it's 100% of the time. So if every single time, every single time I get an email from somebody, it's always asking me for money, and I wasn't interested in talking to them the first time, I'm even less interested the 1000th time. But, if more than half of the time, let's say 90% of the time, that note from you, that email from you is actually a value. It's not asking me for money, it's giving me some information that you thought would be helpful and you know what probably would be helpful. It's kind of information that you know what it is helpful. But you know what even care more about this, my friend down the hall, let me forward that to them. What a great way to get into a company. Now, everybody that's met you, there first impression is you bring value rather than you're asking for money all the time. >> And that's the most important thing, create content that will enable your sales teams to add value throughout the sales process. How you do that depends a lot on the space you're in, the length of your sales cycle and the people you're selling to. But your sales team has excellent insights into all of these things. So collaborate with them about places where the sales process tends to get stuck, bring it up in your next marketing meeting. And then brainstorm content that will help those sales get unstuck, and then you'll truly be enabling sales. [MUSIC]
