The marketing department is often the primary creator of digital content used for customer facing interactions such as lead generation and sales presentations. Unfortunately a lot of content created by the marketing team doesn’t actually get used.
Instead what we’re seeing are sales reps going out and creating their own content for their specific selling needs and challenges.
Today’s article explores digital content creation by sales reps, and why they perhaps shouldn’t be creating their own content.
This article continues our previous discussions around digital sales and marketing content.
Click Here to learn about why sales doesn’t use digital content created for them.
Click Here to learn about what sales reps want from digital content sales material.
Sales prefer their own Digital Content, why not have them Create it?
In our last post we saw that digital sales content produced by the sales team gets frequently used (5+ uses) 57% of the time, as opposed to only 9% of the time for content created by the marketing team (Source: CMS Newswire, 2016).
In fact, when assessing closed deals, marketing created content is used in only 26% of cases, where sales created content was used in 61% of cases (Source: CMS Newswire, 2016). Sales created content actually comprises 40% of the content that sales reps believe they have at their disposal even though marketing teams are the primary producers of digital content at most organizations.
We can see that sales reps are effective at knowing what they need from their own content in order to support the sales process.
The issue is a lack of insights, accessibility, and time.
A Lack of Insights
It is true that few marketing teams include sales in the creation of customer facing content, but this issue becomes even more pronounced the moment sales reps start creating their own material to use across the sales process.
Marketing teams use a variety of Martech solutions to help them assess and optimize digital content over time. This data is often integrated across a number of platforms including CRM in an automated process that delivers actionable metrics about content effectiveness.
CRM adoption among sales reps is low, and capturing these best practices and behaviours from sales created content is next to impossible without a holistic sales stack that enables this kind of automation with sales enablement software.
The results of this misalignment are disjointed communications that create a gap between what is being said at lead generation and what is being said during the sales call. Furthermore, some sales reps may in fact be using content created by marketing, which further deteriorates any coordinated IMC planning for front line communications.
Lack of Accessibility,
(Image Source: CMS Newswire, 2016)
68% of sales reps indicated that they use five or more different repositories to store their digital sales content, and as we’ve already seen (Source: CMS Newswire, 2016), 90% of these content management strategies lack any kind of content management functionality whatsoever. Instead, they make finding the right content a chance-driven ordeal rather than an impulse-driven and intuitive content management process.
If a sales rep does create content, distributing that content may require a lengthy email chain.
That material may eventually become outdated, and trying to stop sales reps from using outdated content requires another lengthy interaction.
Finally, ensuring that the content is accessible for mobile, social, and other channels may require additional formatting which takes time and resources away from selling.
If sales reps are creating their own content, an integrated communications tool must be part of the sales stack used by the sales team, otherwise the best content will never be found, and coordinated sales communications with content become increasingly difficult.
Lack of Time,
A crisis of time management is hitting sales teams hard. Sales reps are spending less time selling and more time researching buyers, searching for content, and creating content.
Let’s examine the decline,
- In 1998, sales reps would spend an average of 47% of their day in direct selling;
- A Study in 2013 revealed a decline to only 35% of their day (Source: ROInnovations, 2014);
- In 2015, a report from Marketwired showed a figure as low as 23% of a sales reps day being spent selling to new clients (Source: Marketwired, 2015).
And what does this time split look like?
- 4+ hours a week spent searching for marketing collateral;
- 8+ hours a week spent searching for customer related material; and
- 4+ hours a week spent creating presentations (Source: ROInnovations, 2014).
The largest time slot was cited for creating presentations, and these figures don’t represent the time spent researching and understanding the buyer and their specific needs.
As buyers become more complex, content creation needs to be tailored more effectively in order to add value. Meanwhile marketing teams are spending time creating content that they believe is being used to support sales.
This combination results in sellers that spend less time selling, and wasted marketing dollars that never meet the needs of both sales reps and buyers at the end of the sales funnel.
Sales reps need some wiggle room to customize or tailor content offerings for each individual buyer. This is known as micro-marketing. Sales reps need a platform that enables them to manipulate marketing content easily without adding friction to the sales process so that they can tailor material to each specific buyer.
Without this, sales reps will continue to create content and marketing teams won’t have the chance to understand how they can improve their content creation for the end of the sales funnel.
At Skura we understand content issues, and it’s why we’ve been named a top sales tool for 2 years in a row by Smart Selling Tools. If you’re having these issues with your content, request a demo and let us show you how easy it can be to enhance sales and marketing content creation.
A Case for Sales Created Content
It’s easy to find and point out the reasons why sales reps should focus on selling rather than creating content, but there remains something to be said about the effectiveness seen from content created by the sales team.
In our next post we’ll create a case for when and why sales teams should perhaps have the opportunity to create content, and how it can be done right so as to minimize the downside impact from the challenges discussed in today’s article.
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