In today’s market, sales diminution is one of the critical issues that can cause a company to lose its foothold in the market. There are various facets because of which sales decline and whenever that happens, management’s top priority should be to identify the root cause and eliminate it. This week we examine the top 10 reasons sales can decline in the face of effective content marketing.
Shift in Business Communications
The majority of companies are participating in some kind of digital content marketing, whether that is for lead generation or just general awareness. (Source: Content Marketing Institute, Marketing Profs) It has also worked exceptionally well for lead nurturing as it allows buyers to progress through the Sales Funnel at their own pace.
This strategy is now being integrated into many Sales Teams in an effort to better align Sales and Marketing communications, and pass on the strengths that Marketers have seen. Unfortunately, there is a problem, many Reps aren’t experiencing the success of found with digital content marketing, and a decline in Sales Rep effectiveness has led many to understand that a gap exists between what is currently being accomplished, and what can be.
Minding the Gap
After analyzing various verticals, below is the list of some common issues that can result in a dramatic sales downfall when using digital content marketing for sales, or, digital content sales.
A Problem with Sales Metrics:
1. Vague Analytics:
Using analytics to support the sales process is the latest trend, many understand that digital content lends itself well to tracking and analytics. According to a CMO Survey, spending on marketing analytics is expected to increase 60% by 2015.
But if the metrics and analytics being analyzed for sales fail to represent the needs of the end user (buyers and Reps), the real reason for what is working and what isn’t will remain veiled. This can result in losing a great amount of deals due to poor communication.
Identifying the collateral which works for successful deals is essential to carry on with the winning spree. This means that end-of-funnel metrics must be applied to the CRM system in order to clarify the buyer persona profile, and optimize content creation.
2. Obsolete content:
Did your company launch new features in the product, but the Sales Team is still unaware and presenting with content which is not contemporary? Or, does the content not represent the needs of a buyer interacting with the Sales team?
In this scenario, there is a great probability that the company will not be able to crack the deal. Large amount of prospects may be lost to the competition, which can result in losing a foothold in the market.
This is a case where a lack of accurate analytics can spill out into other areas of communication planning. Vague analytics don’t just impact content awareness, they impact content creation. When you can clearly see which content progresses a SQL to a close, you can optimize the next round of creation to better reflect this kind of content.
3. Lack of training:
Companies need to understand that there is a difference between an unqualified Sales team and an underqualified Sales team. The average company spends $10K – $15K hiring an individual and only $2K a year in sales training (Source: BridgeGroupInc). They need to understand that hiring is only the first step, but comprehensive training is the building block of creating a good Sales team. Failed training comes at a high cost, as untrained employees can mean unhappy or unsatisfied customers.
On a longer term however, training becomes less about effective onboarding, and more about empowering Reps to know what to say, when to say it, and how to say it. This is achieved in exactly the same way for Marketers, and you guessed it, awareness into buyer behavior.
When Marketing teams know what content a buyer consumed, and requested thereafter, they have a good idea of what they’re interested in. Sales Reps are generally less empowered with this awareness because Marketing Automation does not apply well to their role. Reps need end-of-funnel insights that empower this kind of knowledge, and enable them to be persuasive, and not curious, in a conversation.
4. Self-evaluation:
Lack of self-evaluation among the Sales team can make them complacent. If growth is the target for a company, providing sales personnel with real time performance data and a quota attainment rate can help them identify areas of improvement and induce self-motivation. It is necessary to keep in mind that the fluff is left out when providing such data to guarantee better results
When it comes to delivering a digital content sales strategy, self-evaluation comes from knowing if you made the right communication at the right time. Without it, your metrics would represent only basic operational awareness, and your recommendations would be limited to “make more calls” or “spend less time on task XYZ”, and etc.
When content consumption is brought in the mix, you can directly recommend that a Rep use a different communication piece, a different time, a different medium, and etc. Managers can align best practices to the entire team, and buyers can enjoy a delightful interaction that seemingly always meets their needs.
5. Relying on traditional technology:
Using traditional excel spreadsheets for reporting purposes can result in significant ramifications, as they are error prone and difficult to use. According to The TAS Group and Salesforcework.com, 23% of companies don’t even know if their sales force achieves quota or not. Missing out on such key metrics can have a great effect on future strategies. Thus organizations should adopt new analytics tools which mechanically generate error free reports and provide key metrics.
Further complicating this issue, many companies are now leveraging content insights to demand more accurate forecasting. Content consumption speaks volumes about buyer readiness, and the more visibility a company has into these metrics, the more accurately they can forecast their sales.
6. External benchmarking:
To remain a market leader, or emerge as one, competitors should never be ignored. Comparing the company's performance against external standards can provide insight for what constitutes a “good” performance. Making competition part of strategy can result in 39% more high performers (Source: The TAS Group)
When content is applied to the competitive positioning strategy, a real look into operations can be achieved. Think of it like a war-scenario. It’s great to know how the enemy is doing, it’s better to know WHAT they’re doing. When you can correlate their content activity and success rates, you can better improve your own operations and even surpass their strategy on weaker fronts.
This kind of awareness starts from within, once you have your own content effectiveness mapped, you can compare and contrast with the competition.
7. It’s not always the sales team:
The Sales team is not the one responsible for a decline in sales. It might be the marketing team who are not generating enough qualified leads for the Sales team to handle. Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. (Source: DemandGen Report). Thus if the marketing team does their job well, sales can grow. Shredding off preconceived notions and committing to having a broad vision might help in eliminating the root cause.
This all starts with a plan, and is empowered by insights. On a longer term, if a company only uses the insights from the Marketing Automaton system, they cannot possibly hope to understand end-of-funnel consumption, as these insights are lost when an MQL is passed to Sales.
The result is increased lead generation, but not necessarily content that is optimized for the actual target market (people who end up buying). This can only be achieved when buyer consumption is used to optimize the mix.
A Problem with Sales Content Management:
8. Lack of coordination between marketing and sales team:
According to the survey done by Corporate Visions, only 10% of companies are entirely synchronized in demand generation and sales training efforts. There lies a potential conversion gap due to lack of sales and marketing alignment.
For example, if the Marketing team does not know whether their content is being used by the Sales team, or, the Sales team does not know if new content is made available, it can result in losing deals. A potential lead may not get converted, and this lack of orchestration can impede the Sales growth to a large extent.
Part of this gap has to do with persona content mapping. The majority of content marketers use Marketing Automation, and of these, many have their buyers mapped to personas with automated content drips.
Sales Reps aren’t so lucky, they receive MQLs and plan out their own communication strategy, much of which could be poorly tailored to that buyer, or even worse, something they’ve already seen through lead nurturing. To align the communication delivery, Reps need a system like Marketing Automation that can map the right content with the MQLs they receive prior to making their first touch.
9. Lack of insights:
75% of buyers want marketers to curb the sales-speak in their content (Source: DemandGen). Thus for winning a deal, the content presented should not only be personalized but also be based on patterns identified from other customer interactions. But if these insights are unavailable during creation and presentation, there is trifling likelihood of winning the deal.
Worse still, many buyers expect Sales Reps to deliver the right communications, which becomes increasingly difficult as buyers become more empowered and aware. Buyer’s want communications that represent their specific needs, the new Sales Rep is more of a Micro-Marketer than a sales person.
Reps need a way to tailor existing Marketing communications to the infinite number of potential buyer needs without wasting time creating their own. This means being able to assemble or ‘design’ various content pieces into one single micro-marketed asset. Depending on the industry, regulatory constraints may also impact what a Rep can and cannot show, and content consumption metrics must remain consistent regardless of whether content is rearranged for different buyers.
10. Variance between Inside and outside sales:
Inside sales teams can bring in new customers for 40 percent to 90 percent less cost than field reps (Source: Harvard Business Review). But on the other hand, outside Sales teams can build a better rapport with client and induce long term commitments.
So there is a clear distinction between the two teams. But using the same resources for inside and outside sales can drastically affect the sales growth. The required skill set (administrative, prospecting or closing) for inside sales varies to a great extent from the ones required for outside sales, thus differentiating the two is of significant importance.
When it comes to digital sales using content, the differences in both sales processes means that the content must be tailored to the buyer in question. If Reps send generic content, or spend all day looking for the right thing to send, the buyer will look elsewhere and desire an interaction that adds value.
Got it, End-of-Funnel Metrics and Sales Content Management… How?
If you recognize that any one of the above issues exists in your company, it’s time to take action. After all, wait and watch is not always the best policy. Lack of synchronization between the Marketing and Sales team, and lack of awareness into critical performance metrics, can result in plummeting sales.
Purging of these issues is vital and thus companies need to focus on:
Content and lead management: Companies that automate lead management see a 10% or greater increase in revenue in 6-9 months. (Gartner Research). Also 90% of consumers find custom content useful (Source: Infographics). Thus this is one of the critical areas to focus on.
Closed loop marketing solutions: Companies need to close this gap, as according to Marketo, when Sales and Marketing alignment occurs, companies become 67% better at closing deals.
Adaptive Sales Enablement is like Marketing Automation for a Sales team trying to deliver a digital content sales strategy.
This is because Adaptive Sales Enablement allows Sales Reps to utilize any content through a mobile platform, on any device, and through any medium, online or off, and pre-flighted to the current buyer based on persona profiles. It is truly a Sales Rep software.
This kind of sales content management also includes closed loop marketing functionality, which means that the end-of-funnel consumption metrics directly connects the CRM system, which informs and updates the persona content profile, and optimizes the operations of content Marketers.
You see, the entire process of digital content marketing and sales relies on ensuring both teams have the tools and processes available to coordinate a communication strategy that delights the buyer and progresses a continuous omni-channel experience.
Check out the whitepaper below for more insight into programs that enable a digital content sales strategy. If you’re looking for ways to optimize your content marketing, maybe we can help.
