There are a number of different technologies to improve sales productivity. Ensuring the right documentation at the right time is in sales people’s hand is an incredibly important sales enablement activity.
A few stats to ponder:
- IDC estimates 40% of marketing collateral produced is not used
- Sales can spend up to 9 hours a week are spent searching for information
- According to KnowledgeTree, 30% of the average sales person’s time is spent looking for or creating new sales content and documents
- According to the Aberdeen Group, companies that gave marketing strong visibility into sales content utilisation saw an 3% increase in total company revenue, a 5.1% increase in average deal size, and a 3.6% increase in marketing’s contribution to the sales pipeline, year-over-year
- Analyst estimates show that up to 95% of successful sales were influenced by sales content and sales documents
According to Gartner’s 2016 report on digital content management for sales,
Sales organisations with moderate to high volumes of electronic content (for example, Microsoft PowerPoint presentations and collateral based on PDF files or Microsoft Word documents) should consider basic sales content management systems to improve the oversight of collateral. Sales organisations that rely on complex, time-sensitive and precise information to advance sales cycles should pursue sales content management solutions to increase sales effectiveness (such as improving project-based or complex solution selling practices).
One of the strong trends in this space is to use predictive analytics to suggest content. I think this is really powerful. This can be aligned to behaviour on an opportunity, a stage in the sales cycle, etc. To learn more about this, Seismic has a great blog post on predictive content. This follows trends in the industry towards artificial intelligence. This can also be a way to ensure your sales teams are working in a regular, prescribed and consistent fashion. Ultimately its all about freeing up time for sales to spend more time selling.
If you are considering a productivity initiative, Sales Ops Help can work with you to prioritise how to make the biggest gains for your organisation.
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