Complete Guide to Sales Content Management: Tips & Best Practices

Sales reps need handy content assets to answer prospect questions, overcome objections, and explain the product’s USP.But not any assets. The right type of content presented in a relevant and timely manner helps them close deals faster without any information overload. 

That’s what sales content management is all about.

This article is an in-depth sales content management guide with actionable tips to excel with contextual sales content.  

What is sales content management?

Sales content management is the process of creating, organizing, optimizing, and delivering sales collateral for salespeople to close deals effectively. It ensures sellers can easily find the right content at the right time across the sales cycle.

Content can entail assets, such as sales playbooks, training material, pricing sheets, etc., for internal use, or it can be customer-facing content like proposals, sales pitches, outreach templates, presentations, and more.

Why is sales content management critical for high-performing sales teams?

A lack of proper content management causes sales teams to dig through siloed and unstructured resources, wasting critical selling hours. 

All the time lost searching for the most precise information means several deals are lost.  

Here are a few more reasons why every organization must invest in sales content management:

1. Support sales reps at every sales cycle stage 

A typical sales process is a mixed bag of tasks that requires tailored content. For example, price negotiations with SMB clients vary from enterprise clients as sales reps may need more in-depth case studies or cost breakdowns for the latter.  

With a sales content management system in place, keeping these details organized and up to date makes it easier for sellers to personalize and progress deals. 

2. Customer engagement 

Sales reps with targeted resources effectively engage and convert buyers. The right sales content helps in nurturing and engaging buyers throughout the sales process, thereby establishing meaningful connections with prospects.

3. Uncover prospect and deal insights

Sales content management systems can help you track content usage and detect buyer behaviors and deal insights.

For example, understanding if prospects are actually opening your emails or proposals is critical to strategizing engagement. Meanwhile, a high open rate is a clear sign that prospects exhibit buying signals. 

Such content-led insights can help your team visualize buyer behaviors better and what the most profitable deals look like.

4. Support sales rep training and growth 

The above insights and access to contextual content support sales rep training and development. 

For example, you could share email outreach templates that received the highest open or response rates while equipping reps with the right knowledge management tools to advance deals.

A sales content management system, or a sales CMS, can also be used to encourage the internal use of sales assets like playbooks, battle cards, case studies, etc., to support continuous learning. 

How to improve your sales content management process?

If you already have a sales content management process in place, you must revisit it to discover any potential hindrances or weak processes that may need addressing.

Here are some steps to make sales content management a continuous improvement process to reap maximum benefits:

1. Have a centralized content repository  

Introducing a centralized content repository, which can be as simple as a set of shared folders within a content library helps unify content across systems.

For example, an ordinary Google Drive shared across sales and marketing teams can contain specific templates categorized under topics like outreach, objection handling, product demos, and more.

The benefit? You save sales reps time searching for verified, up-to-date content and make way for effective sales conversations. 

2. Review and update sales content regularly 

Outdated sales materials used to communicate with clients can have severe aftereffects, such as a bad brand reputation, and can repel high-intent leads.

Regular review and updates to sales content can be a joint effort involving sales SMEs or product marketing.

A typical content audit cycle can be between 9 to 12 months. 

3. Leverage sales analytics to make informed choices 

Analytics lets you improve your sales content management process on hard facts rather than guesswork. 

Sales analytics for content can involve insights into how and when content is viewed, who consumes it the most, and how it impacts revenue. 

For example, content engagement analytics like “Content by sales stage” lets you monitor the type of content buyers engage with at various stages of their purchasing journey. Tracking this helps your sales reps tailor content for future buyers. 

When should you graduate to a sales content management system?

Do you have a team of three or more sales reps? That’s a clear enough sign to start introducing a content management system. 

As your team grows, you’ll need a system to track the latest content versions accessed by them and to pinpoint what format works best in progressing deals. 

In short, graduate to a sales content management system if you’re serious about shortening your typical sales cycle with high-value content and saving reps from wasting hours sifting through sales assets even for the simplest of queries. 

Is it difficult to introduce a sales content management solution?

Introducing a CMS can present its own challenges. The difficulty of setting one up can largely vary depending on the solution you choose. 

For example, some solutions are extremely user-friendly while some may need technical training to set up and maintain.

Docket AI, for instance, provides a centralized knowledge base and cuts short implementation time with a clean setup and onboarding process. 

How to implement a sales content management solution?

Here are six simple steps to make a seamless sales content management solution a reality:

1. Define your requirements 

What’s the amount and variety of content you’d be expecting the solution to store? How should the solution align with your business goals? Should it provide analytics on content usage, offer instant answers to sales rep queries, or offer content recommendations?

For instance, Docket is an AI solution for sales content and knowledge management that’s perfect for enterprises looking to support their reps with on-the-spot verified answers to a range of sales and prospect queries. 

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Define these basic requirements or objectives before diving into implementing a CMS. 

Also, consider how many users would have access to the solution and must be supported to assess future scalability. 

2. Evaluate and select the best solution 

Your requirements from the previous step will now come in handy while shortlisting solutions. Start by eliminating the ones that don’t meet your requirements, such as lack of integration with your CRM, out-of-budget plans, clunky interface, etc.

Finally, ensure you’ve narrowed down your list to three or fewer solutions so you can compare them in-depth. 

3. Pick stakeholders and plan solution implementation 

Select a group of stakeholders. It could involve senior sales reps, sales engineers, or people from the sales enablement or product marketing team. 

Use this group to test the solution’s compatibility with your internal tool stack and content resources. That way, it’s easier to evaluate the solution better and onboard the rest of your sales team.

4. Implement the sales content management solution 

It’s time to introduce the solution to the rest of your team and bring them up to speed. 

Set expectations for how and when they can use it to boost adoption. For example, outline scenarios where the tool can be the most helpful. It can be during prospect interactions, answering customer queries, filling up RFPs, etc.

With solutions like Docket, planning and implementing take a shortcut as it hardly takes under five hours for the AI solution to learn from your internal knowledge and onboard users. 

Your salespeople will have access to all the information at their fingertips to progress deals via the most frequently used apps like Slack, MS Teams, or other web applications. 

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5. Monitor and optimize 

This is a final but endless step where you monitor content use and address any roadblocks along the way. 

Don’t forget to continuously optimize your sales content assets so your reps have access to only relevant and verified information. 

Wrapping up

Productive sales reps have more time to focus on selling rather than performing administrative activities like searching for the most contextual content to progress deals.

However, the right sales content management solution can drive productivity and triple your win rates while enhancing your team’s efficiency. 

Try an AI sales content management solution like Docket that uncovers valuable tribal knowledge to answer buyer queries instantly.

Book a demo today!