B2B marketing organizations are now spending more than 25% of their budgets on the development, delivery and promotion of content to drive business. Sales reps spend about 30 hours a month trying to locate this precious content –  to ensure they have quick access to sales-driving information during their sales conversations.  Ideally, this tedious preparation will result in a successful sales interaction helping to close deals. Were sales reps able to access the sales-driving content they needed to drive deals forward? Post meeting, how can sales reps gauge prospect’s interest level for effective post-meeting follow up? How and when should they follow up? Is there strong potential to convert this prospect into a customer?

Through content tracking and the ability to capture prospect’s interactions with the content, sales reps can gain visibility into the post meeting stage of sales conversations. When content is trackable, sales reps can easily gauge a prospect interest level and identify company’s key stakeholders. Sales managers can use insights to monitor content success, communicating these insights to their respective marketing teams to improve their content creation process.

Here’s an in-depth view into 4 ways content intelligence will transform your sales by identifying prospects’ interest level, identifying key stakeholders, establishing best practices and improving the content creation process.

Identify Prospects’ Interest Level:

Hopefully, sales reps leave their meetings confident that their presentation was effective in disrupting their prospect’s mindset. But, regardless of how a sales rep might believe their meeting went, there is a critical blind spot post sales meeting. This leaves sales reps without any insight into how interested their prospect is in their offering.

With a solution that captures a prospect’s interaction with shared content, sales reps can accurately identify interest level by monitoring: when the prospect opens the shared content, how long they spend digesting each specific piece of content, and who within their organization they are sharing the content with.

89% of the time, sales reps follow up with prospects who aren’t interested or aren’t ready to have a conversation. Unsuccessful follow-up strategies are a waste of sales reps’ time and resources. It’s simple: By tracking who’s viewing content, when, and for how long, sales reps can use these pivotal signs to formulate their follow-up strategy to maximize their time and target their most promising prospects to close more deals faster.

Identify Key Stakeholders:

Unless sales reps are targeting key stakeholders within their prospect’s organization, their deals are likely to remain stagnant. According to Gartner Group, in a typical firm with 100-500 employees, an average of 7 people are involved in most buying decisions. Without any insight into who should be included in the series of sales conversations, reps will continue to schedule conversations without the key decision makers.

With content tracking and insights, sales reps can identify to whom their shared content is being sent to, identifying the key individuals they should include in their future sales meetings. With sales enablement solutions like Showpad, content tracking will enable sales reps to reach out to the right individuals, at the right time. By identifying key decision makers and including them in the selling process, sales reps will expedite the entire sales interaction.

Establish Best Practices:

The strongest sales organizations are comprised of teams who analyze and evaluate their selling strategies on an ongoing basis, continuously looking to implement improvements. 20% of top salespeople close 80% of all deals. This means that 80% of a sales force fights over the remaining 20% of the business (Greenberg & Greenberg, 1983). Unfortunately, since managers are unable to sit in on every sales meeting, they often lack the insight to understand why this might be. With insightful analytics, this mystery can be eliminated; allowing managers to track the content that sales reps are using in the field, directly correlating it to their success rates. By gaining insight into sales reps’ processes and content usage, management is able to establish and implement best practices for the rest of their sales team.

Improve Content Creation Process:

Due to the imminent lack of alignment between marketing and sales, marketing teams spend valuable time and money creating content that often fails to drive sales in the field. Sales reps see firsthand which content is effective, but the communication gap between marketing and sales teams often prevents marketers from receiving this constructive feedback. There is great potential for sales excellence that could be achieved if marketers gained visibility into insights to understand the performance of specific pieces of content in the field. Using this insight, marketing can create more successful content in the future. With analytics, marketers can easily identify which content drives sales to prioritize how to best invest their time and resources to create sales-driving content.

Sales enablement solutions that provide analytics shed light on the post meeting mystery – enabling sales reps to follow up as experts, targeting the right prospects, at the right time to increase the probability of a successful sales interaction. Capturing prospect’s content usage and interaction will allow sales reps to quickly identify a prospect’s interest level, identify the company’s key stakeholders, improve the overall quality of the sales team & improve the content creation process. These key insights into sales interactions lead to more effective conversations and, ultimately, shorter sales cycles.

To learn more about implementing a Sales Enablement Solutions, check out our Ebook on 4 Drivers of Mobile Sales Enablement Success.