If your marketing and sales teams are hoping to score wins, analytics is the name of the game.
These days, very few companies would dream of debuting content without first consulting actionable data to back up their message. CSO Insights reports that companies with a sales enablement charter strategy stand to achieve quotas of up to 1.3 times higher than those of organizations that choose to fly without a data-reinforced net.
Read on for a look at the top ways in which analytics can benefit your organization and keep your marketing track record firmly in the “win” column.
When stepping out onto the marketing-and-sales field, a detailed play-by-play strategy can mean the difference between securing a massive win and suffering a crippling defeat. But if you’re unsure how to begin building a strong playbook, take heart: Analytics can give you all the tools you need to get started.
Analytics that measure prospect and seller content engagement provide invaluable insight that can inform each of your campaigns and ensure you maximize your messaging potential. Centralized sales enablement platforms gather crucial data that you can then synthesize and repurpose in order to create more impactful content and, by extension, create more effective sales practices. These kinds of solutions generate key indicators such as content coverage (i.e., “Do my sales reps have everything they need to begin pitching?”) and content freshness (“Do our most impactful assets need to be updated?”), all of which can be leveraged when mapping out your next content rollout or contemplating your next strategic branding move.
In addition, a robust sales enablement platform can offer analytics surrounding the ways in which prospects interact with your content (through clicks, downloads, scrolling activity, and more), which can give you a better sense of what’s working and what’s falling short. Once you know which pieces of content have the greatest reach, you can streamline your archive and ditch anything that’s no longer up to par. And the leaner and meaner your content stockpile, the easier it will be for reps to pick and choose what they need when prepping for the next big sales pitch. This way, your content stands a better chance of hitting its target and securing successful prospect engagements that compel them to move to the next stage of their purchase process.
When harnessed correctly, analytics can provide sales reps with the appropriate content gaming equipment, arming reps with the relevant assets they’ll need to rack up sales “points” and land the best deals.
Sales enablement solutions can assess sales team activity for metrics on content usage (when and where your assets are being utilized) and pitch activity (how often sellers are using the content), giving you a bird’s-eye view of the game. Implementing analytics on this scale can tip the odds in your favor as you and your sales reps take up your positions and get ready for your marketing content game to kick off.
The same is true of prospect engagement analytics. Today’s metrics go well beyond name and company, and tech tools can be programmed to report on an endless variety of customer behaviors — from preferred brands to time spent reading your latest emails. Integrating data gleaned from traditional CRMs with a sales engagement platform can help you segment your consumer audience, empowering you to cater content to leads with even greater precision. Forbes.com puts it succinctly:
“What separates the savviest users of analytics from the rest is their ability to drill into historical information to see what past programs have been successful, and then apply predictive algorithms to become more successful in the future.”
Analytics aren’t just applicable to pre-sales planning — even after the first pitch, analytics can aid in making on-the-fly decisions to push deals across home plate.
Closed-loop analytics — the use of data collected at early stages in the buyer’s journey to help inform best practices at the later stages — can provide near-instant intel on how content is faring with your sellers and buyers. Such insightful data enables you to edit and update your content to best resonate with prospects, keeping you in sync with both the needs of your sales reps and the desires of your prospects.
Similarly, a feature such as Highspot’s Content Genomics lets marketers track various versions of a single piece of content, tracing any edits made by sales reps as situations change or new plays are needed. This kind of insight alerts marketers to shifting trends in both seller and prospect engagement and, consequently, can be used to help make critical decisions about real-time modifications that must be made. No need to call a timeout; analytics enable you to employ a flexible and impactful game technique from play to play.
Engagement analytics are essential components of any well-played marketing game, and when it comes to measuring gains in business, nothing beats cold, hard numbers. If you’re hoping for an accurate score when you step back and take a look at your overall content performance, it helps to put a dollar figure on content impact.
But if you’re thinking that monetary measurements are too complicated for an engagement platform, think again. Cutting-edge sales enablement tools can transform engagement analytics into precise dollar figures, allowing marketers to assess content viability in quantifiable (and not just theoretical) terms. Once these scores are tallied, you can then adjust your future game plans according to which content strategies earned you the most “points” in the previous round.
And...that’s the buzzer, folks. Good game. Take advantage of engagement analytics to ensure that you’ll always be ready to achieve the best score.