How to Use Your CMS, DSRs, and CRM to Inform Your Content Strategy

Is traditional sales content management stifling your org’s growth potential?

In this video, Mindtickle Principal Product Marketing Manager Christian Pieper outlines how orgs can build a content strategy using data from your CMS, DSRs and CRM.

The result? 

A content strategy that’s driven by data and perfectly aligned with the buyer journey. 

Key takeaways

Here’s the rundown of the key things Christian recommends for revenue enablement pros:

Centralize your content management:

  • Consolidate all sales content into one centralized platform to reduce administrative burden and increase adoption.
  • Bring content from various sources into a unified location for better visibility and data centralization.
  • One company reduced admin burden by 40% and increased content adoption by consolidating training and external content.

Layer engagement data

  • Move beyond merely attributing content usage to deals and instead focus on understanding how content impacts deals.
  • Use Digital Sales Rooms to track engagement with content by internal and external audiences.
  • Layer engagement data on top of usage data to gain insights into how content affects deals at different stages.

Plan your content strategically

  • Plan content around the buyer journey by integrating DSRs with your CRM.
  • Understand the buyer journey to create content that addresses specific buyer needs.
  • Identify high-performing pieces and focus on creating impactful content that aligns with buyer behavior.

Transcription

Hi, I’m Christian Pieper principal product marketer at Mindtickle. I’m excited to share this video as part of our series on reducing your technology chaos. Today specifically, I’m going to talk to you about how you can use different pieces of technology related to your sales content to inform your content strategy.

Again, the biggest problem people have with content is that they don’t know what’s happening. A big part of what we will talk about today is understanding how your content is being used. And using all of that data to find actual ways to improve the strategy you’re using for building and deploying content.

The first tip I’m going to talk about is how having all your content in one place helps streamline your efforts. The next one I’ll talk about is how layering engagement data on top of your usage data can help you understand the impact of content, not just how often it was used. And finally, I’m just talking about how you can structure your content in a way that makes it more likely that your sellers will use your content to move deals forward.

I already mentioned this, but if you don’t know what’s happening, you can’t inform your content strategy using data. Most places don’t know what’s being shared by whom and in what ways, and that’s usually because content is being housed in all kinds of places. Different solutions may be on the seller’s hard drive.

Ultimately, you want to bring all of your content into one place to reduce admin burden, increase your adoption, and centralize that data. This is critical. I spoke with the head of enablement and midmarket tech company recently, and they were facing a major problem before where they had their training content in one place, and their content for external audiences in another and sellers weren’t using either solution. They didn’t have good data, they didn’t know what was happening. So they consolidated all that together, and they estimated that they reduced their admin burden by 40% while increasing their adoption in both training and external content use. Now they’re gathering data on how that content is impacting deals.

I want to stress that it’s not enough just to attribute cost to attribute content usage to deals. Yeah, you can say this content was used in these deals. And these deals were worth X dollars. But you’re not saying anything about how that content impacted those deals, maybe those closed. Despite the use of that content. Maybe that content was instrumental, you don’t know.

To understand that, you have to layer engagement data on top of your usage data. That’s why it’s really important to use good sales tech that will allow you to track engagement with your content both by your internal and external audiences.

Digital Sales Rooms is an amazing piece of new tech that really helps you understand who is engaging with your content in the buyer organization,and at what points in your deals. That way, you can see how it’s impacting deals at different stages. And not just that it was used but to what effect. By comparing these two pieces of data, you can also discover opportunities for your strategy.

If content is used not very often but generates great engagement when it is you need to find a way to impact to improve the usage of that content, you might want to include it in templates for your digital sales herbs, might want to put it in the sales place your sellers use to understand how to sell to different personas. Regardless, you will have to find a way to get it used more often.

Now, if you have continents being used a lot and generating a little engagement, you probably have identifying content that isn’t doing its job; you should find a way to make that content more impactful. You want to look at slide-level analytics and adapt. For example, which slides are people engaging with the most get rid of the ones that they aren’t engaging with and focus on the stuff that they care about, that will help you generate content that impacts deals more effectively.

Finally, I want to talk about ways you can streamline your content by identifying it or by planning it around your buyer journey. To do that you have to understand your buyer journey. Again, if you’re sharing content from your hard drive and email if your sellers are doing that, you’re not going to know how the content is impacting the buyer journey.

But if you’re using digital sales rooms, if those are integrated with your CRM, then you’re going to know what content is being shared at what points and what kind of engagement it’s generating. That should help you understand the jobs that your buyers are trying to do and the questions that you’re trying to answer. And that can help you make content that accomplishes those jobs and answers those questions.

In the end result for this is overwhelmingly found when you look at the data inside your sales content solution, a small percentage of your content is generating the vast majority of your engagement. Look for your content superstars and make more of that make less stuff but make stuff that gets used much more often.

This is based on a really amazing presentation I saw from Kathleen Pierce at Forrester – if, you have a subscription at Forrester, I’d highly encourage you to seek her out and have her brief you on her question-based framework for content. It really helps you align your content strategy around data that you generate about your buyer behavior.

Hope this video was helpful on how you can reduce your chaos by consolidating technology and making it more impact. If you want more actionable insights. Please click our scan. This QR code will take you to more videos from my colleagues that will answer how you can do this and other ways in your organization. Thanks for your time and good luck out there.