Say Goodbye to Deal Delays: Discover the Power of Mindtickle’s Digital Sales Rooms

Christian Pieper on July 10, 2024

When we talk to buyers and sellers about the buying/selling process, they frequently complain about the same thing: deals take longer than they need to because of friction, confusion, and opacity.

So, if buyers and sellers want the same thing, what’s stopping them from aligning around the objectives of speed, clarity, and transparency?

The truth is that deals are becoming increasingly complicated. There are more competitors to evaluate, more stakeholders to align, and more legal and regulatory requirements to meet. When multiple conversations occur across multiple email threads and different folks join each sales call, information gets siloed, and deals get delayed.

Mindtickle’s Digital Sales Rooms were built to solve this problem and drive alignment between buyers and sellers throughout even the most complex deal cycles. By consolidating all communication, call recordings, collateral, documents, etc., into one persistent, collaborative space, Mindtickle’s deal rooms keep deals on track as both parties push toward their shared objectives.

What makes digital sales rooms so powerful?

You can think of a digital sales room as a dedicated virtual conference room where buyers and sellers can collaborate, find information, and complete their buying and selling tasks.

Without a digital sales room, you can only impact a small portion of the buying process – the time you spend with buyers on calls and any time they spend reading your emails or reviewing collateral you sent over. With a dedicated deal room for the opportunity, buyers have a place to go to research, get answers to their questions, and get other stakeholders up to speed.

By making your digital sales room the easiest place for buyers to get answers about your product and competing products and giving them a place to complete their buying tasks, you can influence a greater portion of the buying decision. You’ll know what content they are looking at, what questions they’re asking, and what needs to happen to push deals forward.

Why are Mindtickle’s digital sales rooms the best option for modern sales orgs?

Unlike other deal room offerings in the market, Mindtickle’s digital sales rooms allow for unlimited collaboration between unlimited participants on both the buying and selling sides. The rooms maintain a static link throughout the entire customer lifecycle, so the same room can be used pre-sale (for deal acceleration) and post-sale (for implementation and customer success) and simply swap ownership from an account executive to a success manager.

Mindtickle’s deal rooms boast best-in-class analytics, including granular engagement data on all room visitors and their content interactions. Even when someone you haven’t already met from a buying organization visits a digital sales room, Mindtickle automatically enriches that contact and writes it to the CRM opportunity record, so you always know who is involved in the deals you’re working.

What makes Mindtickle’s digital sales rooms special is how much sellers love using them. As Mindtickle customer Sirion discovered, their reps took so quickly to making deal rooms that they reached over 50% utilization in new deals within 90 days of launch. This is not a unique case. digital sales rooms are Mindtickle’s most highly adopted product, and they have been shown to drive adoption in other areas of Mindtickle’s comprehensive revenue enablement platform.

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What benefits are Mindtickle’s customers seeing from digital sales rooms?

At a recent Sales Enablement Society event in New York, Mindtickle hosted a session with Digger McElligott, the Vice President of Sales at Paytronix, to discuss Paytronix’s success with Mindtickle’s digital sales rooms. Digger discussed his sales org’s aggressive goal to double their win rates in 2024 and highlighted that they’re getting ⅓ of the way there simply by using digital sales rooms.

Aside from Sirion’s adoption metrics we discussed earlier, they’ve also enjoyed significant gains in buyer engagement. In one deal with a Fortune 100 tech company, they received over 100 visitors from the buying organization to their digital sales room powered by Mindtickle, logging over 1000 hours of total self-service engagement. And because Mindtickle’s deal rooms enriched those contacts and tracked all the engagements, they knew exactly who looked at which pages and slides for how long in every one of those visits.

Once digital sales rooms are enabled, we see a greater than 200% increase in content utilization across our entire customer base. With all the data that content utilization generates, marketers can understand how their message is resonating and take action to optimize their content strategy accordingly.

Mindtickle’s digital sales rooms aren’t just for sales anymore.

While our customers continue to see increases in win rates and buyer engagement, what’s been perhaps the most exciting development is learning about all of the unexpected use cases they are discovering for Mindtickle’s flexible deal rooms:

  • Marketing teams are using them to replace landing pages as more engaging and dynamic lead-generation assets.
  • Enablement teams are setting up rooms for groups of new employees onboarding together. They use the room to build community, work on group projects, and track their progress through onboarding.

  • HR teams use the rooms to recruit new hires, send offers, and track each candidate’s engagement with the hiring materials.

  • Success orgs are setting up customer groups and generating collaborative interaction in shared rooms.

Ultimately, whenever you need a persistent shared space for digital interaction and collaboration, Mindtickle’s digital sales rooms give you exactly that, whether for internal or external audiences.

Best practices for leveraging digital sales rooms

Here are a few tips we’ve compiled to make sure you get the most out of your Mindtickle-powered digital sales rooms:

Mindtickle’s deal rooms leverage a template library to make it simple for sellers to launch new rooms in minutes. Keep the process simple and manageable by making templates for the most common product packages, personas, verticals, etc., so when a seller scores a new opp, they can easily find the right template and get a room out immediately.

With just a click or two, a rep can add a mutual action plan to any digital sales room powered by Mindtickle. Start from a standard template for your sales process and customize it as needed to reflect the buyer’s intended journey. Assign tasks to buyers or sellers, track milestones, and set due dates to ensure deals stay on track. And when they don’t, you’ll know exactly what’s holding it up.

Invite sellers who built rooms that generated the most alignment in key deals to show off their rooms. You’ll incentivize your team to push the envelope in creating engaging, bespoke rooms. You can even create templates based on the best-performing rooms.

Ready to start seeing those increased win rates? Ready to start generating twice as much engagement with your thoughtfully built content? Contact us today to learn more about digital sales rooms powered by Mindtickle. Talk with one of our reps, and they’ll create a room just for you to see it in action.

Digital Sales Rooms in Mindtickle

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How 3 Medical Device Companies Use Mindtickle to Help Their Reps Close More Deals 

Christian Pieper on June 28, 2024

In medical device sales, staying ahead requires more than constant product innovation—it requires a flexible and adaptive approach to enabling your reps to sell your rapidly evolving product line.

Enter Mindtickle, an AI-powered revenue enablement platform transforming how medical device companies support their go-to-market reps.

By making it easy and fast to create engaging training content and serve up-to-date sales collateral to medical device reps, Mindtickle helps health tech and med tech companies stay ahead of the curve and the competition.

Today, we explore how three leading medical device companies have embraced Mindtickle to enhance sales effectiveness and drive more successful outcomes. From streamlining onboarding processes to refining pitch delivery and mastering complex product knowledge, these companies are leveraging Mindtickle to empower their sales teams like never before.

Let’s dive in.

Company #1 – A fast-growing global diagnostics provider

This medtech company has been using Mindtickle for over five years, and during that time, it has more than doubled the size of its go-to-market function.

Before Mindtickle, their sales enablement efforts were manual and analog. They needed a way to make their approach more scalable, data-driven, and mobile-friendly for their on-the-go reps. They chose Mindtickle mainly for its ability to drive onboarding and messaging certification programs for their new reps.

As their team has grown, this company has found the most value in two of Mindtickle’s varied learning modalities: virtual role-play exercises and quick updates. Reps must meet a minimum score threshold on several role-play exercises to meet their certification requirements. These exercises certify their ability to deliver the company’s message in an accurate, customer-friendly way that meets their high standard for regulatory compliance.

Quick updates are bite-sized training content that this company uses to notify its reps quickly of additions to its product lines, new competitor insights, and updates regarding the regulatory environment.

Mindtickle enabled this customer to grow quickly, powered by a scalable and data-driven approach to onboarding quickly and supporting new reps.

Customer #2 – A “MedTech Global Big 100” provider of medical devices and software systems

This customer came to Mindtickle because they were fed up with their inability to track and report progress with their traditional learning management solution. Similarly to the previously discussed customer, they were frustrated that their training was unavailable on-demand via mobile devices in the field.

After signing with Mindtickle, they’ve made all their training and sales collateral available via a dedicated mobile app provided by Mindtickle. They’ve also established a scalable, repeatable reporting system on enablement outcomes via Mindtickle’s Readiness Index. Not only have they transformed their approach to sales enablement, but they’ve been impressed with how surprisingly easy it has been to do so, thanks to Mindtickle’s support team and “impressive SLAs.”

Customer #3 – The medical device division of a Fortune 500 company

This customer approached Mindtickle intending to digitally transform their manual approach to training their sales reps. Specifically, they needed a solution for their trainers to use to deliver training in a more scalable, consistent, and frequent manner, as well as a solution to help enable their team of expert trainers and standardize their approach.

Having no previous formal means of delivering digital enablement, they conducted pilots with Mindtickle and a competing sales readiness solution. Ultimately, they chose Mindtickle because of our support, services, and superior capacity to deliver adaptive, role-specific learning paths.

Since partnering with Mindtickle, this customer has been impressed with how Mindtickle’s varied approaches to learning keep their reps engaged as they build their skills through onboarding and beyond. They’ve found particular value in Mindtickle’s virtual role-play exercises, especially in how they allow them to scale practice and coaching via AI feedback and grading on these exercises, removing the bottleneck of a manager requirement to review all submissions.

Mindtickle manager command center product image

These customers are just a few examples of how medical device companies are using Mindtickle to:

  • Transform their enablement with a scalable and data-driven approach
  • Deliver learning and training on-demand to reps in the field
  • Keep their teams up-to-date with their evolving product lines, market conditions, approved messaging, and compliance information

Want to learn more about how your company can experience the same benefits from a modern, seller-centric approach to revenue enablement? 

Mindtickle for Medical Device Reps

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6 Steps to a Winning Sales Enablement Program for Med Device Reps

Christian Pieper on June 12, 2024

Medical devices and pharmaceutical companies play a critical role in our society. After all, these businesses are laser-focused on developing and delivering products that improve medical outcomes and enhance patients’ health and quality of life.

But the life of a medical device or pharma sales rep isn’t easy. Day in and day out, these sellers must contend with a whole host of unique challenges, including (but not limited to) heavy regulation, crowded marketplaces, and demanding buyers.

Today, winning medical device and pharma businesses are investing in sales enablement. For good reason. With the right sales enablement strategy and tools, med device and pharmaceutical sales reps are equipped to deliver engaging, compliant experiences throughout the purchase journey – and ultimately close more deals.

In this guide, we’ll explore everything you need about sales enablement for medical device reps. You’ll walk away with a clear understanding of:

  • What sales enablement for medical devices is
  • Why medtech and pharma companies are investing in sales enablement
  • 6 practical steps you can take to create a high-performing sales enablement program for your medical device or pharma business

What is sales enablement for medical device reps?

As a revenue leader in the medical technology sector, you’ve likely heard the term “sales enablement.” But what exactly is sales enablement for medical device or pharma reps?

Sales enablement is designed to increase sales reps’ effectiveness and efficiency. It involves equipping revenue teams with the training, tools, information, and compliant sales content to engage buyers throughout the sales cycle.

While sales enablement is a relatively new concept, it’s quickly caught on in all industries – including medical devices and pharmaceuticals. According to the 2024-2025 Chief Revenue + Sales Leader Outlook Report, the vast majority – 84% – of organizations are investing in a sales enablement function.

of orgs invest in sales enablement
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Sales enablement for medical device reps is an enablement practice focused on addressing the unique needs of sales reps in the medical device industry. Later, we’ll look at some of those unique challenges and how medical device sales enablement addresses them.

You may wonder who is responsible for medical device or pharma sales enablement. It varies from organization to organization. But a dedicated sales enablement team is increasingly tasked with managing sales enablement for health tech.

What is a medical device sales enablement platform?

A sales enablement platform is a tool that powers a sales enablement program. A sales enablement platform centralizes everything related to sales enablement. Sales, marketing, and sales enablement teams can always find what they need – all within one platform.

A medical device or pharmaceutical sales enablement platform is a sales enablement tool equipped to meet the unique needs of medical device and pharmaceutical companies. Think of it as a one-stop shop for everything related to medical device or pharmaceutical sales enablement.

Enablement teams use a medical device sales enablement platform to build and deliver programs and initiatives. These teams can also use the medical sales enablement platform to measure the impact of their programs and optimize accordingly.

Medtech sales reps turn to a medical device sales enablement platform to access everything they need to engage with buyers and close deals in a complex, competitive, and highly regulated industry, including:

  • Onboarding
  • Ongoing learning
  • Reinforcement and practice opportunities
  • Coaching
  • Compliant sales content

A medical device sales enablement platform also incorporates robust analytics that can fuel better decision-making. For example, a sales enablement platform can help sales reps determine what step to take next or what content to share based on customer engagement and the historic performance of sales content.
Why should you implement sales enablement for medical device sales?
Let’s face it: medical device and pharma sales reps face a lot of challenges. Some key challenges include:

  • Navigating a heavily regulated industry with big penalties for non-compliance
  • Crowded markets and fierce competition
  • Ever-evolving product offerings
  • Increasingly large buying committees
  • Lengthy enterprise sales cycles
  • Shifting sales climate
  • Heightened buyer expectations

That’s just to name a few.

The most successful med device companies are turning to sales enablement to ensure medtech sales reps have everything they need to overcome these challenges and close more deals faster.

Let’s examine some of the key reasons leading med tech and pharma organizations are investing in sales enablement teams, plans, and tools.

Alignment between marketing and sales

Sales and marketing teams both aim to close more deals and grow revenue. But often, these teams work in silos. They’re so focused on their own work – without regard to what the other team is doing.

This misalignment can cause big problems.

For example, a marketing team might spend much time and effort creating sales content. But if this content isn’t used by sellers or doesn’t improve sales outcomes, the marketing team is wasting its time. They need hard data and feedback from sales teams to create content that resonates with buyers and helps move them through the sales funnel.

Effective sales enablement requires sales and marketing teams to come together to ensure revenue teams have what they need to be effective and efficient. This alignment is a powerful way to improve outcomes.

Companies with aligned sales and marketing teams experience
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Research from Forrester found that companies with aligned sales and marketing teams experience 24% faster growth rates and 27% faster growth over the period of a year.

A single source of truth for compliant information and sales content

The medical device and pharma industries are heavily regulated. Furthermore, medtech and pharma products always evolve, requiring sales collateral updates. Ensuring sales reps always have the latest, greatest, compliant collateral to use with prospects can be challenging.

A sales enablement platform enables organizations to house and organize all sales content in one location. That means sellers can easily find relevant, compliant sales content for any sales scenario. Furthermore, sales enablement teams can easily update content to ensure sales reps have the most current, compliant versions.

Training and coaching that’s relevant to the needs of each seller

It’s well understood that training and coaching both help improve seller performance. But often, organizations take a generic approach to learning and coaching. In other words, they develop generic training and learning initiatives and assign it to all reps – regardless of whether or not it’s relevant.

Training and coaching must be personalized to be effective. Yet, a recent report found that just 40% of C-level executives can identify sales rep strengths and weaknesses for customized training.

A solid sales enablement strategy and the right technology allow enablement teams to understand each seller’s strengths and weaknesses. Then, they can deliver training and coaching that addresses those unique needs.

Engaging buying experiences across the purchase journey

Selling medical devices and pharmaceuticals is getting more and more complicated. Sales cycles are long, and buying committees are growing. Furthermore, each stakeholder involved in a purchase has different needs and challenges.

It can be difficult for medical device and pharma sales reps to keep large buying committees engaged throughout the sales cycle – especially when most interactions take place remotely.

A sales enablement practice ensures that medical device and pharmaceutical sellers have the skills, tools, and content to keep buyers engaged throughout the purchase journey.

For example, some sales enablement platforms incorporate digital sales rooms, enabling all buying and selling team members to align, communicate, and share content. When everyone is on the same page, deals can progress faster.

Data and insights to fuel better sales outcomes

Making decisions based on hunches isn’t an effective approach. Instead, revenue teams must leverage data.

A sales enablement platform can provide robust data and analytics that can be used by sales, marketing, and sales enablement needs. For example, a pharma sales rep can see how different buying committee members interact with a specific piece of content. This intel can help inform next steps.

In addition, some sales enablement platforms incorporate revenue intelligence, which helps medtech sales leaders better predict sales outcomes. If a winnable deal is at risk, sales managers can work with their reps to improve its outcome.

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6 steps to develop an impactful sales enablement program 

Sales enablement can have a large, positive impact on sales performance. But how can you ensure your sales enablement teams and programs run on all cylinders?

Certain steps are essential when developing a sales enablement program for your medical device or pharmaceutical sales team.

Step 1: Collaborate cross-functionally

It’s important to identify who will own sales enablement within your organization. In the past, sales or marketing often owned sales enablement. But increasingly, organizations are investing in dedicated sales enablement teams.

However, sales enablement teams can’t (and shouldn’t) do it alone. Successful sales enablement requires ongoing collaboration from key teams – including enablement, sales, and marketing. You will likely achieve your sales enablement goals when these key teams are aligned.

Step 2: Determine your sales enablement goals

Without goals, creating effective medtech sales enablement initiatives and measuring their impact is impossible. As such, it’s critical to determine your sales enablement goals. In other words, what do you hope to accomplish with sales enablement for medical device reps?

While setting goals for program adoption and completion are important, you shouldn’t stop there. Instead, be sure you’re setting goals related to how your programs and initiatives will positively impact the metrics that matter most to your business – like quota attainment and revenue generation.

Avoid vague goals like “improve sales performance.” Instead, develop goals following the SMART methodology. SMART sales enablement goals are:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Attainable
  • Relevant
  • Time-specific

You will also need to decide what medical device sales enablement metrics to track to determine whether you’re on track to achieve your sales enablement goals.

Step 3: Define sales excellence

Sales enablement for medical device reps aims to build a team of excellent performers. But first, you have to define excellence.

Look at your best medtech sales reps and determine what makes them different. Use these insights to develop an ideal rep profile (IRP), which spells out the skills and behaviors a medical device or pharma sales rep needs for success at your organization.

Ideal rep profile competencies

Once you’ve developed your IRP, you can measure each rep against this gold standard. It’s a great way to determine where they’re shining and where there are opportunities for improvement.

Step 4: Develop sales enablement programs to support your goals

Once you have a clear idea of what you hope to achieve with sales enablement, you can start building programs and initiatives to help you achieve those goals.

Among countless other factors, sales enablement initiatives vary widely based on goals, team size, and budget. However, some common initiatives include:

Step 5: Tap into the right sales enablement technology

Technology is a key component of any sales enablement strategy for medical devices. Today, some organizations use point solutions to address specific aspects of sales enablement. For example, a medical device company may use one tool for sales content, one for sales training, and one for conversation intelligence.

Requiring your teams to switch between tools can be time-consuming and cumbersome. Furthermore, using point solutions makes it nearly impossible to get a holistic view of how sales enablement for medical device reps is actually improving sales outcomes.

mt-platform-conversation-intelligence-screen

Instead, consider streamlining your sales enablement tech stack by leveraging an integrated medical sales enablement solution. An integrated medical sales enablement tool incorporates all the key components of sales enablement – all from one platform. Those key components include:

An integrated sales enablement platform like Mindtickle empowers enablement teams to create, deliver, and measure their programs – all in one tool. Furthermore, revenue teams can access everything they need to engage prospects and close more deals.

Step 6: Measure and optimize

Launching a sales enablement for a health tech program and hoping for the best isn’t a good approach. Instead, you must measure consistently to ensure you’re on track to achieve your goals. Regular measurement also enables you to identify problems early on. Then, you can optimize your sales enablement programs to improve outcomes.

Build an entire team of top medtech sellers with Mindtickle

Sales reps in the medical device and pharma industries face significant hurdles. A solid sales enablement strategy – paired with the right sales enablement for health tech platform – empowers sellers to overcome challenges, deliver engaging experiences across the entire sales cycle, and close more deals.

Today, some of the world’s best medical device and pharmaceutical companies—including Integrace Health and Janssen India—depend on Mindtickle to equip their revenue teams with the training, tools, content, and insights they need to crush quota consistently. 

Sales Enablement for Med Devices

Want to learn more about how Mindtickle enables med device and pharma reps to hit quota every quarter?

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Your Guide to the B2B Sales Funnel: What is it and How to Optimize Yours 

Christian Pieper on May 22, 2024

In some product categories, the purchase journey is short and sweet. Consider a consumer going to a grocery store to buy cereal. They weigh their options for a few minutes, and then they make their selection.

The B2B customer journey, on the other hand, is often a lot more complicated. The B2B sales funnel is a common way to illustrate this complex journey.

But what is a sales funnel?

In this post, we’ll explore everything you need to know about B2B sales funnels. We’ll start with the basics, like what a sales funnel is and what the B2B sales funnel stages are. Then, we’ll share practical tips for optimizing your sales funnel to drive better results.

What is a sales funnel?

First things first: what is a sales funnel?

A sales funnel is a high level model of how prospective buyers move through the purchase journey. It illustrates their entire journey – from initially learning about a brand to making a purchase.

A B2B sales funnel is a funnel that specifically illustrates how B2B prospects move through the purchase journey.

As you probably guessed, sales funnels are depicted in the shape of a funnel; they’re wider on top and gradually become more narrow. Typically, sales funnels are labeled by stage. Some use general stages, like:

  • Top of funnel: Early parts of the purchase journey
  • Middle of funnel: Middle parts of the purchase journey
  • Bottom of funnel: Late parts of the purchase journey

Other sales funnels are labeled with more specific stages, which we’ll explore later.

B2B sales funnels are a useful tool for sales teams to determine where their prospects are in the purchase journey. Then, sellers can use a sales playbook to engage any buyer, no matter what stage of the sales funnel they’re in. This will increase sales acceleration. In other words, sales reps will be able to move more prospects through the sales funnel – faster.

Of course, not every prospect follows the same purchase journey. While some prospects progress through each sales funnel stage, others take a less linear path. For example, a prospect might proceed through the sales funnel – but then realize the specific product they’re considering isn’t the right fit for them. So, they may jump back up to earlier stages of the funnel as they consider their other options.

As such, a sales funnel should be seen as a broad overview of the purchase journey rather than a rigid set of steps prospects must complete.

What are the stages of a B2B sales funnel?

A quick Google search will show you many B2B sales funnel examples. Not every revenue organization uses the same B2B sales funnel.

As we mentioned earlier, some B2B sales funnels use general terms for the parts of the sales funnel – like top of the funnel, mid-funnel, and bottom of the funnel. Others use more specific terms to describe the stages of the B2B sales funnel.

While each B2B sales funnel is different, certain stages are common.

Stage #1: Awareness

Awareness is the first stage of the purchase journey. As you probably guessed, it’s the stage when prospects become aware of your brand.

There are many ways a prospect may become aware of your brand. Often, the marketing team owns these awareness-stage initiatives.

For example, a prospect may see a paid post on LinkedIn, promoting an upcoming thought leadership webinar focused on industry trends. Or one of your blogs might show up in Google search results when the prospect searches for solutions to solve one of their pain points.

Stage #2: Interest

The prospect is now aware of your brand. The next challenge is to build their interest.

During the interest stage of the B2B sales funnel, brands must build relationships with potential customers and help them see the impact their challenges have on their effectiveness and efficiency. At this point, the prospect isn’t ready to buy, so it’s best to avoid delving into the ins and outs of your product offerings.

There are several channels organizations can use to build prospect’s interest, including:

  • Blogs
  • Webinars
  • Ebooks
  • Email campaigns
Mindtickle resources used for the B2B sales funnel

Stage #3: Consideration

During the consideration stage, prospects know they have a problem and are actively seeking a solution.

During this stage, sales and marketing become more focused on the product. For example, marketing teams may develop case studies that convey how customers have used specific products and services to overcome their challenges.

Stage #4: Intent

During this stage, buyers take action that demonstrates their intent to purchase. They know they want to buy but are unsure which brand or product best suits them.

For example, a prospect might reach out to a sales rep to ask questions. Or, they might schedule a live demo.

Demos – one-on-one or in a group webinar format—are important tools at this stage of the B2B sales funnel. Some revenue organizations also offer “self-guided tours,” which allow prospects to better understand the ins and outs of a product or service.

Mindtickle product tour

Stage #5: Evaluation

The evaluation stage of the sales funnel is when the prospect weighs their options and makes a purchase decision. Prospects make their decision based on all the information they’ve gotten up to this point – including:

  • Sales collateral
  • Sales battle cards
  • Pricing information
  • Demos
  • Free trials
  • Testimonials and reviews from existing customers

Negotiations are common at the evaluation stage of the sales funnel.

Stage #6: Purchase

You’ve been working toward this stage. It’s when the prospect signs a contract and officially becomes a customer.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the work is over. It’s important to ensure the customer has an excellent implementation experience and feel supported during the initial rollout and throughout their relationship with your company. This will boost satisfaction – and customer retention.

B2B sales funnel vs. B2B sales pipeline

Sales funnel and sales pipeline are two phrases often used interchangeably. While they have similarities, they aren’t the same.

A sales funnel is a visual representation of the stages a buyer goes through during their purchase journey. However, buyers aren’t required to go through every stage of the B2B sales funnel to make a purchase.

Sales pipelines are visual representations of the B2B selling process. They include every stage of the sales process – from prospecting to retention. B2B sales pipeline management is the process of overseeing the sales pipeline.

Prospects may skip stages of the sales funnel. However, sales reps can’t skip stages of the sales funnel. Each step is required in the sales process.

B2B sales funnel vs B2C sales funnel: What’s the difference?

B2B and B2C customers navigate a journey before making a purchase. As such, both B2B and B2C businesses can use sales funnels to illustrate these journeys.

But B2B and B2C sales funnels aren’t the same.

B2B sales are typically more complex than B2C sales. In B2B deals, there is usually more money on the line and more people involved in the evaluation process. So it’s unsurprising that the B2B sales cycle often takes much longer than the B2C sales cycle.

As such, B2B SaaS sales funnels are typically more complex than B2C sales funnels. B2B sales funnels are often longer and incorporate more stages. In addition, B2B buyers often spend more time in each stage of the sales funnel than their B2C counterparts.

B2B Sales Funnel B2C Sales Funnel
Overall funnel length Longer Shorter
Amount of time spent in each stage More Less
Number of stages More Fewer

Tips to improve your B2B sales funnel

Perhaps you’ve never created a B2B sales funnel. Or maybe your revenue organization uses one, but it’s not working.

Whatever the case, there’s always room for improvement.

Let’s explore some tips for creating (or improving) your B2B sales funnel.

Leverage data to understand the customer journey

There are plenty of B2B sales funnel examples out there. But they may not be relevant to your business.

It is important to leverage data to understand how your customers navigate the purchase journey. Then, you can use those insights to develop a relevant B2B sales funnel for your business.

Identify your ideal customers

You may have many people in your B2B sales funnel, but you’ll be wasting your time if they aren’t a good fit for your products and services.

It’s important to document your ideal customers. A great starting point is to analyze your existing customer base.

Then, you can develop buyer personas, which will help inform content development. Buyer personas will also help your sales reps prioritize their time on good-fit prospects.

Align sales and marketing

All too often, sales and marketing teams act in silos. They each focus on their initiatives without much insight into what the other team is doing.

This misalignment causes big problems in the B2B sales funnel.

For example, your marketing team may devote much time to developing webinars and reports. But the leads that result from these initiatives may never convert. Without this feedback, marketing teams will continue doing what they’re doing, and sellers will continue getting unqualified leads.

Instead, sales and marketing teams must act as partners. That way, marketing can prioritize content and campaigns that attract the right people and guide them through the sales funnel. And, sales will get qualified leads that are more likely to become customers.

Develop content for each stage of the B2B sales funnel

Modern B2B buyers depend on content to make informed purchase decisions. But generic content won’t cut it. Instead, sellers need content that’ll resonate with each customer – no matter where they are in the B2B SaaS sales funnel.

Sales and marketing teams should collaborate to develop content for sellers during each sales funnel stage. All content should be stored in a single content management system so sellers can easily find the right sales content for each sales scenario.

Ensure sellers know how to use content

You might have great sales content. But if your sellers don’t use it (or don’t know how to use it), it won’t help you close more deals.

Be sure to provide training and enablement to help sellers learn how and when to use key content assets. In addition, be sure they know exactly where to find the content they need. That way, they’ll spend less time searching and more time building relationships with prospects.

Prioritize good fit leads

Salesforce research found that sales reps spend only 28% of their time selling. The rest is spent on internal meetings, data entry, and other manual tasks.

Research found that reps only spend

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Because sales reps have such limited time, they need to prioritize prospects who are a good fit for their products and services. For starters, marketing teams must ensure their initiatives are actually yielding high-quality leads. In addition, sales reps should know their ideal customer profiles inside and out and have the skills needed to quickly determine whether or not a prospect is a good fit.

Don’t check out after the deal is closed

You might think the work is done once the prospect has signed the dotted line. Well, think again.

Instead, revenue organizations should continue to engage with customers. For example, they could invite them to a webinar where another customer shares how they use a specific product feature. Or, they could add them to an email campaign that shares tips for making the most of their investment.

Staying engaged with customers will increase their satisfaction. That means they’ll be more likely to stay a customer – and recommend your company to those in their network.

Analyze and optimize your sales funnel regularly

Your sales funnel shouldn’t be set in stone. Instead, it’s important to track B2B sales funnel metrics. For example, measure prospects’ conversion rates at each stage of the B2B sales funnel. Then, use that data to make optimizations.

Engage with buyers – wherever they are in the B2B sales funnel

A B2B sales funnel is a great tool for visualizing the B2B purchase journey. When sales reps understand where buyers are in their journey, they can better determine how to engage with them.

Mindtickle’s integrated revenue enablement platform equips your entire revenue team with the training, enablement, content, and call insights they need to deliver outstanding experiences across the sales funnel – and close more deals.

Training, enablement + Content In Mindtickle

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3 Ways Mindtickle is Making a Seller’s Job Easier Right Now

Christian Pieper on May 16, 2024

First and foremost, a seller’s job is to close business.

But all too often, their work time is filled with perfunctory tasks that distract from that job. At Mindtickle, we make it part of our mission to change that and help sellers sell more, faster, and easier.

In this post, I will highlight three new capabilities being announced as part of Mindtickle’s Spring 2024 product announcement, designed to help your sellers do their jobs more easily today.

#1. Utilize content in the flow of work

Every minute spent searching content repositories for the right datasheet or infographic is a minute that could be spent closing more business.

That’s why Mindtickle puts the content sellers need front and center in the most used tools. In addition to CRM and email integrations, sellers can now add content directly from Mindtickle’s Asset Hub to sales engagement sequences in Outreach and social posts in LinkedIn—there is no need to log into multiple tools to power their work with targeted content.

#2 Use AI to help you discover and leverage new and better content

Sellers frequently spend too much time looking for content because they don’t know what content exists. In too many cases, they end up using the same content in many different sales scenarios when better content might have been used had they known about it.

Now, Mindtickle uses AI to identify and list similar assets for reps whenever they view content within Mindtickle. That will help them discover and engage with new content, in a manner similar to how they engage with content on YouTube, Netflix, and other modern media platforms.

It will also point them to better, more targeted versions of content for specific sales scenarios, helping them use content to engage more customers and close more business.

#3 Collaborate with co-sellers seamlessly

Mindtickle’s Digital Sales Rooms have quickly become the preferred way for our customers’ sellers to engage with their buyers. These collaborative spaces allow buyers and sellers to interact with each other, share content back-and-forth, and track progress and align throughout the buying journey.

Now, as part of the 2024 Spring announcement, Mindtickle is releasing a new version of Digital Sales Rooms built to power collaboration between internal teams. Team selling has become increasingly the norm for high-touch B2B sales, and with more folks involved in the sales process, it becomes increasingly important to align your selling team step-by-step throughout the sales cycle.

Mindtickle’s internal rooms will give your teams a place to share content, communicate, and track progress. Whether you use these rooms for team selling, account planning, knowledge sharing, or any other internal collaboration needs, Mindtickle will help you sell more and better by working together.

While this post has focused on how these releases drive easier and better selling, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that these capabilities, as well as the entire Mindtickle platform, provide the same benefits to customer success reps, business development reps, marketers, and all the critical roles that dictate how your company goes to market. All these folks need to find and distribute content, so AI recommendations and flow-of-work integrations will save them time and help them do their revenue-generating activities more efficiently and effectively.

In particular, Mindtickle’s internal rooms present many exciting opportunities for different teams to coordinate their efforts and collaborate cross-functionally. Some use cases our customers have discovered for these rooms include:

  • Interactive landing pages for demand generation
  • User groups and customer communities
  • Digital event support
  • Onboarding groups
  • SKO breakouts and team exercises
  • Hiring portals
  • …and many more.

These three releases are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how Mindtickle is innovating the future of selling. Register for our spring 2024 announcement webinar on June 5, 2024, to hear how Mindtickle is unlocking new productivity levels for GTM reps, front-line managers, enablement teams, and marketing leaders.

2024 Mindtickle Spring Announcement

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How Sales Content Analytics Helps Revenue Teams Close More Deals, Faster

Christian Pieper on April 10, 2024

When it comes to B2B sales, content is still king. According to the Demand Gen Report, more than half of B2B buyers rely on sales content to guide their purchase decisions more now than in the past.

Revenue organizations have heard the message loud and clear, and most invest time and effort in producing content for their sellers to use throughout the sales cycle. According to the recently released State of Revenue Productivity Report, organizations published an average of 642 new assets in 2023.

Average number of new assets orgs published in 2023
0

But simply producing a large volume of sales content doesn’t mean it’ll be used – or that it’ll make a difference in deal outcomes. Instead, you must understand how sales reps and prospects are (or aren’t) using sales content. In other words, you need sales content analytics.

In fact, without sales content analytics, you’re likely sinking time and money into content that has little to no impact on sales performance.

In this post, we’ll explore sales content analytics, why they’re important for driving B2B sales performance, and which analytics you need to start tracking immediately.

What is sales content analytics?

The harsh reality is that most B2B sales content ends up on the shelf. According to Forrester, an estimated 65% of B2B content isn’t used. For those keeping track, that means 417 pieces of content each year go completely unused by the sales team. 

According to Forrester

of B2B content isn't used
0 %

With sales content management analytics, you can spend your time and effort creating content that will be used and improve sales outcomes. But what is sales content analytics?

Sales content analytics is the practice of analyzing the performance of the different types of sales content your revenue team uses. These include sales presentations, sales collateral, whitepapers, case studies, videos, or any other type of content used throughout the sales cycle.

Sales content analytics can help you understand:

  • How often a piece of content is used by sales reps
  • How and when sellers share a piece of content with buyers
  • How buyers consume the content
  • How (and whether) the content influences revenue
  • Which teams and sellers get the most customer engagement from the content they share

Revenue organizations can leverage content analytics to optimize their sales content strategy. For example, teams can use these insights to understand when there are opportunities to:

  • Update existing content to improve performance
  • Eliminate unused or underperforming content
  • Create new content

Content analytics can also help organizations determine where additional sales training and sales enablement are needed. For example, let’s say an organization finds that its best sellers frequently use a specific piece of sales content to close deals. However, this piece of content isn’t used widely across the sales team. The revenue organization can use this intel to deliver sales training or sales enablement to help all sellers understand when and how to use this piece of content in the sales cycle.

Sales content analytics are also hugely beneficial to sales reps – which we’ll cover in more detail next.

How does sales content analytics help your B2B sales team?

Today, businesses tap into analytics to make better decisions and improve performance. Their efforts are paying off. A survey from PwC found that highly data-driven organizations are three times more likely to report significant improvements in decision-making.

Data-driven orgs are

more likely to report significant improvements in decision-making
0 x

Revenue organizations are no exception to this rule. With the right sales analytics, revenue teams can make better decisions – and improve outcomes.

Sales content analytics, which is a type of sales analytics, enable sellers to be more effective and efficient in their roles. Let’s take a closer look at some of the key ways sales content analytics can improve sales rep performance.

Content analytics inform more effective training and enablement

On every B2B sales team, there’s a subset of top performers. Content analytics helps you understand what your top sellers are doing with content so your entire team can adopt these winning behaviors.

For example, you may find that one of your top sellers uses a specific piece of sales content every time they close a deal in a specific industry. However, the entire sales team hasn’t widely adopted this content. You can use these insights to deliver training and sales enablement focused on helping all sellers understand how to use this particular piece of content.

Sales content analytics help reps determine the next best action

Chances are, your sellers follow an established sales process for every deal. However, the sales process must be flexible enough to allow sellers to deliver personalized experiences that resonate with each buyer.

Content analytics provide valuable information that B2B sales reps can use to determine what action to take next. For example, a sales rep can examine content analytics to see how (or whether) different buying committee members are engaging with the content they’ve shared. These insights can help the sales rep determine the next best action.

Sales content analytics helps drive deal acceleration

Sales content helps reps close more deals. But not just any content will do. Instead, reps need relevant, proven content for each customer – no matter where they are on the sales journey.

With sales content analytics, revenue teams can understand how content is being used and whether it’s impacting deals. Then, they can use these insights to invest in content that’s proven to accelerate deals.

For example, content analytics may reveal that certain pieces of content are never used. This content can be eliminated altogether.

Content analytics can also illuminate opportunities to freshen up existing content and boost its effectiveness. According to the recently released State of Revenue Productivity Report, the top 10% of revenue organizations update their content at least every 3.25 months.

The right sales content analytics can also help organizations understand where new content is needed. For example, you may find that deals frequently drop off at a certain point in the sales cycle, and the existing assets for that stage aren’t as effective as you’d hoped. You can use data—as well as feedback from your sales team—to develop new content for sellers to use.

The bottom line is that sales content analytics enables organizations to improve the effectiveness of their sales content. That means sellers are equipped with proven-to-work sales content. When sellers use this content, they’re more likely to close deals faster.

Sales content analytics help create a culture of data-driven decision-making
Making decisions based on hunches or gut feelings isn’t an effective approach. Instead, business decisions must be rooted in data.

Revenue organizations should strive to build a culture where data-driven decision-making is the norm. Equipping the right people with the right sales content analytics is a key way to make this a reality.

What sales content metrics do you need to track?

Now you know what sales content analytics is and why it’s important to revenue organizations. But what content metrics do you need to track to understand how your content is being used and what kind of impact it has on deals?

Let’s take a closer look at some of the top sales content metrics. Ideally, you should be able to access these metrics via your sales content management solution.

Searches

Track what keywords your reps are using when searching for the right content. You can leverage this information to categorize better or tag your existing sales content assets.

In addition, look for trends in reps’ searches. If sellers’ searches turned up no results, there may be an opportunity to develop new sales content.

Finally, be sure to monitor whether the content reps find during their searches is effective. In other words, ask yourself if buyers are engaging with this content and whether it’s creating opportunities for sellers.

Sales content usage

You may have spent a lot of time creating great content. But if your sellers aren’t using it, your prospects will never see it.

Content usage metrics help you understand how (or if) sales reps use a particular piece of content. Key metrics include things like:

  • Sales content views
  • Sales content downloads
  • Sales content edits
  • Sales content shares
Mindtickle Asset Hub sharing

You can track sales content usage metrics across the whole revenue team, as well as by region, territory, or individual rep.

Sales content engagement

The right content helps accelerate B2B deals. However, content must be relevant and engaging to be effective.

As such, it’s important to track sales content engagement, which measures how your buyers consume your sales content. There are several metrics you need to track to understand sales content engagement, including:

  • Clickthrough rate
  • Average amount of time buyers spend engaging with a specific piece of content
  • How often buyers engage with a piece of content
  • How many pages or sections the buyer engage with, and which pages or sections get the most engagement
  • How often buyers are sharing a piece of content with others
  • Which sales reps have the highest engagement on sales content

Sales content production timeline

Producing content requires time and effort. Be sure to track the amount of time it takes to create sales content. This metric will be important when determining whether the results are worth the time and effort spent on it.

Sales content performance and ROI

You want to invest in content that improves sales outcomes. As such, it’s important to measure sales content performance and ROI.

You can use these insights to invest more in content that’s proven to work.

Be sure to track which content buyers are engaging with at each stage of the sales cycle and how it’s impacting whether or not they continue through the funnel. You should also track which content is used in both closed-won and closed-lost opportunities – and the impact the content had on each deal.

Feedback from the sales team

When it comes to sales content optimization, hard data is key. However, it’s also important to ask for feedback from your sales teams, as they meet with customers daily. Your sales reps – especially your top performers – have unique insight into which content works, which doesn’t, and where there are opportunities to develop new assets to accelerate the sales cycle and improve sales outcomes.

Leverage sales content metrics to optimize your sales content with Mindtickle

Sales content is a key component of the B2B purchase journey. But without sales content analytics, it’s impossible to know how content is being used by buyers and sellers, and how it’s impacting the outcome of deals.

If you’re not using sales content analytics, you spend time, money, and effort on content with little to no impact. So, while your sellers have plenty of content, it’s ineffective, and they may lose deals because of it.

It’s time to start leveraging sales content analytics to understand how buyers and sellers are engaging with content today and how you can optimize for greater engagement and impact.

Mindtickle’s integrated revenue productivity platform incorporates sales content management tools, which ensures your sales reps can easily surface the right content for the right selling scenario.

Mindtickle’s sales content management platform also features robust analytics to help you understand how sales reps and prospects engage with content and how various assets influence sales outcomes. Revenue organizations can use these insights to improve the effectiveness of their content and deliver sales training and sales enablement to ensure reps know how and when to use content that’s proven to drive revenue.

Sales Content Analytics in Mindtickle

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How Alkami Drives Revenue Impact with Digital Sales Rooms

Christian Pieper on March 14, 2024

B2B buyer expectations are higher than ever, and how they want to interact with sellers is changing.

Enablement teams are under pressure to ensure sellers are always ready to deliver outstanding experiences and provide value throughout the sales cycle.

Alkami Technologies, a digital baking solutions provider for financial institutions in the U.S., understands these challenges well. The team at Alkami had built a large repository of content for sellers to use throughout the sales cycle. However sellers struggled to leverage this content to engage buyers effectively. That all changed when they started using digital sales rooms.

At this year’s Sales Enablement Summit in Austin, Stephanie Massey, Senior Sales Enablement Manager at Alkami Technology, joined Teri Long, VP of Revenue Enablement at Mindtickle, to discuss how Alkami has leveraged Digital Sales Rooms from Mindtickle to deliver personalized, engaging experiences that enable sellers to close more deals.

Connecting with buyers – digitally

Alkami invests significant time and resources into developing content for sellers to use in any sales scenario. But they didn’t want sellers spending their time hunting down the right content. “We needed a place for sellers to have access and discoverability into all of that content,” said Massey. “Mindtickle provided that.”

Alkami’s sales teams have the content they need to engage with buyers. But today, many buyers don’t want to engage with sellers. In fact, according to the Gartner B2B Marketing Report, 75% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free sales experience.

According to Gartner Research,

of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free sales experience
0 %

Today, Alkami uses digital sales rooms to meet their customers where they are. Digital sales rooms enable buyers to share the right sales content at the right time and engage with sellers throughout the sales cycle – without needing in-person visits.

“We needed a digital vehicle to get this content in front of buyers,” explained Massey. “That’s the next place where Mindtickle came in.
Alkami Technology logo
Stephanie Massey
Senior Sales Enablement Manager, Alkami Technology

Delivering personalized, on-brand experiences

The team at Alkami understood the need to transition to digital experiences. However, they also knew one-size-fits-all experiences wouldn’t cut it. Digital experiences need to be personalized to each customer and reflect the branding and culture of both the buying and selling organizations.

Digital sales rooms from Mindtickle enable the Alkami team to easily develop and deliver tailored digital experiences that resonate with each buyer. Alkami provides sellers with pre-built templates focused on specific industries or challenges. Sellers can then customize those templates with the company’s branding.

Of course, digital sales rooms aren’t static. Instead, they evolve throughout the sales cycle as sales reps better understand a prospect’s needs and challenges. For example, reps can look for buying signals, find key, relevant content, and then add and share that content with prospects through the digital sales room.

These personalized experiences go a long way for Alkami’s sales team. “Our sellers need to build relationships with buyers,” Massey explained. “We have massive deals, and some can span across two years. It’s such a long journey, and buyers really value that personalization and feeling like reps are really speaking to their unique needs.”

Engaging large buying committees

It’s no secret that the number of people involved in a B2B purchase decision is growing. Recent research shows that every deal has between 11 and 22 unique decision-makers.

Alkami has seen even larger buying committees, with 20 to 26 unique digital sales room visitors for every deal. With deals this complex, it can be challenging to manage content and communication effectively. Massey says it’s easy for things to get “lost in a sea of emails.”

Number of unique DSR visitors for every deal
0

Digital sales rooms provide Alkami sales reps with a centralized location for managing content and interactions across the buying committee. “With digital sales rooms, teams can not only see content, but also engage with each other,” said Massey. “Everything is centralized so you’re not having to sort through all the clutter.”

In addition, digital sales rooms provide insights into how prospects are engaging. Sellers can use these insights to determine the best way to follow up to move deals forward. 

“At Alkami, reps are closing deals 50% more often when using digital sales rooms."
Alkami Technology logo
Stephanie Massey
Senior Sales Enablement Manager, Alkami Technology

Increasing buy-in and seller adoption

Change is hard for everyone. The team at Alkami knew they’d have to have a plan in place to gain buy-in and adoption of digital sales rooms. Simply telling sellers to start using digital sales rooms “because I said so” wouldn’t be an effective approach.

Instead, the enablement team worked to understand the pain points of sellers – specifically related to finding and sharing content and collaborating with large buying committees. Then, they focused on conveying how Mindtickle’s digital sales rooms would help sellers overcome these challenges to close more deals.

Alkami’s Chief Revenue Officer was a big champion of this initiative, which was key to gaining seller buy-in. “We’re a digital-first company. We need a digital-first experience for our prospects,” said Massey.

Massey’s team knew a one-off training wouldn’t be enough to get the entire sales team on board and ready to use digital sales rooms. After all, 70% of what reps learn is lost within the first 24 hours. Furthermore, the team recognizes that sellers all learn differently. That’s why the team created various learning and reinforcement formats to get sellers up to speed.

Alkami has also tapped into the power of recognition and friendly competition to increase adoption. The enablement team recognizes top performers in their bi-weekly digest and during all-hands meetings. “We share how many rooms they’ve created and how many room visitors they’ve had,” said Massey. “Now that they know how to use the digital sales rooms, the key is to make sure they keep caring.”

 

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Simplifying Sales Content Management

Christian Pieper on March 7, 2024

As a sales enablement leader, sales content is a big part of your job. Whether it’s creating it, training reps on it, monitoring its performance, or updating it, simplifying sales content management lets sales enablement leaders focus on other programs that help sellers actually sell.

When sales content hits the mark with both sellers and buyers, it can be a powerful tool for advancing deals forward. Our 2023 State of Sales Productivity Report found that interactions with content per rep per week doubled last year. It went from 3.5 interactions per week in 2021 to 7.5 in 2022.

But when sales content doesn’t hit the mark, it can disengage your audiences and stall deals. According to Sales Enablement Collective’s 2022 Sales Enablement Landscape Report, 63.1% of respondents said sales content wasn’t as good as needed.

According to the Sales Enablement Collective

of orgs say sales content wasn't as good as needed
0 %

So how do you create a sales content management strategy that’s simple, personalized, and scalable? In this blog post, we’ll walk you through:

What is sales content management?

Sales content management refers to the process of creating, organizing, distributing, and analyzing sales-related content, such as product information, case studies, and customer testimonials, with the goal of supporting the sales team and improving their performance.

Effective sales content management involves developing a content strategy that aligns with the organization’s overall sales goals and targets specific stages of the sales cycle. It also involves selecting the right tools and technologies to manage the content, such as a content management system (CMS) or a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Sales content management can help sales teams to:

Access the right content

Customize content

Track peformance

  • Access the right content at the right time: By organizing and centralizing sales content, sales reps can easily find the information they need to educate prospects and move them through the sales funnel.
  • Customize content for different audiences: Sales teams can tailor content to meet the specific needs of their target audiences and increase their chances of closing a deal.
  • Track content performance: By analyzing the performance of sales content, sales managers can identify what’s working and what’s not, and adjust their strategies accordingly. 

Overall, sales content management is a critical part of any sales strategy, helping organizations to improve their sales performance and grow their business.

The importance of sales content management

Sales content management is essential for organizations that want to improve their sales performance and drive revenue growth. Here are some key reasons why sales content management is important:

Sales content management helps to ensure that sales reps have access to the most up-to-date and accurate content. This helps to ensure consistency in messaging across the organization, which can build trust with prospects and customers.

Sales reps spend a lot of time searching for content, and this can be a drain on productivity. By using sales content management tools, sales reps can easily find the content they need and focus on selling, rather than on administrative tasks.

Sales content management tools enable sales reps to customize content for individual prospects or customers, based on their specific needs and interests. This can help to build stronger relationships and increase the likelihood of closing a sale.

Sales content management tools provide insights into which content is resonating with prospects and customers, and which is not. This can help sales managers to make data-driven decisions about which content to prioritize, and to identify areas where sales reps may need additional sales training or support.

As organizations grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage sales content manually. Sales content management tools can help to scale content creation and distribution, enabling organizations to reach more prospects and customers without sacrificing quality.

Sales content management is critical for organizations that want to improve their sales performance, build stronger customer relationships, and drive revenue growth. By using the right tools and strategies, organizations can streamline content management and make their sales teams more effective and efficient.

What are the benefits of sales content management?

CSO Insights asked 16.5% of participants who actually use a sales enablement platform to share the top three benefits they received from such a system. Below is a chart that summarizes the results:

Let’s take a look at some of the improvements in sales performance experienced by these companies.

Improves sales and revenue productivity

Sales content can be crucial in improving sales and revenue productivity in several ways. Here are some examples:

Well-crafted sales content, such as case studies, product information sheets, and customer testimonials, can help educate prospects about the benefits of a product or service, and help them make more informed purchasing decisions. By providing relevant information that addresses their needs and pain points, sales content can help to build trust and credibility, which can ultimately lead to more sales.

Sales content can be customized to meet the specific needs of individual prospects or customers. This can be achieved by segmenting the audience based on factors such as industry, company size, or job title, and tailoring content accordingly. Personalized sales content can help to build stronger relationships with prospects and customers, and increase the likelihood of closing a sale.

Consistent messaging across all sales content can help to build brand awareness and recognition. By using a consistent voice and tone, and conveying a clear value proposition, sales content can help to differentiate a company from its competitors and position it as a thought leader in its industry.

Sales content can help to streamline the sales process, enabling sales reps to more efficiently move prospects through the sales funnel. By providing sales reps with the right content at the right time, sales content can help to reduce the amount of time spent searching for information and enable sales reps to focus on selling.

Sales content can be analyzed to gain insights into what content is resonating with prospects and customers, and what is not. This information can be used to optimize sales content, and to identify areas where sales reps may need additional training or support. By using data to drive decisions about sales content, organizations can increase the effectiveness of their sales teams and drive revenue growth.

Sales content improves sales and revenue productivity by educating prospects, personalizing content, providing consistent messaging, streamlining the sales process, and using data to optimize content and identify areas for improvement. By investing in sales content management and creating high-quality sales content, organizations can increase their sales effectiveness and achieve their revenue goals.

Reducing sales’ search time for content and collateral

These two improvements are closely related. When your salesforce has easy access to sales content and tools, their search time is reduced. These two outcomes alone increase the amount of selling time that your reps have and increase their overall productivity. Here’s how.

Increasing win rates

Good sales content can help you close more deals in several ways:

Good sales content is created with the buyer’s journey in mind. It should provide information that is relevant to the prospect’s specific stage in the buying process. By providing the right information at the right time, sales reps can build trust and credibility with the prospect, and move them closer to making a purchasing decision.

Sales content should address common objections that prospects may have, and provide persuasive arguments to overcome these objections. By anticipating objections and providing solutions, sales reps can reduce the likelihood that a prospect will back out of a deal.

Good sales content should highlight the unique benefits of your offering and differentiate it from your competitors. By providing clear and compelling reasons why your product or service is the best choice, sales reps can increase the likelihood that a prospect will choose to do business with you

Good sales content can facilitate conversations between the sales rep and the prospect. It can provide a starting point for discussions, and help the sales rep to better understand the prospect’s needs and pain points. By having more productive conversations, sales reps can build stronger relationships with prospects and increase the likelihood of closing a deal.

Good sales content should provide value beyond the sale. It should help the prospect to better understand the product or service, and provide guidance on how to get the most out of it. By providing ongoing value, sales reps can build stronger relationships with customers, increase customer satisfaction, and drive repeat business.

By investing in sales content management and creating high-quality sales content, organizations can increase their sales effectiveness and achieve their revenue goals.

Improving sales and marketing alignment

Sales and marketing departments worked separately for many years. More recently, they’ve made more efforts to communicate more consistently. Doing so allows Marketing to continually deepen their understanding of your prospects. This makes it easier for them to create content that encourages prospects to move through their buying cycle. In fact, according to a DemandGen study, over half of the participants estimated a revenue increase of 20% if they had the right content available at the right time in the sales cycle.

Reducing new sales team members’ ramp times

New rep ramp time varies from company to company. Average sales cycle length and training effectiveness influence the amount of time it takes for a new salesperson to become fully productive. Reducing this time increases your bottom line more quickly as well. Having content more easily distributed and accessible means that new reps are able to learn more in a shorter period of time. Having content at their fingertips helps reps sell more effectively without needing to memorize every proof point. All they have to do is find it, consume it, and/or share it with their prospect. Their questions are answered without slowing down in the learning and sales processes.

Improving the ability to track content usage

Tracking content usage provides valuable insights into marketing’s effectiveness. It enables them to know which content is being used more frequently and which content isn’t being used at all. This information allows them to quickly and easily identify content gaps so they’re able to stay current with new content requirements. This results in sales always having the content they need throughout the sales cycle for the exact persona in the specific industry.

Reducing competitive losses

Good sales content can be a powerful tool in winning over your competition. Here are some ways it can help:

  1. Differentiation: Good sales content can help you differentiate your product or service from your competitors. By highlighting your unique value proposition and explaining why your offering is better than your competitors, you can give potential customers a reason to choose you over your competition.
  2. Education: By providing informative and educational content, you can position yourself as an expert in your field. This can help build trust with potential customers and give them confidence that you have the knowledge and expertise to meet their needs.
  3. Persuasion: Effective sales content can persuade potential customers to take action. By addressing their pain points and showing them how your product or service can solve their problems, you can motivate them to choose your offering over your competitors.
  4. Credibility: Good sales content can also help establish your credibility and reputation in the marketplace. By providing case studies, testimonials, and other social proof, you can show potential customers that you have a track record of delivering results and providing value.

Overall, good sales content can help you stand out from your competition, educate and persuade potential customers, and build your credibility and reputation in the marketplace.

How to improve sales content management with technology

There’s no shortage of ways to organize, distribute, and measure sales content. Scaling and simplifying sales content efforts gets its power when it’s embedded into other enablement efforts.

At Mindtickle, we know that content needs to be aligned with skills, processes, and customer needs.

Here’s how we’re doing it.

Mindtickle’s Digital Sales Rooms are much more than simple content microsites and elevate the digital sales experience. They are collaborative portals where the entire selling team and all buyer stakeholders can align, communicate, share content, and drive the deal to its optimal resolution.

Asset-Hub-DSR

Automatic content sync allows you to use more content more easily, by automatically syncing content and metadata from your cloud-based content storage directly into Mindtickle.

Enablement engagement metrics provide granular engagement analytics that expose how learners engage with content. Dashboards and reports give visibility into the impact of your efforts and inform your strategy with smarter data.

Customized, quick content sharing protects your brand and ensures the right messaging reaches the market. At the same time, sellers have the agility and flexibility they need to build smart, custom presentations. Sellers can tailor the buying experience to each buyer’s needs.

Smart content attribution & revenue impact data help you identify the content that actually wins deals. In Mindtickle you can see which content drives revenue impact, and leverage those insights to create better content in the future.

Sales Content Management in Mindtickle

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This post was originally published in May 2018, was updated in April 2023, and again in March 2024. 

What is Sales Collateral and How Does it Help Reps Close More Deals?

Christian Pieper on January 25, 2024

Any organization aiming to grow revenue must make sales engagement a priority. When buyers are engaged, they’re more likely to advance through the sales funnel – and make a purchase.

In order to engage buyers, sales reps must deliver the right information at the right time.

The right sales collateral is essential.

In this post, we’ll explore what sales collateral is, why it’s important, and what the different types are. We’ll also share some tips and best practices for creating more effective sales content that’ll help your reps close more deals.

What is sales collateral and why is it important?

First things first: what is sales collateral?

It’s any type of asset that enables sales reps to engage prospects and guide them through the sales funnel. It takes many forms, which we’ll explore in detail a little later on.

Print

Digital

Internal

External

Print vs. digital sales collateral

Today, some organizations continue to use printed sales assets. However, the vast majority of sales organizations are transitioning to digital collateral. This is especially true in today’s world, when many sales are conducted without a buyer and seller ever meeting face-to-face.

A best practice is to leverage a sales content management solution to centralize your digital collateral.

Internal vs. external sales collateral

Some sales collateral is used externally. In other words, this collateral is shared with customers and prospects. Some examples include case studies and data sheets.

Other collateral is for internal use only. This collateral (often referred to as sales enablement collateral) is developed only for use by the sales team. Some examples of internal collateral include sales playbooks and sales battlecards.

The importance of sales collateral

Now, we’re clear on what sales collateral is. But why is it important?

Sales collateral drives sales effectiveness and sales efficiency. When it’s done well, it engages buyers with the right information at the right time in the right format. Outstanding collateral can accelerate the sales cycle, which means sales reps can close deals faster. When reps can close more deals, your revenue will grow.

What are the different types of sales collateral?

There are many different types of sales and marketing collateral. Each type is especially effective in certain parts of the purchase journey. For example, a case study may be impactful for a prospect who is close to making a decision – but first wants to get a better idea of how other businesses have leveraged a similar solution to achieve their goals. However, the same case study may not resonate with prospects who are higher up in the funnel and just starting to research their options.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the different stages of the sales journey – and some of the best collateral for each stage.

Sales and marketing collateral for the awareness stage

During the awareness stage, prospective customers are aware that they have a challenge (or multiple challenges), and they’ve started to look for solutions to address it. B2B collateral is an important tool that helps ensure prospects become aware of your company and its solutions.

The purpose of collateral at this stage is to make your brand known – and demonstrate that your business is a thought leader. Some common types of collateral that resonate during the awareness stage include:

Blogs are a great way to demonstrate your thought leadership during the awareness phase.

Videos can convey key information in a format that’s easy to digest.

Enables prospects to see what’s new at your organization.

These are a great way to quickly convey a lot of information in an easy-to-digest format.

Regularly posting on key social media channels can increase prospects’ awareness of your brand.

Sales and marketing collateral for the consideration stage

During the consideration stage, prospects start weighing their options. They know about your organization and may have some knowledge about your products and services. But they’re not ready to sign on the dotted line just yet.

Collateral can help sellers build relationships and deliver value during the consideration phase with assets including:

These can be an effective way to present a large amount of information.

eBooks and guides are popular ways to add value during the consideration stage.

Conducting surveys – and then summarizing your findings in a research report – is a powerful way to earn prospects’ trust.

Webinars are an interactive way to share a variety of information and data with prospects.

At this stage, sellers should be sure to use B2B sales content that is industry-specific and speaks to the buyer’s specific challenges.

Sales and marketing collateral for the decision-making stage

At this stage, prospects are getting ready to buy. They’re likely considering your business – as well as a few competitors. The right collateral can build their confidence about your solution being the best option. Collateral that’s effective during the decision-making stage includes:

You can put together fact sheets to concisely convey key product information.

Tells the story of how a company has leveraged your solution to solve their challenges.

These customer quotes give prospects an idea of what it’s like to work with your company.

Provides prospects with concise feedback from your current customers.

Tools like ROI calculators can help prospects understand what they can expect from investing in your products or services.

Demos enable buyers to see your solution in action.

Sales and marketing collateral for retention stage

After you’ve closed a deal, the goal is to keep that customer around long-term. After all, retaining an existing customer is a whole lot easier (and less expensive) than acquiring a new one.

This can be a great way to share best practices to ensure customers are getting the most value from your solution.

Let customers know what’s new with your product and how it benefits them.

Newsletters are a great way to share what’s new at your company. They can also include links to other resources that’ll build customers’ knowledge and ensure they’re getting the most from your solutions.

You can engage customers by sending automated emails when they complete certain activities.

How do you create sales collateral for your business?

The right sales collateral can help you grow revenue. But creating collateral for the sake of creating collateral isn’t effective. After all, research suggests that up to 70% of B2B sales collateral sits unused.

Asking key questions for sales content development

It’s important to create collateral that resonates with buyers throughout the purchase journey – and is proven to move deals forward. It’s also imperative to ensure sellers know where to find the collateral they need – as well as how to use it.

So, how can you start creating more effective collateral for your team? The first, foundational step is to answer these five questions:

Question #1: Who is your customer?

Before developing any type of asset, you must have a clear understanding of who you are talking to. Today, many sales organizations develop buyer personas. Buyer personas are detailed descriptions of fictitious prospects who are a good fit for your organization’s products or services.

Question #2: What are your customers’ pain points?

Generic B2B sales content isn’t effective. Instead, it must speak to a customer’s specific pain points.

When developing your buyer personas, it’s important to understand their challenges. That way, you can develop sales content that specifically addresses those pain points.

Question #3: How can prospects trust your solution?

To close deals, you must articulate why your solution is the best option for solving your customers’ challenges.

Of course, it’s important to establish your brand messaging. However, incorporating the voices of your existing customers into your sales content can be a powerful way to earn prospects’ trust.

A recent Gartner study found that “third-party interactions, such as reading customer references or reviews and consulting directly with third-party experts, are better suited to provide customers with value affirmation.”

Question #4: What types of content will help in the buyer journey?

You know who your customers are and you understand their pain points. You also understand how your solution is ideal to address those pain points. Next, you have to determine what types of content are right for delivering your message throughout the purchase journey.

There’s no right answer here. As we discussed earlier, different types of sales collateral resonate with buyers at different points in the purchase journey. It’s important to determine the right mix of sales assets, measure regularly, and optimize accordingly.

Question #5: How can you retain your existing customers?

Often, sales content is focused on acquiring new customers. However, it’s also important to develop collateral that aids in customer retention.

It’s important to ask yourself what you need to keep your customers around long-term. Then, develop the right content to engage them.

You can use the answers to these key questions to develop the right sales collateral.

Streamlining  management

You’ve answered the key questions above and used the answers to develop sales collateral. What now?

It’s important to ensure your sellers know how to find and use your newly created sales content.

At some sales organizations, collateral is stored in multiple repositories or distributed by email. This makes it difficult for sellers to find the sales assets they need in a specific situation. In addition, it’s common for sellers to use outdated content.

A best practice is to store and organize your sales collateral in a single platform. Many revenue enablement solutions include content management functionality so you can store all content in one place. That way, sales reps can easily find the best content for any selling scenario.

In addition, sales enablement teams must provide training to ensure sellers know when and how to use the sales collateral that’s available to them.

Measuring and optimizing 

Sometimes, organizations develop a piece of sales collateral, upload it to a repository, and then never think about it again. This isn’t an effective approach.

Instead, it’s important to consistently measure usage of sales collateral. In other words, how often are sellers using a specific piece of sales collateral? And how are buyers engaging with it?

It’s also important to measure how (or whether) sales collateral is impacting sales outcomes. That way, you can understand which collateral has the biggest impact – and focus your efforts on those assets.

Increase the impact of your sales collateral with Mindtickle

Sales collateral – when it’s done well – can be a powerful tool for engaging buyers throughout the sales cycle. When sales reps are able to engage a buyer, they’re more likely to close a deal.

But generic collateral won’t cut it. Instead, organizations must equip sellers with content that resonates with buyers and is proven to improve sales outcomes. In addition, organizations must ensure this sales content is easy to find and that sales reps know how to use it.

Mindtickle’s revenue productivity platform incorporates sales content management, which enables organizations to centralize their collateral. That means sales reps can easily find the right sales content for any selling scenario. In addition, sales leadership can easily measure how collateral is being used and whether it’s improving sales outcomes.

Of course, it’s important to ensure sellers know how to use sales collateral. Mindtickle also enables organizations to deliver sales training and sales enablement to ensure sellers know how and when to use the sales assets that are available to them.

Sales Content Management in Mindtickle

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How Digital Sales Rooms Help Reps Win More Deals

Christian Pieper on January 25, 2024

On average, there are 27 interactions in the buyer journey before a decision is reached. These interactions range from phone conversations to email chains to instant messaging. Each step is an instance where information can be misplaced or forgotten, and sales momentum lost.

# of interactions in the buyer journey before a decision is made
0

The good news is that this type of back-and-forth communication can be replaced with a digital sales room — a single and permanent location for potential buyers to find all your sales information instantly.

Digital sales rooms (DSRs) give prospects a personalized buying journey with content that is tailored to their business needs and goals. As well, they help sales reps understand which content leads to closed deals and improved close rates.

What you’ll learn:

  • How digital sales rooms streamline the buying journey
  • Why empowering buyers can improve your close rates
  • How to create compelling buying experiences using DSRs

What are digital sales rooms and how do they work?

Digital sales rooms work through a client-seller portal. Here, sales reps create a DSR or virtual sales platform, which essentially serves as a resource and storage location for all the content a buyer needs to make an informed purchase decision.

Similar to a showroom, digital sales rooms are created specifically for each customer, where they can view product demos, have their questions answered, and keep track of all the conversations and information they have with your reps. Depending on the needs of the buyer, content can include product proposals, testimonies, order forms, or service proposals. Once the portal is created, buyers are given access through a unique link.

Digital sales rooms are also connected to sales enablement platforms. This is an added benefit for sales reps, as they can gather insights on how prospects interact with content and where further content needs to be included for future negotiations.

Asset-Hub-DSR

Digital sales rooms empower your buyers

Digital sales rooms improve close rates by empowering buyers with all the information they need to confidently finalize a purchase. Thanks to the personalized sales cycles and customized content management DSRs offer, Gartner predicts that by 2026, 30% of B2B sales cycles will be managed through their use.

Digital sales rooms improve the digital sales experience by:

  • Offering a platform to answer any questions or concerns with instant two-way communication
  • Improving engagement with customers through an interactive portal
  • Improving understanding of buyer behavior and the buyer journey by capturing data on client interactions and patterns
  • Providing access to the newest product features and offerings
  • Building relationships, providing content to address questions, and helping clients feel supported and valued
Amount of time during the sales cycle spent with a rep
0 %

These days, only 17% of the B2B buying cycle is spent with a sales rep. With digital sales rooms, buyers can drive the sales cycle but the content they interact with is still controlled and delivered by sellers.

How to create compelling custom buying experiences using DSRs

If you’re thinking about introducing a DSR into your selling process, follow these tips to close more deals.

Personalize the digital sales room experience to your buyer

Your digital sales room should help your prospect through their buyer journey, aiding in their research without overwhelming them with irrelevant content.

Upload content that is meaningful and relevant to your buyer. For example, if your prospect is at the start of their journey, they’ll be interested in content that explains product features and articles on comparisons with competitors. However, if they’re closer to signing off on the purchase, content for next steps, like payment options and implementation processes, will be more relevant.

To know which content to include, ask yourself:

  • What are your prospects searching for on the internet?
  • At what stage are they in their buyer journey?
  • What solutions does your product provide for their business?
  • What roadblocks are preventing them from buying?
  • Do they need to share this content with other stakeholders?

To drive high buyer engagement, Include content that has already proved itself based on data from your sales enablement platform or past experience.

Where possible, personalize the content to include the prospect’s name, position, and company. So content is being received in the most persuasive way possible, you can even use terminology that is specific to their industry.

Have support accessible at all times

If your buyer doesn’t find the information they need immediately, you risk them getting frustrated and looking for answers elsewhere, potentially with a competitor.

In your digital sales room, it’s a good practice to include a support channel that is accessible at all times. Or, have an in-room chat option to ask and answer any buyer questions in a centralized platform where no information will be lost.

Make your content unique with purposeful interaction

Your content needs to meet your buyer at their stage of the journey. Answer the questions they have at that stage and guide them through the digital sales experience to the next. But that certainly doesn’t mean that your content should be monotonous.

On the contrary, your potential buyers should feel curious to learn about your product through content that is interactive and engaging.

You want prospects to remember your content, and that means forgoing long Word documents and instead leaning into videos, infographics, product demos, slide shows, and fun visual documents.

Always make the next steps clear

Guide the buyer down the sales funnel with clear next steps and actions. Not only does this direct prospects to the final closure, but it also gives insight into prospective roadblocks in the process and indicates where content is missing. Some things to keep in mind:

  • Create and embed customized CTAs into each content piece to drive the buyer through their learning journey.
  • Create a checklist or an action plan built from past successful seller experiences outlining what the next steps or content to consume should be.

With clear next steps, you make sure that the buyer is staying on track and making progress toward their final purchase.

Keep the content on brand to elevate purchase desire

You want buyers to feel the brand throughout the buying process so that they establish a connection with your product. Here are things to keep in mind:

  • Deliver your brand’s value and purpose to your buyer with every content interaction
  • Customize your digital sales rooms to reinforce the look and feel of your company
  • Position your content as an enhancement of your business values and tone

By keeping your content on brand, you avoid creating false expectations. Instead, your content clearly communicates the benefits and objectives the product can fulfill.

Include a product demo

Product demos give users an opportunity to see firsthand the benefits your product or service can provide.

Access to demos helps prospects fully understand the features and product capabilities as well as allowing them to imagine the time they can save and the problems they can solve by using your product.

With demos available, sellers can directly question the prospect’s particular needs and show them how to solve their problems.

Your DSR is only as good as your sales content

When you’ve got a great potential buyer visiting your digital sales room, the real driver is the content you provide.

Use insights from past sales processes to deliver the most impactful content to your buyers at each stage of the buyer journey. This will enhance the buyer experience and simplify the selling process. The sales materials should educate the buyer without hard selling the product or service. The idea is to help the buyer become empowered in their purchase decision.

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One secure, shared space for all content, communication, and deal planning.

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This post was originally published in October 2022, was updated in August 2023, and again in January 2024. 

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