A sales content audit is a thorough assessment of an association’s sales content, whether it is on the site or in a Google Drive folder.
The resources that assist your sales team in closing deals are the primary focus of the sales content audit. Your team will be ready to assist prospects at any stage of the sales funnel after completing a content audit.
Salespeople need to have the right content at the right time to keep the conversation going.
You can find the resources your sales team needs to succeed with a content audit. Before you begin, it is essential to comprehend what your sales team requires and establish objectives for your efforts. In the present quick moving climate, enduring misalignments and squandered effort are intolerable.
Understanding the Needs of Your Sales Team
One of the most effective ways to get in touch with your sales team is to send them brief surveys.
Insightful responses to questions about the content’s accuracy, organization, and conversion can help your audit. Additionally, you will receive feedback on which aspects of the sales funnel need improvement.
Your sales team ought to be asking:
- Are sales materials organized well and easy to find?
- What kinds of assets typically form the basis of your calls?
- Which kinds of materials frequently convert?
- Which documents are out-of-date or incorrect?
- Which pieces of content contain useful information but fail to convert visitors?
- Which assets normally supplement each other well?
- Which issues must we address with the new materials?
- How can the buyer’s journey be improved?
Setting Goals for Your Sales Content Audit
You can keep your focus on sales enablement by setting goals for your audit.
If you are aware of the pages or areas where customers leave your website, it will be easier for you to create content that resonates with your audience. To ensure that a review takes full advantage of assets, always tie your review objectives to your primary business objectives.
Because marketing content goals, like those found in SEMRush, and sales content goals are frequently distinct, your key performance indicators (KPIs) need to match the improvement you want to see with your sales team.
At the best companies, sales and marketing will work closely together on this, but sales will still use the assets differently (more at the bottom of the funnel, less at the top).
Two fantastic motivations to direct a content audit are content consistency and accuracy.
By reviewing each piece of content, you can prioritize updating outdated information to ensure that customers are aware of the most recent and crucial information about your product or service. This can assist in both retaining existing customers and attracting new ones by introducing new product features and updates.
After clearly defining the objectives of your audit, it is now time to begin gathering the content you already have for review.
Creating a Sales Content Inventory
Because your sales team is using ebooks, one-pagers, and blog posts to guide prospects through the sales funnel, it is important to look into each piece of content that is sent to you.
The majority of sales people have their own drives dedicated to previous assets. Those clearly demonstrate what might and might not sell well.
If your marketing team regularly audits websites, asking for a list of marketing assets from the audit can make some of the inventory process easier.
Many marketing content audits focus primarily on public content, such as blog posts and website content. However, these evaluations may overlook the internal battle cards and decks of your sales team. As a result, a promotion materials review will not cover everything you need to know.
It is essential to search for value in each channel and folder when categorizing your assets. Digital books, whitepapers, contextual investigations, battlecards, introductions, online courses, and even one-pager examples are a couple of instances of the various assets that are open.
This first audit step records every piece of content that your sales team may use, allowing you to evaluate their effectiveness.
Once you have found all of your content, you will need to organize it and use the feedback from your sales survey. From that point forward, you’ll have a total image of how well your content is performing, as well as any open doors to exploit.
Organizing Your Existing Content
To coordinate your current content as per your objectives, make a content map that makes sense of each piece exhaustively, including the significant channel stage, personas/ideal client profile, and vertical concentration.
Utilizing a template for a sales content inventory spreadsheet will enable you to quickly get started with the content map. You can quickly sort out which demographics are not responding positively to your content or where you fill gaps in your inventory.
As a result, you won’t have to look through every piece of data you really want. Consider the following scenarios when creating the template:
- You can begin organizing your content by going through each folder and data center
- To update the funnel stage column for each piece, create a category for each type of content, such as ebooks, webinars, blogs, and so on
- Update the target audience, the channel or sharing format, and the industry it is written for
- Last but not least, assign a score to each piece of content based on its effectiveness, accuracy, usage, conversions, and other relevant factors.
You can use these scores to determine which parts work best, which materials should be changed to fit the brand’s or product’s current focus, and which materials should be discarded.
By asking your sales team about the content they use, you can accurately score your content. To organize and better use your sales materials there are many technologies you can use. Check out this list of top sales enablement tools.