You'll probably have noticed a running theme in this guide: asking questions. Asking the right questions is perhaps the greatest indicator of long-term success., no matter what discipline you're in. To understand and improve on the effectiveness of your sales enablement, you need to be able to track the answers to these six:
Another way of thinking about this is: are your buyer decision stages catered to by your content library? You may have identified gaps as part of your strategy, but you need to keep monitoring those gaps. Speak to your salespeople regularly, and keep your ear to the ground to uncover buyers' shifting priorities.
Messaging changes, products evolve, and styles go out of fashion (even in B2B). Schedule in reviews for every asset on a rolling basis. Sales enablement tools can help you avoid version control issues by giving sellers a single source for accessing materials, managed by you.
This will be evident from how many viewers and downloads the materials have. If they're not being viewed, you need to understand why. Put on your investigator's hat. Your first port of call should be the sellers themselves. Are the battle cards not useful? Why? Have they not been sharing the latest case study? Why not? What you uncover will answer this particular question, but also invite others: If they have sent out the materials, why are people not reading them? Who have they been sending them to?
Tally up the copies and versions of each material and explore the ways people are making edits to them. If you've equipped your salespeople with the means to personalize documents then it follows that a high count of copies is to be expected. But if that's not the case, and people are choosing to add in their own chapters or slides, it'll be because they feel something is missing or not good enough as is. Get to the bottom of why.
Your materials are of precisely zero value if no one engages with them. How long someone engages with an asset, and which parts of it they spend their attention is essentially feedback on the relevance and quality of the information you've shared, as touched on in the previous chapter. If a resource or section of a resource isn't winning any of your buyer's time, you'll need to consider whether it's a quality issue or a relevance issue and solve accordingly.
Being able to connect your sales enablement content to the bottom line is how you demonstrate tangible ROI to the business. Monitor which materials are making a recurring appearance in the journeys of contacts that eventually go on to buy. Look for patterns in how else they're influencing wins - including speed through the pipeline and total customer value. Armed with this information you can do more of what's having a real impact.
