By now, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a salesperson who doesn’t extol the virtues of being able to deliver customized content to their prospective buyers.
It seems like a no-brainer. After all, study after study has confirmed that sales enablement content that is adjusted to the specific situation and needs of the buyer increases the odds of a sale. So salespeople, often on the fly, do their best to tweak Powerpoints just before they walk into their next sales demo. Unfortunately, they might be hitting the step of delivering customizable content way too late.
In Shawna Sumaoang’s recent post, “Empower Your Field With Customizable Content,” she enumerates the efforts that forward-thinking salespeople are making to stay ahead of the customization challenge:
“[R]eps need the ability to customize any document, presentation or spreadsheet easily and quickly and keep it in their sales content management platform—no downloading or uploading…’
“In particular, in regulated industries reps must stick with approved content. In this case, organizations can provide a master deck of approved content, and reps can create a presentation from a mix of approved content. Remixing does not allow sellers to modify the content of a slide, but enables reordering of slides within a presentation, or mixing slides from multiple “master decks” to create exactly the content they need.”
Of course, these efforts are laudable and make ends meet when you consider sales demos and other types of content delivered after Sales has connected with a buyer. But what about content that needs to make contact with the buyer before Sales can arrive on the scene?
In CEB’s recent webinar, “Making the Consensus Sale,” they revealed that buying groups often fail at reaching consensus well before Sales can intervene. They then proceeded to highlight the need to begin delivering customized content and tools to buyers before the lead ever passes from Marketing to Sales.
The nagging question, then, for Sales (and likely Marketing) becomes: “How do we deliver customized content to buyers before we’ve even held a single call with them to scope out their needs?” For some organizations, this challenge can seem impossible. And it’s unlikely that adding another layer of human contact earlier in the process would be feasible for most organizations.
Technology, however, might hold the key to solving the challenge of delivering customized content to buyers before Sales’ first contact, when buying groups need it the most. For instance, automated, high-level demos that allow prospects to self-identify according to their role and needs could then deliver a presentation to speak to those specifically to their needs—all within the buyer’s first contact with a company’s website.
To see how Consensus™ delivers customized content when buying groups need it the most, click on the orange “Watch Demo’ button below.
