In the Mad Men era, marketing was considered a cost center where “creative types” made glorious advertising campaigns but had very little ability to measure their impact on sales.
Now, thanks to the Internet, marketing automation, and other technology, we can measure nearly everything in marketing, tracing our impact all the way down to influence on revenue and ROI. This ability to measure marketing’s performance and receive instant feedback on what works has revolutionized marketing.
Analytics are the key to performance optimization.
Real-time feedback on what is working empowers us to improve message quality, creative, channel, and offers to quickly improve the outcome. Without accurate performance analytics, we’d be back in the Mad Men era of creating content and launching campaigns into a black hole with no idea if they worked. And yet, that is exactly the scenario in which publishers of sales content find themselves today — no ability to measure whether their content has any impact at all.
Most marketers and sales enablement professionals (more than 90% of those people that produce content for sales, I’d argue) have no real ability to measure whether sales reps are using their content, how often it is being used, how effectively the content engages the customer, which customers, and whether the content has any impact on sales.
Without this feedback loop, these content publishers lack the technology and processes to systematically optimize content. Why is it that what we think of as standard practice in top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) marketing has not been adopted in bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) sales enablement practices?
Highspot believes that comprehensive and accurate performance analytics for sales enablement is the key to driving more effective sales engagements, and thus revenue growth, faster sales and higher ASPs. We published the Definitive Guide to Sales Content Performance to get everyone thinking about the need for better analytics and to provide some best practices in content performance metrics. Our goal is to definitively cover the eight core analytics necessary to measure sales content performance, how they should be used, and the business benefit of each.
We hope that this starts a mini sales enablement revolution of its own, establishing content performance analysis as a standard practice in sales enablement. Download the Definitive Guide to Sales Content Performance here.
