Sales leaders, are your sales reps customizing their outreach and understanding how buyers are engaging with their content?
Industry-leading programmatic advertising platform, StackAdapt, empowers their reps to tailor proposals and other materials for more personalized outreach, resulting in deeper rep participation and more effective buyer interactions. The key: Investing in a sales enablement platform with robust content management, buyer engagement, and analytics capabilities.
It hasn’t always been this way. Like many other rapidly growing companies, StackAdapt had to quickly establish and scale their sales enablement efforts, pivoting from reps building their own sales materials in silos, to a collaborative, centralized strategy that equips them with up-to-date, marketing-approved content that they can customize, share, and measure.
Read on to learn how Vik Kandeth and Eli Bardikoff, VPs of Sales at StackAdapt, enable their reps to make the most of every customer conversation.
Align First, Engage Second
When building a go-to-market (GTM) strategy, it’s critical for sales and marketing teams to align on a number of factors, such as target audience, messaging, and what type of content to share throughout the buyer journey.
A strong GTM strategy ensures that your reps are engaging buyers with a consistent approach, marketing-approved messaging, and relevant content at the time of action, resulting in consistent quota attainment and rep satisfaction. To stay competitive today, it is crucial to keep reps satisfied and reduce churn as much as possible. In the last year, according to Xactly’s State of Sales report 2021, over 50% of sales decision-makers reported higher rep turnover than ever before.
Empower Reps with Customizable Content and Guidance
Once your strategy is in place, it’s time to arm your reps with content and guidance and what to know, say, show and do in every unique selling scenario. With a system that empowers reps to have the right messaging and content at the right time, your reps will be able to deliver maximum value to buyers.
According to Bardikoff, “Having a live resource where we can update content and our sales team can continue to reference and add things has been a really positive change from Google Drive, which we were living in before.”
Bardikoff and Kandeth recommend the following to strengthen your content management and enable effective buyer interactions:
- Organize content in a way that makes the most sense for your reps — by vertical, persona, stage in the sales funnel — so they can quickly and easily find content relevant to each specific buyer.
- Build centralized ‘splash’ pages that house sales materials, information about your product, and more for your reps to drive buyers to — say goodbye to un-trackable email attachments!
- Create buyer outreach templates leveraging the most up-to-date, marketing-approved messaging that reps can easily tailor and send.
- When it makes sense, make the content itself customizable by reps so they can tailor the information to their buyers’ needs.
Motivate Reps and Optimize Their Engagement with Analytics
StackAdapt said that the most impactful aspect of getting reps to adopt their sales enablement efforts has been data. Investing in a sales enablement system that provides robust analytics on buyer engagements is key to being able to optimize their approach and recognize reps for their efforts.
Insights into views, opens, downloads, and even viewing time per page or slide helps reps better follow up with their customers. Bardikoff says that “understanding [these metrics] gives you a clear line of sight into the health of a deal.”
Another powerful way to leverage this data is to motivate and incentivize reps. Bardikoff and Kandeth launched sales spiffs and contests that encourage reps to send out proactive proposals and other forms of outreach, recognize those that achieve the best open rates, and incentivize further engagement behaviors.
Bardikoff and Kandeth recommend measuring the following aspects of a rep-buyer interaction:
- Open rates associated with specific content: This helps marketing and sales leaders understand what content is and isn’t grabbing buyers’ attention.
- Open rates associated with specific reps: If a rep is consistently seeing a low open rate, there could be a way to improve their approach. Invest in coaching these reps on their buyer outreach.
- Identify reps that have positive open, view, and download ratios, determine why their ratio is better than average, and scale these best practices across the team.
- Track how engagement rates are impacted by marketing efforts, such as product launch campaigns or new content being released. This demonstrates the alignment between what marketing is publishing, what sales is sending, and what buyers are actually interacting with.
Bring Buyer Engagement to the Next Level
To effectively enable your reps to boost their buyer engagement efforts like StackAdapt, read our guide on 5 Best Practices to Engage the Modern Buyer and sign up for the next Sales Enablement Soirée on September 23, 2021. And if you’re a current Highspot customer and want to work directly with our product designers and researchers to invent the future of sales enablement, sign up for our User Research Program.
