Content is one of the most critical components of your sales engagement strategy.
To ensure long-term content strategy success, it’s best to periodically evaluate your team’s content requirements and workflow alignment.
As a sales content manager, it’s strongly recommended to review your content strategy if you’ve been using the same sequences, templates, and snippets that you initially launched with.
[This article is an excerpt from Outreach’s Unleash Customer Workshop: “Content Therapy.”]
Your content strategy evaluation should start with understanding your team’s current challenges. The below Dunning Kruger Curve can be a helpful aide in gauging your content strategy maturity.
Starting at the left, someone in stage one is just beginning their journey. They are generally filled with optimism but lack deeper system knowledge.
Stage two content strategists tend to find themselves overwhelmed and unsure how to best wrangle their growing content portfolio.
In stage three, a system is in place, and your focus is on ensuring you have strong user adoption.
The final stage is the “expert” level. The entire sales team is clear on the plan, and it’s working.
Now it’s time to step back and ensure best practices are in place.
No matter where your strategy falls on the spectrum, remember there’s no “right or wrong” — you’re simply identifying your stage to inform the path to improvement. And all stages of development can benefit from addressing the following scenarios:
Scenario 1: It’s unclear what’s working and what’s not
This problem is characterized by too many sequences or rulesets and “stuck” prospects. You may also experience content stagnation or have a lack of data.
Moving forward without a clear strategy can result in poor rep adoption, longer onboarding times, and even burning through your high-value leads.
Understand what’s working and what’s not by:
- Identifying your North Star content strategy
- Reviewing reporting and analytics to determine the best content
- Auditing/reviewing content and archiving the “noise”
RELATED: Use Outreach? Here’s How to Create, Maintain, and Measure Sequences
Scenario 2: Out of control content
This can look like nonexistent governance limits, cloned sequences with almost identical content, or “bottlenecking” content requests that allow too many people to create content. A lack of documented workflows and/or ownership translates to confusion and extra work.
Continuing down this road can make it impossible to create clear reports or achieve operational excellence.
Fix out-of-control content by:
- Reevaluating your governance model
- Reviewing, reconciling, and aligning your workflows
- Planning for change management, which includes testing, communication, and highlighting wins
RELATED: Use Outreach? Here’s 3 Strategies to Organize Your Sales Team’s Content
Scenario 3: Too much content to maintain momentum
When you find yourself with too much content to maintain, your strategy will go stale. Content development overload keeps you stuck if your resources are already stretched thin, there are no guidelines for creation, or you don’t have a sufficient budget. There’s no method, only madness.
Improve manageability by:
- Developing a content committee or center of excellence
- Establishing a schedule for content review and improvements
- Setting benchmarks for performance and measuring them
Take it to the next level: Learn how to Build a Content Committee for Ultimate ROI on Content Companywide
Edited by Kendra Fortmeyer @ Sales Hacker 2022
