Trust Enablement

Improving Sales Performance with Enablement Recruiting, Consulting, Outsourcing, Coaching, and Insights on Strategies, Tactics, and Tools

Sales Content Management: What, Why, and How

Sales Content ManagementSales content management systems are vital to businesses of all sizes. Identifying the top solution for your company, however, is simply too difficult.

In this write-up, we cover:

  • What is sales content management?
  • Why do you need a sales content management system?
  • Best practices for sales content management

Let’s dive in.

What is sales content management?

Sales content management is simply the process used to organize and deliver content used by the sales organization.

Simple, right?

What is a Sales Content Management System?

A Sales Content Management System often referred to as a Sales Enablement solution, is any tool, software package, or platform that is capable of housing content for your sales teams.

But note, not every content management platform is good for sellers, or certainly not for all sales roles. Let’s define our requirements for a great Sales Content Management platform.

  • It should integrate with the systems your sales teams are using regularly. This may be your CRM, your email client, sales engagement tools, or other platforms are primarily for their roles.
  • If the platform will be used by remote, channel, or outside sales teams, it must have a mobile application that is easy to use.
  • The solution should produce data that informs content creators about the effectiveness of their content to generate revenue and provide ROI-related insights.
  • Sales Content Management system should automatically update the CRM with tracking information when content is shared with prospects, viewed, downloaded, or otherwise used.
  • The solution should help sellers identify which content to use for specific personas, use cases, and products, reducing their need to hunt for the right content to use.
  • The tool should support content governance so it is easy for teams to find the latest and greatest content. Failure to do so will not only cost you a sale, it can cost you brand equity and potentially result in breaking laws and costing you fines or jail time.

Alright, now that we know what we mean by sales content management, let’s ensure we are all aligned around why we need it.

Why do you need a sales content management system?

We know that sales teams only spend around 33% of their time actively selling. The rest of the time is spent looking for and creating content, and on administrative tasks such as updating the CRM system. See this article for more stats.

Your sales content platform should give your sellers more time to sell by reducing admin overhead and simplifying finding the content they need.

We also know that nearly 2/3rds of all content created by marketing for the sales team is never used (see the same Trust Enablement article). The reasons for this include:

  • Available content doesn’t meet the needs of reps.
  • Content is hard to find.

Your content solution helps solve the second point, and, with reporting, will help marketing and other teams know what is going to waste and what is being consumed, and adjust their content investments to better match the team’s needs.

Best Practices for effective sales content management

We cover content governance in another article and will not repeat those insights here. You should read the article if you have time.

Now, onto best practices for effective sales content management.

Buying the right platform, the top sales content management system for your needs.

This table should help you identify, for the most common scenarios, which platforms to consider.

Capabilitymonday.comData DwellEnable.usSaleshood
Ideal for what?Sales content for internal use only, for team readiness, not for sharing with customers.For companies built on the Salesforce CRM tech stack.For situations when interactive, digital selling is key and you are using Mutual Action Plans to create a shared schedule.For other Sales Content Management use cases
Digital Sales RoomsLacking robustness recommended for internal, not customer-facing, use.Solid capabilities, dynamic content (optionally), security, chat/conversation capabilities.Solid capabilities, dynamic content (optionally), security, chat/conversation capabilities.

Mutual Action Plans Supported.
Solid capabilities, dynamic content, but no security.
Content PlaybackBasic, No Annotations or NotesBasic, No Annotations or NotesBasic, No Annotations or NotesBasic, No Annotations or Notes
SearchTitle, DescriptionTitle, DescriptionTitle, DescriptionTitle, Description
ReportingMinimal but sufficient for an internal use case.Most complete reporting of any solution, pinpoint the impact of content on deals.Sellers can use reporting to identify customer engagement, identify who to reach out to and what to discuss.Sellers can use reporting to identify customer engagement, identify who to reach out to and what to discuss.
Email IntegrationsGmail, OutlookNoneGmail* (new but untested by our team)None
CRM IntegrationsSalesforce, PipedriveSalesforce (only available as native in Salesforce)Salesforce, Hubspot (* Only at Growth Plan Pricing)Salesforce
PricingIndividual
Free
– 2 Users
– Up to 500 MB of Files Stored

Basic
$8/user/month
– Unlimited Users
– Up to 5 GB of Files Stored

Standard
$10/user/month
– Unlimited Users
– Up to 20 GB of Files Stored

Pro
$16/user/month
– Unlimited Users
– Up to 100 GB of Files Stored

Enterprise
Pricing Not Listed
– Unlimited Users
– Up to 1000 GB of Files Stored
Jet Package ($450/month)
– 2 admins
– 3 power users + 45 standard users
– First 50 GB of data included
– See more on the pricing page.

Rocket Package ($800/month)
– 5 admins
– 20 power users + 125 standard users
– First 200 GB of data included
– See more on the pricing page
Startup Plan
$25/user/month
– Unlimited Content Storage for docs, videos, infographics, PDFs, etc.
– Content Management including attributes, versioning control, permissions, etc.
– Digital Sales Rooms
– Contact-based engagement tracking
– Sales Room Analytics

Growth Plan
$50/user/month
– CRM Integration (Salesforce & Hubspot)
– Video Conferencing Integration (Zoom & RingCentral)
– Content Repository Integrations (Google, Microsoft, DropBox)
– Content Level Analytics
– Individual Content Link Sharing with Detailed Tracking Metrics
– Mutual Action Plans
– Ideal for teams with 3 or more users

Enterprise
Pricing not Published
– Custom Delivery Domain Name
– Reference Management
– Sales Room and Mutual Action Plan Templating
– Custom Integrations
Try Free
$50/user/month
All Pricing
Primary VerticalsUnknownTechnologyEducation, Healthcare, eCommerce, AI, Technology Technology, Clean Technology, Health Technology
Secondary VerticalsUnknownProperty, Financial ServiceConstruction, Enterprise SAASPhilanthropy, Financial Service, Government
Year Founded2012201620202013
Funding to DatePublicly Traded$1.3 million$4.5M.$1.8M
Ideal Customer SizeAll SizesMid-Sized BusinessesMid-sized Businesses to EnterprisesMid-sized Businesses to Enterprises
Try NowTry NowTry NowTry Now

Evaluate these platforms with all key stakeholders to ensure they address your core needs, and work with a vendor who knows your industry well and that demonstrates a willingness to collaborate and communicate openly.

Create a content creation, curation, and approval process

Review our sales content best practices article to learn more.

Build a taxonomy

In the majority of systems, your taxonomy impacts searching for content and how the solution determines what content is shown where when integrated into your other systems (e.g., your CRM).

What questions do you have left?

Let us know as we are here to help.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.