Engaging Customers at Critical Touch Points• CSO Insights: Sales Engagement Optimization

Study

Sales Teams Go Rogue

55%

45%

Sales

Marketing

Who is Creating Sales Content?The chart to the right shows that there is about a 55/45 split between collateral created by sales teams and materials created for sales by marketing. This means most of the content sales teams use is made by sales — not by marketing.

Furthermore, several of the companies surveyed highlighted the concept of “sales enhanced” content. In these cases, marketing created the tools or collateral, and sales customized it for their own use. When you take this into account, the sales organization is actually creating more than 55% of their content.

Source - CSO Insights: 2016 Sales Engagement Optimization Study

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90%

Call Scripts

Product Brochures

Email Templates

ROI Templates

Needs Analysis Templates

Objection Handling Information

Proposal Templates

Demos

Competitive Analysis

Presentations

Sales Force Best Practices

Case Studies and References

Mission Critical Very Important

We then sought to assess the value that various tools and content represented to sales teams in terms of helping them effectively engage customers and prospects. The chart to the right provides a summary of participants’ ratings of the value of various types of resources sales teams use during the sales process. Here we see that sales professionals need a variety of different types of assets to share with clients in order to support effective interactions.

How effective are companies at providing sales teams the materials they need? That analysis raised some yellow and even red flags.

Sales Teams Go Rogue: Creating Their Own Content

Value of Different Types of Assets

Source - CSO Insights: 2016 Sales Engagement Optimization Study

19%

47%

29%

6%0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

40%

45%

50%

Needs Redesign Needs Improvement Satisfactory Exceeds Expectations

Quality and Quantity of Content Created by Marketing

Sales Teams Go Rogue: Creating Their Own Content

We have often said that the answer to every sales challenge you currently face probably already exists inside your company. Some enterprising sales professional has figured out a unique value proposition, developed a great answer to an objection, has developed messaging that clearly differentiates you from the competition, etc.

Looking at the list of assets on the previous page, we see that sharing best practices is the second highest-valued selling resource for salespeople. Unfortunately, few companies are in a good position to effectively do this. Of the firms surveyed in the Sales Engagement Optimization study, 30% reported having a random or ad hoc sharing practice, and another 40% said they had an informal process.

The remaining items on the list are often the responsibility of marketing to create. When asked the study participants how sales would rate the quality and quantity of the assets marketing provides, it became clear that less than 35% of marketing organizations are providing content that meets the needs of sellers.

Here we see the first sales engagement challenge many companies are facing: they are not consistently providing sales teams with the best practices, tools, and collateral to effectively sell.

Source - CSO Insights: 2016 Sales Engagement Optimization Study