Every organization today knows that they need to have readily available and relevant content to support their sales people during all phases of their sales process. At a high level, content is either classified as being either ...

Internal
Meant to be used by Sales, Marketing, and other relevant teams to prepare a solution or recommendation for a client. In this regard, the reality is that most organizations tend to have way too much internal content (some of which is outdated), and this may actually confuse and distract their sales people as they prepare for client interactions and conversations. 

External or client-facing
Intended for clients and other interested parties, publicly available via your website, social media platforms, email communications and marketing initiatives, conferences and the like.

Having the right content available at the right time, both internal and client-facing, is one of the key requirements to closing the deal and to winning the sale.

But that is only part of the problem or solution ... in a previous blog article "Are you Educating your Clients?", I touched on how the Internet and the ease of access to vast amounts of publicly available information has changed the way that buyers now make their buying decisions - in fact, most are already 60% to 70% through their purchasing process by the time they reach out to you!

Hopefully, during this 60% to 70% phase of their purchasing process, clients would have found your publicly available content, which is probably why they are reaching out to you! Now you need to take them all the way to 100% ... this is when you really start selling, and you will need client-facing content that is 100% relevant or customized to the buyer or buying committee. Examples would be customer references, case studies or any proof that your solution could work in the client's environment, proof of concepts, as well as any value-based analyses, etc.

So, what is your organization's content strategy? And is that currently working?  

Many organizations know that they have content that is disorganized, ineffective, and possibly outdated. The challenge is to have a strong sales enablement system that will allow you to create engaging content in a way that is both cost-effective and which will deliver the information that buyers need to make a decision. If this is not in place, your organization could waste a great deal of time, money, and expensive resources, and at the end of the day have very little to show for all your efforts.