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Since the launch of Open AI’s ChatGPT, artificial intelligence (AI) has been top of mind in all industries. Sales is no exception. But this has been a long time coming.
Venture capital investment in AI has increased 13-fold in the last ten years. This has directly impacted the increase in computation capacity today—evident in the number of AI tools available for different use cases.
In sales, representatives finally have the tools to take charge of their day-to-day operations. For example, creating tailored messaging or personalized pitches at scale is no longer a massive issue. But it has also exemplified many issues. Now, sales reps can generate content at scale, resulting in a mountain of content they can’t manage anymore.
So, how can companies organize and manage this without sacrificing quality or money? Let’s start by understanding the problems that exacerbate this issue first.
Previously, sales reps were responsible for creating customer-facing content like email campaigns and decks. But with AI, they’re taking it a step further.
They can auto-generate reports, one-pagers, and similar collateral that were time-intensive previously. This lets them quickly respond to market changes and customer needs, but the issue is that it might miss the mark in terms of messaging and positioning.
Dave Shanley, founder and CEO of Content Camel, says, “The issue, though, is one that marketers fear. It can drift from where the brand and the positioning are. The AI stuff is so general, right? It’s very good in a broad sense, but the content is not obviously good at positioning products. You easily end up with stuff that misses the mark as far as meeting the prospect where they need to be met.”
In addition to empowering sales reps to create content, AI also helps them create multiple versions in minutes. For example, they can do that much faster now if they need to create five different versions of a campaign or create three different campaigns for a segmented database.
This results in a massive inventory of content assets that, over time, become hard to categorize and manage without the right systems.
As sales reps have more content assets to choose from, they also become better at meeting buyer needs. For instance, they don’t need to wait on marketing to determine which assets work best in specific situations.
Depending on the client, pain points, or product, reps can choose these assets themselves as they already have access to a large inventory of these assets. This lets them customize pitches and provide relevant assets only.
However, you’ll soon feel the growing pains of a large content inventory. Sales reps and marketers must spend more time reviewing, categorizing, and ranking content based on internal parameters.
Some of these parameters include:
Also, marketers will need to put systems in place to update these on a regular basis to reflect changes in messaging, positioning, or even relevancy.
Companies are already producing over 20 assets each month and struggling to manage them all. When you add AI to the mix, that issue gets worse. Here’s how:
Previously, the issue with scaling content was that companies didn’t have enough resources to achieve that. But with AI making it easy to write content, you can slowly see companies take the quantity over quality approach.
This also happens because there are no guardrails to monitor what’s being published. Shanley says, “It’s not hard anymore to shrink and expand things. So both from the marketing side and the sales side, you can have all this derivative product. We need to ask ourselves three questions:
Sometimes, people get lost in the mechanics of doing these things and don’t have a good reason. In general, expectations and strategy aren’t always set well in organizations.”
Now, you can create 20 different versions of a content piece. It becomes even more difficult to spot redundancies in your inventory. It leads to wasted time and resources in terms of content creation and review.
In addition, you might also have redundant pieces that have inconsistent messaging and positioning. Over time, sales reps won’t know which assets to use and archive—further complicating things.
With the rise in quantity, the maintenance of quality comes into question. Everything gets turned up to eleven because it’s simple to create derivative branded assets.
But without the right systems to check for quality before making these assets live, all your effort goes to waste. Creating a feedback loop at every step of the process is one way to do that.
“It’s important for the teams to work closely together to know what’s possible, know what’s available, and know what’s working,” Shanley says. “That feedback loop is even more important because the ultimate goal for teams is to move fast, not to place constraints on sales reps.”
In every company, information is dynamic. From product specifications to pricing, granular details change regularly, so your content must reflect that, too.
You don’t want your sales reps prospecting with the wrong information. However, the probability of using outdated assets increases as your content volume rises.
The pressure on sales reps increases with time as well. The constant need for familiarization with what’s available and what’s not becomes mentally taxing and time-consuming.
This is why companies need to start investing in the right solutions that make organizing and managing content easier. This ensures that sales reps have access to the right materials within the proper context.
While using AI to become more efficient is inevitable, you should implement processes that help sales reps manage their content. Investing in sales content management software is an excellent way to do that. Here are a few core features that should simplify this:
You need software that comes with in-built categorization capabilities that allow you to sort based on aspects like:
You can add each asset under specific categories, making it easy to find them when needed. For example, if your client is in the martech space, you can filter all your assets by industry vertical and find the right ones in minutes.
Tagging is a more granular method of content organization, allowing users to attach specific keywords or phrases to content.
For instance, if you need to deploy a specific asset only when the buying signals are high, you can tag it. Then, sales reps precisely know when to use that content piece. The goal is to offer more context, making retrieval and usage easier with time.
Sales reps often need to share content with prospects, clients, or internally within the team. Your content management system needs to offer multiple ways to do that. Some of them include:
Sharing becomes a simple task if it’s compatible with multiple platforms like Slack and email providers. It enables you to share content with the right people where they want it.
Sales reps should be able to access materials using any device. As some reps travel to different locations to give presentations, this feature makes it handy for them. Irrespective of where they are or the kind of device they use, they can retrieve, share, or edit content on the go.
A cloud-based system stores your content on a remote server—making it accessible to your reps on different browsers and devices. Apart from remote access, it also offers advantages like:
Not all content is meant for every sales rep or team member. Choose software that offers various levels of access so that only the right team members retrieve these assets. It protects confidential data, safeguarding your content’s integrity.
Most sales reps use shared drives and wikis to manage their content. They create folders based on their company’s internal organization system. But all that effort becomes futile when it comes to finding these assets.
They choose the right keywords, tags, or categories, but these assets don’t appear. Ultimately, reps lose hours every week just trying to find content instead of focusing on selling to their prospects.
Look for a product that offers advanced search capabilities that use predictive search or tags to find and filter content. It provides a better user experience for those searching—saving them hundreds of hours in the long term.
Both sales reps and marketers need to know what’s working when it comes to closing deals. By using a tool that lets you do that, you can see which assets bring in the most engagement or revenue and which need to be revisited. Your data should validate what your reps are seeing in reality.
“Does everybody understand it? And are we focused on it from a sales perspective? Like if we’re talking marketing and sales, is it focused on your use case? Is it really focused on helping buyers buy?” explains Shanley. “That key part is to see if it’s helping them because if it’s not, it’s just sort of noise. And then you should see that up in the analytics. You’ll see low uptake if that’s the case.”
Here’s what you should be able to track:
“It’s organizing the output visibility into what’s being seen, and then analytics on how it’s performing and having an open dialogue between the teams so that you really do understand what’s working and what’s not working,” Shanley says.
It’s evident that AI is not a fleeting trend, and it’s here to stay. Your sales reps will take advantage of these tools to the best of their capabilities. It’s time that sales reps and marketers work hand in hand to manage the content they create with the right systems in place.
This investment is more of a necessity than an option as it empowers reps to do what they do best—sell. So, give them the tools to easily organize and manage this content instead of worrying about how fast your inventory is growing.
Get the most out of your content and deliver trackable results
Content Camel is a sales enablement tool used for sales content management. High-growth sales teams use our system to quickly find and share the right content for each specific sales situation and measure content use and effectiveness.