Startups need to be very strategic about their investments, and it can seem hard to justify a big marketing spend, like requesting a new or replacement Content Management System (CMS). However, while you’re budgeting for 2018, now is the best time of year to have the discussion. You may not feel like you have the proper insight into how your content is performing, and want to stay ahead of the market. Implementing a robust CMS now will give those insights, which you can leverage in your budgeting process next year (not to mention well before that).
In this post, we’ll review a few ways you can start the conversation and justify your content management spend before year-end to set your team up for success.
Maintain high-performing content throughout the buyer’s journey
Having effective content readily available for every stage in the buyer’s journey is crucial in arming your team for success. In a recent study conducted by Highspot, respondents with a sales enablement team said they were 51 percent more likely than companies without a sales enablement team to agree their content is closely aligned with sales stages.
This means that when you have resources that help you align your content with the buyer’s journey, you’re more likely to close more deals. Having the right tools that help you map the right message to your buyers’ targeted needs at every stage is key, and many new CMS tools for sales enablement provide capabilities that allow you to easily do this, and search and filter for content by industry, business area, and region to ensure your message is targeted and up to date.
Related: How Content Management Helps Close Deals and Increase Sales
Don’t start the conversation with cost savings
The long-term strategy associated with implementing a new sales-focused CMS definitely includes benefits like cutting costs and resources needed for things like lead generation, shortening the buying cycle and customer retention and upsell. However, startups often want to know what’s going to benefit them in the short-term, and you may not save money initially. Instead, you’ll want to focus the conversation on how a new CMS will provide mutual benefits for your marketing workforce as well as your sales team.
A new CMS is a win-win for both sales and marketing
This is a big selling point. How many tools on the market can simultaneously benefit both sales and marketing? Startups need to justify solution spends that are going to offer expansive benefits across the business, and having a single content repository allows marketing to vastly improve content organization and performance, while also giving sales easy access to the resources they’ll need to close more deals (and gives management insight into what content is working in the field and what isn’t!).
Start the conversation by outlining the vast benefits both sales and marketing will experience after implementing a new CMS for sales and training content. Many CMS tools not only allow marketers to be more strategic in how they spend time and resources by identifying the gaps in your content but also offer sales enablement capabilities that help increase sales productivity by enabling sellers to find what they need quickly and easily. Investing in a new CMS will allow your startup to measure what content is generating the most engagement from customers at every stage in the buyer’s journey.
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A new CMS comes with advanced analytics
This is a great way to justify the spend before the year’s end: wouldn’t it be great if you could measure how your content was performing? CMS tools that offer analytic capabilities help you identify what content is being used the most across the sales force and help shed light on what content is helping generate revenue. This allows you to ensure you’re dedicating your resources appropriately to maintain high-performing content with high ROI.
Analytics also provide insights to measure your content freshness and find out when the content was last updated. You can easily identify assets that need to be reviewed and updated, rewritten or retired, and identify gaps in your content where you need to refocus efforts to create fresh, new content. You can keep track of outdated content and ensure sales has the latest and greatest decks by using analytics to track which versions of presentations are being used.
These are just a few of the expansive benefits that come with investing in content management. It’s time to kick it into high gear to improve your content engagement and create and maintain better content that’s sure to set you apart from your competitors in the new year.
