In this episode, we’re talking about how to create a sales enablement strategy that is actually helpful for your sellers and the prospect they’re interacting with on a daily basis.
You’ll hear us ask questions like, what kind of companies need sales enablement the most? How do you go about building a solid sales enablement strategy? And how do you measure the effectiveness of sales enablement content?
Joining Dani to break it all down is Beth Osborne, Senior Content Marketing Manager at Marketron.
Beth brings so many amazing points to the table, like:
In this episode, we’re talking about how to create a sales enablement strategy that is actually helpful for your sellers and the prospect they’re interacting with on a daily basis.
You’ll hear us ask questions like, what kind of companies need sales enablement the most? How do you go about building a solid sales enablement strategy? And how do you measure the effectiveness of sales enablement content?
Joining Dani to break it all down is Beth Osborne, Senior Content Marketing Manager at Marketron.
Beth brings so many amazing points to the table, like:
Welcome to Sell Smarter Sell Faster, a podcast dedicated to helping sales organizations grow. Each week, we discuss proven sales enablement strategies and real life examples with experts and thought leaders from across industries. I'm your host, Dani Buckley, Vice President and General Manager at LeadG 2, a sales performance agency. In this episode, we're talking about how to create a sales enablement strategy that is actually helpful for your sellers and the prospects they're interacting with on a daily basis. You'll hear us ask questions like what kind of companies need sales enablement the most, how do you go about building a solid sales enablement strategy And how do you measure the effectiveness of sales enablement content?
Dani Buckley:Joining me to break it all down is Beth Osborne, senior Content Marketing Manager at Marketron. Beth brings so many amazing points to the table, like how great sales enablement content makes the life of your sellers easier, why your sales enablement content should be developed for anyone who could be a prospect, not just your typical customers, and, finally, how sales enablement strategy should be more about building relationships than merely trying to influence a prospect. All right, I am so excited to jump in with you today, Beth. How are you doing?
Beth Osborne:I'm doing great. Dani, Lovely to be here.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, we got some really good stuff to cover and one of my favorite topics, content Sales enablement content. I know you're passionate about it too, so we're going to have some fun. So, just to get us started and everyone on the same page, tell us a little bit just about your role at Marketron and kind of your experience with sales enablement in general.
Beth Osborne:Sure, i'm the Senior Content Marketing Manager at Marketron, so I'm basically the head of content, so I create the strategies and examples. It's not just me, though. We have a really great team that, you know, facilitates all of that as well. So, like you know, like a day to day for me is working on a content calendar and seeing how you know our business goals are aligning with our content, or what things that we need to prioritize. What are our customers saying. You know those kind of things that kind of inform all of that.
Beth Osborne:I'm really really passionate about sales, enablement content or kind of enablement content, i guess. In general. I've been in the SaaS world most of my career and and SaaS companies definitely focus a lot on enablement content. Whomever you know is the audience. You know this discussion we're having today is about sales, and it's definitely you know it's a different type of sales and enablement content, which we'll I'll probably go into later, but just kind of some examples from you know my previous life or that I worked for. I worked for a content marketing software platform, So I wrote enablement content for people like me.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, great, well, good, so you've got a wealth of experience. You're the right person to have this conversation with. We already knew that I did, so I always like to ask, just because everyone has different language they like to use, how would you define sales and enablement And then tell us, like why, why it's important to an organization?
Beth Osborne:Sure. So kind of what I just alluded to is traditionally sales enablement content is content that sellers use as resources to influence buyers, you know, in the buyer's sort of thing. So what I do is a little bit different. So I'm creating content for those who are sellers and then they are doing the same thing. So you know, it's a, it's a, it's a nuance a little different. Yeah, to me, you know what.
Beth Osborne:what it means to create sales and enablement content is that I'm delivering valuable information that solves the problem, inspires them or gives them some clarity around a situation.
Beth Osborne:It's about, like, how does what we're creating make a local media sellers day easier or better, you know, kind of thing. So people have hard jobs. Yeah, they're also resilient, they're creative, they're persistent And they have to be constant ideators Because they're always going to have objections and Barriers and all those kind of things. so they need trusted resources that are that are going to, you know, empower them, and that's really the foundation for Aspire our sales enablement Vlog. we really conceived it to be that go-to resource for local media sellers and that's exactly what it is, you know, and I meet customers in kind of different ways, like I do space studies a lot and I talk to them or go to events like the NAD conference that I attended a few weeks ago, and I really love to hear from them that content, you know, inspired them or help them overcome something or even, like you know, actually help them win a deal.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, i mean, that's what it really comes down to like. Are we actually helping sales people do their jobs better? I think that's like what it always comes back to. Okay, so tell us, what kind of companies do you think most need sales enablement content? Are there are certain that ones that you see Needed more than others? is everybody like what are some of the key problems that it's really solving?
Beth Osborne:Well, yeah, i think every organization needs it. Staff, specifically, as I kind of talked about that, that's been my, my niche for for quite a while. I think you know It is helpful for any kind of organization that has a Longer buying cycle that has, you know, multiple types of people making the decisions. That is, you know, a Complex kind of purchase Sometimes. Software can be, sometimes not so much. I think it's any industry where you want to Educate whoever your audience is and you know, upkill them, make them expert, those kind of things. We always say that more informed customers are better customers for sure.
Beth Osborne:Um, for the local media industry, which is what I do, you know, we're focusing a lot on Upstilling and helping them understand and become confident. Typically with with digital advertising, a lot of people are from the traditional TV and radio and digital still a little like very and we don't know what's, what's gonna happen with it, but they need it, they need that information for sure. We also focus a lot on like real life scenarios, which I think any sales and stable that content should of like What do you do when this happens or What is a way around this, or what makes this in this situation like, for example, we hear a lot from our We heard a lot from our customers. Well, we don't know exactly what kind of digital ad mix to recommend to a customer and we were like, okay, we, we can take that, and we took it and run ran with it and we created an interactive pool So somebody can go to this interactive pool.
Beth Osborne:They can choose from eight different advertiser goals and then We give them a mix recommendation of this much social or this much display or be a fan thing or whatever. So they can then be confident to go to their customer and say I really think this is a good, a good mix for you. But yeah, at the end of the day, it's all about this takeaway, it's all about you know, whatever, somebody needs to be better at their job and understand things better. And for us specifically, and for any kind of fast company Really, or any company sales enablement, contact can be a differentiator for you. It can be what your competitors not doing.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, yes, absolutely, and you just made me think of this while you're talking. It's kind of like I mean, i've never put it in these words before but like, sales enablement is about enabling the salespeople So you actually can enable the prospect. Right, it's really like you're not. It's not just enabling the salespeople, it really is about, like you said, educating and answering the questions and all of that, and so that is the end goal and it has to be both of those if they enable both of those people. Yeah, yeah, Absolutely. You were starting to touch on this. Tell us a little bit about how does one go about building a solid sales enablement content strategy. What are some of the steps? maybe someone who's new to this should take? start thinking about what they need.
Beth Osborne:Yeah, That was the first thing I did in the decision to launch Aspire was create this content strategy. I love content strategy.
Dani Buckley:Me too, i'm very excited.
Beth Osborne:I could nerd out on them for hours. probably This was a little bit different, because the main goal with Aspire is not promoting a product or service or our brand or anything. Then you have to dig into what are objectives of this. Our objectives are to empower, enable up-feel, give people great information and ideas. How does that connect to other things? My content strategy has several different pieces in it that I would recommend for anybody creating one. First, you've really got to define who your audience is. We have three different personas that we write to. I had to make a lot of assumptions about them in the beginning. Some of those were correct, some of them worked. That's how things roll. There are other parts of it that are more granular, around voice and tone. I even define words we use and words we don't use. For example, we don't call sales people sales reps. We think that's a little old school. We call them sellers or sales professionals.
Beth Osborne:We have to typically call them local media experts or things like that, rather than an older term kind of thing. Then it has content clusters. We have four different content clusters on Aspire. What do those mean? How will we convey the ideas under those? Then it has a part of it that every content strategy has is how does this content align to business goals I was talking about? hey, we're not promoting our products. This is a bottom funnel content to get people to convert. How does that contribute to revenue?
Beth Osborne:First of all, our content is not just for our customers. It's for anybody that could be a prospect or anybody that is a local media seller. For our customers. It upfields them, gets them great ideas. A lot of our content is about here's a thing and here's how you pitch it. Here's some great ideas. I did one yesterday about the auto industry and it's bouncing back. Here's some great ideas to take your dealership customers With them. It enables them to sell more digital advertising, which does impact our revenues. From a prospect side, it's developing a relationship and rapport and trust and credibility of oh, these people really know what they're talking about. That's a big part of Market Prom's brand promises. We're more than software. We have all these great resources that we want to provide you with so that you can do the best at your job.
Beth Osborne:I think the other parts of the strategy are just metric, which we'll probably talk about later, like how do you know what's working and all that stuff Then how are you going to amplify it? How are you going to share it? How is it going to get to all these people that you want it to? It's a strategy that I look at and refresh, probably quarterly, more often if things change or shift internally or externally, but definitely the key parts are who are your personas, what are your clusters? What are your voice and tone, type of things? How are you going to measure it? How are you going to amplify it? What does it mean to the business? Another part is really just keeping yourself accountable, too. How much content are you going to produce? How are you going to do that? Do you have the workflows and all that kind of thing? That's all part of the strategy.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, absolutely, that's great. For those that may not know, can you tell us just quickly what is a content cluster? I know what it is, but I know some of our listeners might not realize what that is A content?
Beth Osborne:cluster is like your umbrella of content. It's kind of like themes, I would say themes. Ours are sales ideas, ad categories, creative and trends, Trends and something. Those are bigger umbrellas. Underneath them we have even sub-pattern type of things. It keeps you connected too. What does the audience need? what are your topics? So every month I'm making sure that I'm hitting all those clusters, Some more than others, on some months kind of things. Some kind of belong in both clusters. But it also keeps consistency, I think, in content production when you have these things.
Dani Buckley:Yep, yep, love that. And another important thing that we won't get into today but for those just to note at home, and is that often those clusters are something that you kind of are building your SEO strategy around too, and things are linking back and there's a lot more into that, but great. So you talked about effectiveness. How do we measure it right? There's a lot of different ways. There's a lot of different goals people might have with sales, enablement, content. So what are some of the metrics that one might track?
Beth Osborne:Sure, yeah, so I call them the metrics that matter, love it, kind of thing. So I do a monthly report and I look at a lot of different things. A lot of it is SEO. It's like okay, what is more, my organic traffic Is it increasing? Where is it going? How am I ranking for certain words? So there's like all that kind of stuff.
Beth Osborne:Then there's stuff on engagement, and engagement is again like a big umbrella thing. So I'm looking at page views, visitor page views per session, average engagement time, but that I'm also looking at engagement, like on social channels or email or different ways that we've distributed content, to see, oh, this is resonating or this isn't. And then another big metric for us for an Aspire subscription. So we have a, we ask you to subscribe and then you get like a monthly email with like the top, you know, pick for Aspire, kind of thing. So in 22, so Aspire launched in May of 21 and year over year, in 22, page views went up by 63% visitors, 86% subscribers, 126% page views per session, by 57 and average engagement time by 165%.
Dani Buckley:Awesome, those are great numbers. I love it, And it speaks volumes to that that our customers and our prospects are hungry for information. They're hungry to be educated by you, and I think a lot of folks think, oh well, there's enough stuff out there on my industry. There's enough things out there, or you know. Or they just want to focus on their product or service And it's like no, but there isn't anything out there that you've written on that topic. Right, and it makes a difference. Your own take on it. So I love that, and so do you have any? I mean, you just shared some success numbers. Do you have any other success stories that you kind of seen where I'm actually really curious I'm kind of putting you on the spot with this very a little bit more directive of a question, but where you've heard like salespeople really having like wow, this really helped move the needle with this cost act or something like that.
Beth Osborne:Yeah, this is a wise firmament of. are the people that I'm creating stuff for? are they benefiting from it? Yeah, When I know that I've created something that's been a value, I get warm buzzes for people.
Beth Osborne:So luckily, i've had quite a few experiences. So I mean, i'm not super customer facing but, like I said, i do do a lot of face studies with people And I get an opportunity like interview them And you know we're talking about a specific thing, but almost always they bring up a spire and they tell me how it has helped them or whatever. So I was doing a case study like end of last year and we had just done a webinar on recruitment advertising and we just had done the ebook and all the content, because that was a big friend in 22 and a lot of revenues was being created from recruitment advertising. So I'm talking to this sales manager at a station and we're not talking about recruitment advertising, but he was like I love that webinar y'all brought and that ebook. He was like we used that and we were able to close a big deal with a health system in our market. And then he was like and then we even used some of those tactics for our own recruiting at the station And I was like I love that webinar. Wow, that was. That was really, really cool. I talked about that.
Beth Osborne:I had just attended in a B of the National Association of Broadcasters conference, the last conference and we sponsored something called the Model medium radio forum and we have these round tables where we discuss different things and I get to kind of listening in on that. And so I was having a um, a conversation with a customer about Just you know, it was just a light conversation at first and they brought up Aspire again and they talked a lot about Some content that we had written about non-profit shifting and prospecting, because that is actually a gold mine for people because nonprofits do have budget for for advertising and And she just said the lady just told me like how much that it had reset her mind on that, on that as a prospect and you know opportunity, and that You know that she just really really appreciated it. But it just you know, stuff like that, just like I said, i definitely make me feel really good.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, that's great, and it really is. Sometimes It's just that simple. It's it's a salesperson really getting that. This helps the Conversation move forward, and that is what it's about and that is hard to measure right now.
Dani Buckley:A lot of times it is, we need just those like verbal stories or, and so I know it can be hard for many of us trying to track the, the effectiveness. Obviously there's all the metrics you talked about, from like kind of a engagement and things like that. But really seeing, like the ROI, like how did this impact the sale? It does, i think, involve having have conversations with salespeople, with sales leaders at your organization and beyond of of And asking them questions, asking them what piece of content are you really finding valuable? What do you wish we had, or what you know? those things I think are really, really Um, is it really effective to get that ROI stories? or, if they're not there, to figure out why?
Beth Osborne:Yeah, definitely, and I also get a lot of feedback from our CBM team, which are their client development managers. They're kind of their digital gurus for our digital clients and You know they they will pass on similar things to me and we have like a whole like team chat Where, where different things and I kind of you drop on that a bit to see what's coming and we ask our customers what they want. Yes, yes, we ask them what. What should we write about what? what is bothering you, what is what is worrying you like a big thing right now is third party cookies. Hmm, yeah, it's so good finally going to make good on removing those and that's a concern for people in the advertising industry. So we've done a lot of content on it. We did our own. We have a very small little podcast and we had a guest on that was she's an expert in the space, just to be like, here's the reality and the truth of this and we want to get you the right information.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, yeah, that's great. I love it. Well, Beth, I know you and I can probably sit and talk about this stuff all day, but I'm going to wrap us up and tell me is there anything that we haven't touched on, that you just want to be sure our listeners hear about past practices, about strategy, anything that you can think of related to this, that you just want to be sure that they take away today.
Beth Osborne:I want to just say for any buddy that's in this space is one of the most important things is to have leadership buy-in.
Dani Buckley:And.
Beth Osborne:I did not necessarily have that in my early career, where I had to prove the value every day, but that's never been the case at Mark Cron. I knew from day one that I would have autonomy, that I would be able to take it and run with it And, like I said, it's part of our brand promise to like be more than software kind of thing, so that's a huge thing. The other thing again is that it goes back to the strategy Create one and stick to it, but refine it and make it so that anybody could just walk in and be like okay, i get it, i get what we're doing with our content.
Dani Buckley:I like that. Yeah Yeah, don't make it overly complicated. really, start small. I always tell people, just start. You don't have to do everything at first, just getting started. So great. Thank you so much, beth. I so appreciate you and your time here, and be sure to connect with Beth If you'd like. You can find her contact information in the show notes along with mine If you want to reach out, ask questions. And thanks for joining us today. Everybody, we look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Sell Smarter, sell Faster And, until then, happy selling. Thanks for joining us on Sell Smarter, sell Faster. If you like what you hear, click that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. Be sure to visit our website, sellsmartersellfastercom, where you can find even more helpful sales enablement and inbound marketing content.