Study: High-Quality Content Improves Sales Quota and Revenue Attainment

The recent “2016 Sales Enablement Optimization Study” from CSO Insights and Seismic has found that high-quality content improves sales quota and revenue attainment up to 6 percent above average, or 59.3 percent. Lower quality content typically leads to a win rate 9 percent lower than average (53.1 percent).

According to researchers, “In the age of the customer, content quality and content quantity have a remarkable impact on quota and revenue plan attainment. Furthermore, content quality determines the customer relationship levels that can be achieved.”

The most popular types of content used in the awareness and prospecting phase of the customer’s journey include email templates and white papers.

During the buying and selling phase of the customer journey, sales professionals employ proposal templates and ROI / business value justification templates. For maintaining customer relationships, sales professionals most commonly use client focused and technical presentations.

The survey also found that 38.2 percent of respondents are focusing on marketing personnel to improve sales enablement services this year. However, more than half (50.7 percent) of respondents agree that current collaborations with marketing department need improvement or a major redesign.

Marketers are the primary creators of content for sales enablement purposes, though not the only department responsible. Marketing creates 39 percent of sales content, salespeople create 24.2 percent and product management creates 14.8 percent.

Easy Content Access Key to Successful Sales Enablement Efforts 

The “Sales Enablement Practitioner Survey” from Highspot and Heinz Marketing recently discovered 70 percent of respondents agree that sales reps need easy access to content in order to improve the quality of customer conversations, and therefore sales effectiveness.

Sales enablement teams are also increasing efficiency (75 percent), sharing best practices (63 percent) and improving training (63 percent) to improve sales effectiveness.