How do you assess which sales enablement materials are the most effective?

There is no single golden arrow. Every piece of material has its role in the process. I look at effectiveness from two perspectives. One - did the salesperson use it? Two - did the prospect use it? Fortunately, there are tools for this today. You should be using a tool like Seismic, Highspot, or Docsend. These tools also allow for a third important measure - did the prospect pass it around to the buying group? Now you’re hitting the right notes.

If the salesperson doesn’t use something, it doesnt necessarily mean it’s an ineffective asset. Sometimes it means they need more awareness and training on the value an asset can add to their sales process.

On the other hand, more usage by sales doesn’t necessarily mean it is effective. It is important to track what role the asset played in the prospect’s buying journey.

This is always a difficult one. Sometimes it can be easier to solve with technology, while other times it's a bit more difficult to track/measure.

With technology:

• You can track which content is being sent out/used
• You can track how many reps are 'customizing' a deck in their workspace
• etc.
• However, the issue with this is that you might see a pitch deck you worked hard on isn't being used at all. In that case, you need to evalutate whether its an adoption issue or a quality issue (ie. not the right pitch)

Without technolgy:

• You really need to rely on feedback loops and finding sales champions to work with
• Meet regularly with those champions to review assets and listen to them on what's working, what's not, and what they'd suggest improving
• Ask your reps to surface and share with you the assets they're creating on their own. Oftentimes reps are creating materials on their own, because they have a need and don't want to wait for marketing. So ask them! Then take those materials as guidance for how you can optimize, improve, and standardize them as 'approved materials' that are on-brand.

At the end of the day, every company and sales team will need the same core assets/materials. Things such as an approved pitch deck, a few core one-pagers, a pillar page on your website, or a tool such as an ROI calculator. So it really comes down to a matter of quality over trying to figure out 'which materials to create' and this can only be figured out through sales rep feedback and working with them.

So in short = work with your sales counterparts to listen, learn, and then create.

The best way is to use tools that give you these analytics. I have used tools like Highspot and Guru that make this much more automated.

The other way to do that is using some sort of intranet, like Confluence to host this content so you can track use.

At the end of the day, you always want to augment any of that with actual sales feedback. You can run monthly or quarterly sales feedback surveys and directly ask the team which pieces of content have been the most effective and why.

To assess the performance of sales enablement materials, I recommend using a mix of feedback and usage data.

1. Feedback. Regularly gather feedback from the sales team through surveys or interviews about the usefulness, relevance, and user-friendliness of the materials. This type of direct feedback can highlight what’s working and what’s not. This approach also allows you to target feedback from critical sales representatives / customer segments.

2. Usage Data: Leverage analytics tools to track how often sales enablement materials are being accessed and used. High engagement levels can be a good indicator of perceived value by the sales team. Usage data like downloads can miss insight into repeat use of a material though, also it is blind to “why” a given item is used. This information can further guide feedback gathering though.

• Collect insights through customer research. Research should be done regularly to get feedback from prospects or existing customers to find out what their needs are, and how to best position yourself during each point in their discovery journey (sales being a touchpoint in that journey). You can also ask them to evaluate the various types of materials and give feedback on which ones are compelling in their decision journey

• Set up any new enablement materials as a test - with clear metrics to measure and audiences / other enablement materials to compare against. For example, you can compare that one pager you're launching versus another asset by setting up an A/B email test, and measuring engagement
  

Survey the sales reps quarterly or biannually, and include questions around which materials they use the most. Use multiple choice for this question, and leave a write-in line for feedback. You'll get direct feedback in a scalable way, and also notice trends over time.

This is a real challenge, and I am curious to hear how other PMMs do this! My suggestion would be to take the onus off of sales in manually tracking how often they are using assets and how effective they are, and instead find ways to proactively get that feedback.

One thing that I have done in the past is survey the sales team on which assets they use most frequently. It was a basic Google form that had them rate various assets in our content library (pitch deck, ROI calculator, product one-pagers, etc.). It isn't an exact science, but it does reveal sentiment within the team of which content pieces are the most valuable to them.

Additionally, you can try to establish which materials are effective in closing business by doing some deal reviews with reps. You might look at a cohort of sales opportunities, and ask reps which content pieces they used during the sales process, and create a kind of content journey map. Again, it's quite manual, but even on a small scale, you can start to identify trends and understand how and where your materials are being deployed so you can continually improve.