How do you measure content usage and effectiveness within the sales process? Do you have a constant feedback loop that enables your team to attribute content engagement to business outcomes? Does this allow you visibility into standardizing best practices and measuring marketing impact?

This is definitely one of the trickier elements of sales enablement and the quantifiable value driven through product marketing into sales enablement. In short much like the majority of PMM KPI's and metrics, its hard to have 'absolute' metrics but I have no hesitation in owning the influence on key business metrics by way of strong sales enablement. A good example of this is things like decreased Time To Close (TTC), increased Average Contract Value (ACV), and higher win rates. If PMM is enabling sales in the most impactful and effective way, with the strongest value propositions, the most disruptive competitive differentiators, and the most aligned messaging to the customer..then metrics like the ones above will happen! There are alway 'softer' metrics you can use too like attendance (of enablement sessions) and content downloads/usage through your content/enablement portal such as Highspot but in my opinion the real value shows through the key business metrics..more revenue, quicker, and stickier!

There are multiple ways I've tried to measure content usage and effectiveness. The most obvious is to be able to have platforms to help you, but I've not always been so lucky to have access to these. Thus, other ways are to set up programs and also do your own analysis.

For platforms, I've used Guru and Highspot. I used both of these to store the enablement tools and track the usage (downloads, views, etc). I also really like being able to have access to Gong, which enables me to read transcripts and listen back to sales calls. This saves me a lot of time rather than sitting in on sales call to hear how teams are using the sales enablement collateral. From here I can easily make adjustments or understand what messages have been sticking and what has not.

Leveraging Marketing/Sales campaign platforms help as well, as your marketing teams will be sharing your message, content, etc via their email campaigns. BDRs will often use Salesloft to automate their sales emails and you can also track from there what's working and what's not.

When these platforms are not fully available, I've set up Win/Loss analysis and interviews, both internally and then with customers. This helps me again understand what content is working and what's not, how it's been affecting the sales process.

Continuous and consistent meetings with sales teams is crucial and I think PMMs often don't do this enough. Regular syncs with sales leaders will help see what's working and what's not. I think we often meet with Marketing teams since content creation on the demand generation side is much more frequent, but a lot of times I just see Sales enablement being a one and done thing and continuous feedback is crucial to be able to attribute PMM to sales success.