Content Effectiveness Benchmark Report

Introduction

Content is a nexus between the sales and marketing functions in most organizations. The traditional content model calls for marketing to produce content assets and sales to use them. Having this model work well requires a great deal of intentionality on the part of both functions: marketing must endeavor to understand customer content needs and how well the assets they produce engages those customers. Then, the sales team must diligently provide feedback to marketing so that content quality and effectiveness rises.

While this model is conceptually simple, there are challenges related to alignment that impact content effectiveness in the form of visibility, communications, feedback, process, tools and even culture. The statistics tell the story: when the level of sales/marketing alignment is high, 81% of study participants report that marketing content meets sales’ needs well. However, when alignment is poor or non-existent, the content effectiveness percentage drops to 35%.

Quality content that is easy for sales to find and use is a critical success factor in sales interactions. The dynamics of the content process are not difficult to understand, but the content creation, deployment, usage and feedback loop is often a point of friction between sales and marketing. This friction is not one-sided; marketing is frustrated when it has limited feedback and visibility into the use of content assets. The sales team gets frustrated when content assets don’t meet customers’ need, or those assets are hard to find and use. This frustration is more than just an inconvenience: 70% of sales teams acknowledge that the lack of effective content negatively impacts the outcome of a sales conversation.

Since content is so often the key to successful sales interactions, it merits constant attention and improvement efforts. Demand Metric and Showpad together conducted research to understand the sales-marketing relationship around content, and how it affects sales interactions. This research shares key insights, such as when marketing has little or no visibility into sales conversations, only 32% of the content produced meets the needs of sales team well. This research will help organizations understand how to get better results from their marketing content.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Executive Summary
3. The Content Process
4. Content Process Success Factors
5. Content Use
6. Content Impact on Revenue
7. Analyst Bottom Line
8. Acknowledgements

9. About Showpad
10. About Demand Metric
11. Appendix - Survey Background

Research Methodology

This Impact of Content Effectiveness on Sales and Marketing Benchmark Study survey was administered online during the period of June 4, 2015 through July 6, 2015. During this period, 295 responses were collected, 239 of which were complete enough for inclusion in the analysis. The data was analyzed to identify insightful relationships between variables in the study and to ensure the statistical validity of the findings. The representativeness of these results depends on the similarity of the sample to environments in which this survey data is used for comparison or guidance.