Shyna Zhang
Director of Product Marketing
Identifying what drives return on investment is just as crucial as increasing it for product marketing leaders.
These professionals are not only responsible for creating content and ensuring customer-facing teams don’t share outdated, off-brand collateral, but understanding where and how content should be used in the buyer journey and its effectiveness in closing deals.
In this way, product marketing plays a key role in sales enablement – the act of empowering customer-facing teams with the content, tools, knowledge, skills and coaching required to optimize buyer interactions.
As highlighted in our new eBook, “No more half measures: How to identify and maximize sales enablement ROI,” the combination of sales enablement strategy and technology can help product marketing directors drive hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.
But product marketing leaders need both quantitative and qualitative metrics to prove impact and make data-driven, strategic content investment decisions. Recognizing both the quantifiable and unquantifiable ROI of sales enablement allows product marketing directors to analyze and adopt all its potential benefits.
Quantifiable sales enablement ROI for a product marketing director
Despite its direct impact on available resources, 28.1% of organizations don’t know how much they invest in content, according to CSO Insights’ “Fifth Annual Sales Enablement Study.”
In fact, the same study revealed a majority of organizations take a random approach to developing and implementing their content strategies, which contributes to below-average win rates among salespeople.
When you consider the lack of resources and limited bandwidth product marketers face every day, it’s clear this is a missed opportunity.
A comprehensive sales enablement strategy powered by technology is proven to boost marketer productivity, increasing time- and money-savings related to creating and managing content as well as empowering product marketing directors to prioritize their efforts based on content usage and revenue impact.
The improvements in both efficiency and effectiveness can be measured using key performance indicators such as:
- Time spent creating sales content
- Time spent managing sales content
- Content usage rates among sellers
- Content usage rates among buyers
- Middle-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel revenue attribution
Yet while metrics measuring time expenditure and financial impact are important for product marketing, sales enablement provides less tangible but equally valuable advantages.
Unquantifiable sales enablement ROI for a product marketing director
Product marketers are eager to have more influence within their organizations, and nowhere is that more clear than when it comes to how content is accessed and utilized by sellers.
Developing compelling messaging and sales collateral that accurately reflects customers’ pain points and priorities is only half the battle. Improving oversight of how content is used and the ways in which messaging is applied are essential to supporting effective content usage and preventing messaging inconsistencies.
The tools and tactics sellers use to engage buyers can also be used by product marketers to manage what content is made available to and shared by salespeople, providing insights into how content is used by sellers and received by buyers. This information can then be used to inform and optimize future plans, giving product marketers greater control over the creation and execution of content strategies while supporting superior buyer experience at scale.
Without this oversight, organizations risk erratic sales processes and wasted budgets. Sixty-five percent of sales reps struggle to find content to send to prospects, according to “A Marketer’s Guide to Sales Enablement” from Kapost, opening the door to them using unapproved, off-brand assets.
In fact, data from CSO Insights showed sellers create approximately one-fifth of their own content from scratch, increasing the chance of compliance issues while decreasing active selling time. Meanwhile, as SiriusDecisions reported, 60% to 70% of B2B content goes unused.
While greater control over content and messaging isn’t as easy to measure as increases in productivity, the rewards companies stand to reap are substantial.
CSO Insights illustrated how organizations that develop and implement a content strategy as part of a sales enablement function have 18.1% better quota attainment and 27.1% better win rates than those that don’t.
Assessing sales enablement ROI as a product marketing director
Sales enablement addresses the common challenges of product marketing directors, empowering them to optimize content creation, prove the financial impact of their work and make more efficient use of their time and budget.
But it also helps them keep sellers on brand and on message, supporting a cohesive strategy that is more likely to drive results and deliver a better buyer experience.
And just like that, the ROI of sales enablement is measured in more than common KPIs – it’s evaluated based on how it empowers organizations to evolve for the better.
Download our new eBook, “No more half measures: How to identify and maximize sales enablement ROI,” to see how product marketing directors can boost favorable outcomes and ultimately deliver the best buyer experience possible alongside other key business functions.
