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Popular sales enablement content like sales playbooks, battle cards, and case studies are created for one primary purpose: to give sales reps the answers they need when engaging with prospects at every stage of the sales pipeline.
This content helps reps quickly respond to prospect questions and close deals faster. But what happens when the amount of available sales assets becomes huge, and they are also poorly organized?
According to Forrester, sales reps deal with an average of 1,400 pieces of sales content over two years. Without proper management, sales reps become overwhelmed by the amount of content they have to choose from–creating a gap between the content that organizations provide for reps and the content they leverage in practice.
If you’re dealing with this problem in your organization, using sales content management software is the best solution. In this article, you’ll learn what a sales CMS is, why you need one, best practices, and the best sales CMS to choose from.
What is Sales Content Management?
Sales Content Management is organizing all the customer-facing sales assets reps need in a single centralized repository so that it's easy to organize, access, update, and send to prospects.
It also involves managing internal sales training content for upskilling reps and reinforcing knowledge. It’s a sales enablement best practice that ensures sales content is available to reps whenever and wherever they need it.
Maintaining an effective sales content management strategy brings structure to how reps interact with available sales assets. It ensures relevant content is delivered to the right people at the right time, keeping prospects well-informed and engaged as they move through the sales pipeline.
What is a Sales Content Management System?
A sales content management system is an intuitive software designed to automate organizing and giving access to sales content. Beyond accessibility, sales CMS provides in-context recommendations to sales reps to help them effectively utilize sales content in real-world situations.
The sales assets found in CMS are:
- External materials: Customer-facing content for all sales cycle stages. Includes webinars, infographics, blog posts, etc.
- Internal materials: These are resources for sales reps to help them sell efficiently. Includes battle cards, playbooks, sales scripts, etc.
- Onboarding materials: Maintaining onboarding resources like intro videos, product details, and sales process makes bringing new hires up to speed easier.
A robust CMS should come with features, tools, and resources that optimize your content management strategy and enable you to train reps, analyze sales content performance, and even quantify the ROI of sales assets.
Best Sales Content Management Systems & Software
Let’s look at some of the best sales content management systems on the market:
1. Spekit
Spekit is a sales content management system designed specifically to enable reps to find and utilize sales content effortlessly. The platform simplifies sales content management, making it easy to access content, monitor content usage, upload and organize content, and more.
Enablement teams can use Spekit AI to equip sales representatives with the right content to close deals with prospects. Spekit AI is a new intuitive feature that enables enablement teams and sales representatives to automatically generate, summarize, and implement content, sales playbooks, scripts, content, and more. The AI-powered tool can also analyze the context of sales interactions to surface the right content, at the right time.
Spekit brings content wherever your reps need it. Whether it's Slack, Salesforce, Outreach, LinkedIn, etc., Spekit embeds guidance, coaching, training, and answers within these platforms so reps can access content on the go or new sales materials without disrupting their productivity.
With Spekit, you’re not just offering your sales reps a smart way to work–you’re also giving them smart content to work with. After centralizing your sales assets on the Spekit content management platform, you can generate unique share links that enable reps to track when buyers interact with sales content so that reps can proactively respond.
Key Features
- SmartSend Buyer Engagement: Generate unique sharable, trackable links in seconds and receive instant notifications when buyers engage with content
- Centralized Content Repository: Upload and organize content in a few clicks and automate accessibility for any tool or workflow
- Simplified Content Management: Easily manage and organize PDF or PPTX files, edit custom fields, and user permissions
- Spekit AI: AI-powered content creation to help you create bite-sized sales content in seconds via whichever platform you’re working on
- In-app Alerts: Trigger in-app alerts to notify teams when new content or time-sensitive updates drop
- Skill Reinforcement: Deliver real-time sales playbooks and content sales reps need to close deals when and where they need it
2. Seismic
Seismic is an enablement cloud platform designed to enable sales reps to discover the right sales material using in-app and context recommendations. Users can send out customized and personalized content en-masse while maintaining compliance. Seismic also offers a digital sales room where buyers and sellers can communicate and collaborate. It integrates with other enablement tools like CRMs, email, and content authoring tools.
Key Features
- AI-powered in-app search and in-context recommendations
- Automate content production and customization
- LiveDocs for personalizing content and presentations
- AI-generated action items for follow-ups
3. Highspot
Highspot is an AI-powered sales CMS that enables users to centralize, upload, organize, and merchandise content on a single platform. It is designed to help sales teams share personalized content with buyers and for marketing teams to track key content strategy metrics.
The platform syncs content and metadata from existing DAMs into a centralized location. Highspot integrates with Google Drive, Slack, and Salesforce.
Key Features
- Scaled content audits
- Rules-based content recommendations in CRM workflow
- AI-powered search, browse, and filter
- Usage policy enforcement and content approval
4. Showpad
Showpad is an enablement operating system built for sales and marketing teams. It allows users to organize content by topic, buyer persona, and stage of the buyer journey. Its guided selling feature enables sellers to formulate a selling blueprint based on predefined processes and buyer insights.
Showpad has coaching and training tools for upskilling sellers and driving skill retention. The platform offers content, seller, and engagement analytics.
Key Features
- Sales content performance analytics
- Synchronized content and metadata across systems
- Content governance tool for ensuring compliance
- Built-in content approval workflows
5. HubSpot
Hubspot provides a CMS hub for marketers, developers, and IT teams. This platform offers developer tools that enable users to build customized content websites that can be accessed on any device.
Hubspot users can access SEO recommendations and A/B testing to test variations of their content to see which works best. It also has premium cloud hosting solutions and a multiple website management tool.
Key Features
- Drag and drop website builder
- SEO recommendations
- A/B testing for content pages
- 24/7 enterprise-class security
6. Paperflite
Paperflite is a generative AI-powered CMS that offers content discovery, engagement, and revenue intelligence. Its content discovery intelligence is built to help marketing teams know what content and keywords sales teams are searching for.
Its content engagement and revenue intelligence tool enables users to get insights from content usage and ROI from content marketing efforts. Paperflite integrates with Hubspot, MS Dynamics, and Salesloft.
Key Features
- Sales and marketing tech stack integration
- Centralized content library
- Personalized content microsites
- Content discovery, engagement, and ROI intelligence
7. Mindtickle
Mindtickle is a sales readiness platform that enables organizations to provide situation-specific training and marketing content for their sales teams. Teams can deploy DSRs and share customized content with prospects. Its conversation intelligence tool helps prepare reps for engaging with buyers and offers insights into buyer needs.
Mindtickle supports admin work by providing universal version control and content expiration features.
Key Features
- Custom content and daily sales report (DSRs) deployment
- Cross-platform sales content management
- Reinforcement drills and real-world conversation snippets
- Universal version control and content experimentations
8. Bigtincan
Bigtincan is a CMS that provides a single platform for teams to store customer-facing assets. It offers sales teams AI-powered recommendations based on their role and the stage of the buyer journey they fit into.
The platform also has social features that let users create user profiles and share content to RSS feeds or social media. Bigtincan works online and offline on any device and integrates with Gmail, Outlook, Salesforce, and Gong.
Key Features
- 3D, AR, and VR content creation
- Data visualization and analytics
- Online and offline access on any device
- Realtime document automation
Why Sales Content Management is Important
Here’s how effectively managing sales content benefits you:
Productivity & Efficiency
On average, 64.8% of sales reps' time is spent on non-revenue generating activities, reducing productivity. Without a sales CMS, sales reps must dig through different content repositories, looking for the sales material they need. This affects workflow and makes it harder for them to optimize selling to prospects.
Using a sales CMS boosts productivity and efficiency. With easier access to sales assets, reps can spend less time searching for content and can send personalized content to prospects faster.
Accelerated Sales Cycle
Businesses want a shorter sales cycle, and customers want a shorter buying cycle. Effective sales content management helps achieve this goal. A sales CMS makes it easy to ensure that updated content is available throughout the sales cycle. It enables content to be shared once available, contextual sales materials can accompany deals, and prospects get enough information to compare products/features and make faster buying decisions.
Content Usage Management
According to research, only 35% of content assets are actually used. But who is using what sales material, how, and when? Most businesses cannot access this information because tracking content usage across various platforms is hard.
With a great sales CMS, you can organize sales materials according to your sales cycle, making it easy to track what content has been used, what needs updating, and what is no longer relevant.
Sales Content Management Best Practices
Want to ensure your content management efforts are on the right track? Try this:
1. Assess Your Current Sales Content
Assessing current sales content provides insights into how content is used, which is most effective, and the gaps that need to be filled. Over 60% of successful companies perform content audits more than twice yearly.
To avoid sales reps using outdated content or prospects not getting the needed information, you should perform content audits as needed.
2. Track Content Effectiveness
Measuring content effectiveness should be non-negotiable in your organization. Sales content analytics involves tracking metrics like traffic, engagement, conversions, and ROI to determine whether your content strategy works or what areas need adjustment.
Take advantage of your sales CMS analytics and reporting tool to visualize and track metrics easily. You can use a platform like Spekit Analytics to track metrics beyond the surface level. Spekit enables you to turn metrics into easy-to-view informative visuals that enable you to identify patterns in your content strategy results.
3. Make it Easy to Access Content
65% of sales materials in an organization go unused because they are not easily accessible. Making sales materials accessible to reps ensures they have the right material at their fingertips to answer prospects' counter questions and quickly deliver engaging pitches. Enhance accessibility using tools like user permissions, version control, and content tagging.
With Spekit Speks, you can embed bite-sized content directly into whatever platform your sales team works on–Slack, Hubspot, etc. Your reps can quickly surface the needed information without disrupting their workflow or productivity.
Choose the Best Sales Content Management Tool
With a robust sales content management system like Spekit, you can easily centralize your sales materials and put them into measurable action with SmartSend. You will always know what content is used and when prospects engage with it.
Spekit’s CMS is purpose-built to support your sales reps and give them the best experience while they sell. Spekit also easily integrates with your existing tech stacks and works seamlessly with other sales enablement tools like Salesforce, Outreach, Okta, OneLogin, Hubspot, and more.
Ready to learn more about how Spekit can help you optimize your sales content management strategy?
