What Sales Trainers Can Learn from Snapchat

In the next couple of blog posts, I’ll be helping sales trainers better understand why their team isn’t leveraging the sales enablement content that has been built just for them. The first answer is that the content might be out of date.

Last month, Snapchat—a company built on content that disappears within seconds—was valued at $15 billion dollars. That valuation isn’t as crazy as it sounds: Snapchat has seen staggering growth, with a reported 700 million “snaps” shared each day last year. Snapchat’s rise is just the latest sign that we need up-to-date information faster that ever, and are losing patience with anything else.

When it comes to your sales content, that same expectation holds true. Your sales team expects (and relies on) up-to-date information to do their job. Whether it’s accurate product specs or the right medical terms, if they don’t trust your content, odds are they’ll turn elsewhere. 

Of course, keeping everything up-to-date is easier said than done; sometimes, it can feel like you’re playing Whack-a-Mole with your content. Here are three tips for bringing your content management processes up to date so you can make sure you’re reps always have the latest information.

1. Share your content in the cloud.

While the shelf-life of knowledge plummets, most sales training and marketing teams are still printing reams of sales enablement material. Print content is out of date as soon as it leaves the printer; it might as well be etched in stone in today’s digital age. 

Print content is out of date as soon as it leaves the printer; it might as well be etched in stone in today’s digital age. 

The solution is to distribute your content through the cloud. Find a platform that allows you to update content in a single location and instantly push it to every device. Make sure your sales team doesn’t have to jump through hoops like complicated sign-up processes or different software packages for different devices. Give them a cloud-driven content solution that just works.

2. Install a content development process that gives your sales team a seat at the table.

Today’s top companies are realizing that sales needs a seat on the leadership team because they know the customer better than anyone else. Sales can call B.S. on internal groupthink about the greatness of your latest product feature—or your latest sales enablement content.

Set aside time to regularly meet with your sales team and listen to what they say they need. Find the most vocal thought leaders on the sales team and invite them to collaborate with you in the early stages of outlining new materials. If you’re using a cloud-based publishing platform, invite these leaders to review drafts of the content or even contribute to it directly.

3. Track your content’s usage.

There’s an old management adage “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” That goes for sales enablement content as well. 

Do you measure which pieces of collateral are being used most often? Do you know where Sales has found a gap in your materials? Do you track how long it’s taking your team to find the data they’re looking for? It’s questions like these that will help you make the right updates and keep your content fresh. 

If you’re printing your content, the answer to most of these questions is almost certainly “no.” If you’re distributing via an LMS, the answer is likely “sort-of.” Only when you can say “yes”—by tracking every pageview—can you start doubling down on what works and deprecating what doesn’t. Look for a content platform that gives you the analytics you need and feeds them all the way back to your authoring system so you can take action quickly.

The end-product: sales enablement content that updates at the speed of a snap

Your sales team’s tolerance for out-of-date content is waning, and the time it takes for content to go out of date is decreasing on a daily basis. You won’t be able to ride this wave of transition with process alone—find a platform that lets you update your sales enablement content at the speed of a snap. 

Once you’ve made sure your content is current, you can tackle the second reason your sales team isn’t using your content—it’s too hard to find—which I’ll cover in my next post.