The document discusses how effective marketing content is important for sales productivity but many companies struggle with creating engaging content. It provides five traits that effective content should have: 1) be actionable to generate urgency, 2) be findable so sales reps can quickly access it, 3) be engaging through storytelling formats, 4) be trackable to determine which content is driving sales, and 5) be recyclable to maximize resources. Showpad is presented as a sales enablement solution that allows marketing to organize content and sales to access and track engagement with content to improve future strategies.

1. The use of effective marketing content leads to increased sales productivity. Today, most
customers that sales reps face are educated buyers. These customers consume
whitepapers, case studies, product collateral and reviews before they meet with a sales
rep for the first time. Due to their pre-meeting preparation, educated buyers expect their
exchange with a sales rep to entice them with unique ideas they haven’t yet seen and
solutions relevant to their company’s success. In fact, most customers expect the sales
reps they meet with to be experts, equipped with all relevant product information. To
compete with the educated buyer and increase sales productivity, it is pertinent that sales
reps be equipped with effective and informative marketing content.
Yet, despite the highly important role effective marketing content plays in the selling
game, a Forbes study states that even today 50% of B2B executives view their content as
ineffective and regard their inability to create enough effective content as their biggest
content challenge. Chances are, your team can relate to this struggle. How can this
be solved? It’s actually quite simple. Effective marketing content needs to be: actionable,
findable, engaging, trackable and recyclable. What exactly do we mean by this? We’ll tell
you.
Actionable Content
Content should generate a sense of urgency among prospects. It should challenge them on
the effectiveness of their current methods, encouraging them to explore more efficient
alternatives. By fostering a sense of need among prospects, an opportunity arises for sales
reps to sell their product and emphasize value based on the prospect’s pain points.

2. Findable Content
Content that sales reps cannot quickly access isn’t effective and leads to great
inefficiencies. In fact, sales reps spend about 30 hours each month looking for and
creating content, wasting precious selling time. In order for sales reps to successfully sell,
they must use their time wisely, spending more time selling and less time doing
preparation work. Findable content enables sales reps to access the material they need to
use in their sales conversations and move deals forward. Solutions like Showpad enable
marketing to strategically organize all of their content in one centralized platform. This
provides sales reps easy access to marketing content, equipping them with the
information they need to answer prospect’s questions and prove their product’s value.
Engaging Content
Content must appeal to the customer. It should tell a story and invite the customer to
engage. Avoid the ordinary usage of PDFs, Word documents and pamphlets, as these
aren’t very engaging. Instead, marketing and sales should partner together to create
dynamic content that both sales and customers can interact with. In using alternatives
such as HTML5 files, videos, and sales playbooks, you’ll successfully engage with your
audience, educating them about your product through a story-telling format, custom built
to their specific needs.
Trackable Content
Content is useless unless it proves to capture prospects’ attention and inform them with
the information they need to pursue the sales deal further. But, how do you determine
which content is effective in driving sales? What sales collateral are your reps using to
close deals? Further, what shared content do your customers spend the most time on
digesting post meeting? Content must be trackable. With sales enablement solutions
like Showpad, post meeting interactions with the shared content are tracked, providing
sales reps with actionable follow-up insights and marketing with feedback to use in their
future content creation strategy.
Recyclable Content
Content creation is incredibly resource-intensive. In fact, the CMO Council states that
B2B marketing organizations are now spending more than 25% of their budgets on the

3. development, delivery and promotion of content to drive business leads, influence
customer markets and grow brand presence and authority. To maximize your time and
resources, the most effective type of content should be re-used and re-purposed to create
other forms of sales collateral. Focus on different ways you can recycle your content,
maximizing your resources to drive sales forward.
In closing, to grow, businesses rely on effective content to communicate their product
value and benefits to prospects. CMO’s allocate a large budget annually towards the
production of powerful marketing content, but are often disappointed with the return. To
improve upon your current marketing content strategy and close more sales, content must
be actionable, findable, engaging, trackable and recyclable. By implementing these traits
into your company’s content strategy, sales reps will succeed in creating impactful sales
interactions.
What is Showpad? Showpad is a mobile-first sales enablement solution that gives
marketing control over content and messaging while providing the sales team with
effective material to present and share with prospects. Both sales and prospect’s
interaction with content is tracked and actionable insights are provided to streamline the
entire sales process.