A sales content audit is a thorough examination of every piece of sales content for your business, whether it is on your website or in a Google Drive folder.

Assets that aid your sales team in closing deals are the primary focus of the sales content audit. This is not the same as a content marketing audit, which focuses on bringing in new customers. Performing an audit of your sales content ensures that your sales team is prepared to assist prospects at any point in the sales funnel.

To keep the conversation moving forward, salespeople must have the right content at the right time.

A content audit can help you identify the resources your sales team needs to succeed. It’s important to know what your sales team needs and set goals for your efforts before you start. This is a crucial step in the process that is frequently skipped, which can result in misalignments and wasted efforts later.

Understanding the Needs of Your Sales Team 

Sending short surveys is one of the best ways to reach your sales team. Your audit can benefit from insightful responses to questions about accuracy, conversion, and organization of the content. Additionally, you will receive feedback on the areas of the sales funnel that require more content to cover.

Your sales team might want to know:

• Are sales materials well-organized and simple to locate?
• Which documents do you frequently use?
• Which materials result in conversions?
• Which documents are incorrect or out-of-date?
• Which pieces of content have useful information but don’t do well in terms of conversion?
• What kinds of materials are typically sent together?
• With new content, what questions must we answer?
• Is there any room for improvement in the buyer’s journey with the addition of new content?

You can use this sales content audit survey template right now.

Setting Objectives for Your Sales Content Audit 

By setting objectives for your audit, you can maintain your focus on sales enablement.

Realizing where clients drop off or which pages don’t convert will assist you with making content that resonates with your audience. To ensure that an audit is a worthwhile use of resources, always tie your audit objectives to your primary business objectives.

Your key performance indicators (KPIs) need to match the improvement you want to see with your sales team because sales content goals are frequently distinct from marketing content goals (such as those found in SEMRush). 

Sales and marketing will collaborate closely on this at the best companies, but sales will still use the assets differently (more bottom-of-funnel, less top-of-funnel).

Accuracy and consistency in content are two excellent reasons to conduct a content audit.

You can prioritize updating outdated information by reviewing every piece of content to ensure that customers are aware of the most recent information about your product or service. You could also concentrate on making the content better for a particular part of the sales process where customers are more likely to leave.

Defining goals that will have an effect on your bottom line and enable your sales team to thrive can be made easier when you are clear on what would help your sales team succeed. It’s time to start gathering your existing content for review once you’ve established your audit’s clear objectives.

Putting Together a Sales Content Inventory 

The first step in a successful content audit is to take a look at all of your sales collateral. Your sales team is utilizing a wide assortment of resources to lead possibilities through the channel, so it’s essential to survey each piece of content your outreach group can send your direction.

The majority of salespeople have their own versions of deliverables or old assets stored away in their own drives. Those give a great idea of what might be working and how off-brand products might be selling.

By requesting a list of marketing assets from their audit, you can simplify a portion of the inventory process if your marketing team already conducts regular website audits.

A lot of marketing content audits only look at content that is visible to the public, like blog posts and website content. However, these reviews may overlook the decks and battlecards that your sales team sends out and uses internally. Therefore, the marketing content audit will not cover everything you require.

While classifying your assets, it’s critical to search in each channel and folder for value. One-pagers, videos, ebooks, whitepapers, case studies, battlecards, presentations, webinars, and other materials can be found all over the place.

Don’t forget to include internal documents like talking points or sales support documents in your sales content library while you’re noting the content that your sales team sends out.

The assets that need to be created, updated, or retired can be shown to you when you have a comprehensive view of the top sales enablement tools that your sales team has at their disposal. Every piece of content that your sales team may use is recorded in this first audit step, allowing you to evaluate their effectiveness.

You will need to organize your content and make use of the feedback from your sales survey once you have located all of your content. You can then find content gaps and get a comprehensive view of how your content is performing.

Organizing Your Existing Content 

With your goals in mind, you can make a content map that explains each piece of content in detail, including the relevant funnel stage, personas / ideal customer profile, and vertical focus.

With simple filtering, you can quickly see which audiences aren’t getting your content or where you can combine content pieces to make the sales process go more smoothly.

Using a template for a sales content inventory spreadsheet can help you get started quickly with the content map if you’re just starting out. This way, you don’t have to figure out all the information you need to capture. Consider these ideas for using the template:

• Dive into every folder and data centre where content is stored and include that in the template
• Start putting your content together by asset type. Create a category for each piece of content, such as ebooks, webinars, blogs, and so on
• Now, update each piece’s funnel stage column. Update the target audience, the channel or sharing format, and the industry it is written for
• Then, you can include keywords to see more information about the content and any overlaps

Last but not least, as you look over each piece of content, assign a score based on its effectiveness, correctness, use, conversion success, and other relevant business needs.

These scores can assist you with figuring out which materials can be resigned, which should be overhauled to fit the ongoing brand or item emphasis, and what parts are performing best.

You can accurately score your content by interviewing your sales team about the content they use.

To organize and better use your sales materials there are many technologies you can use. Check out this list of top sales enablement tools.