Real-time Content Analytics: The Fix to the Changing Messages of Rapid Growth
Since I joined Seismic in 2015, we have grown from scrappy start-up into Unicorn company. And my role has changed too — having been in sales before my current role in marketing, I understand that from both sales and marketing perspectives, as we grow, our story obviously changes.
Through rapid growth, constant product evolution leads to constant changes and refining of go-to-market strategy. With changes coming quickly, it’s critical to come up with a strategy to actually determine what kind of messaging is working in the field. So while rapid growth is thrilling, to keep it sustainable and to keep your go-to-market teams effective, it takes a program to understand the effectiveness of your new strategies. The key that Seismic has found? Content analytics. Here’s how we’ve done it:
The challenges with scaling
When your company is rapidly growing, changes to go-to-market strategy come fast and furious. These changes could be relatively minor changes that don’t overhaul strategy — shifting focus from segment to industry, or shifting the persona that you are focusing on. But these changes could also be major, changing entire strategies and moving the focus of your sales cycle and sales content to values-based instead of product-focused, as an example. When the market is constantly shifting, or even being defined by your company as you go, these changes are critical to continuing to grow and adapt.
When these changes happen rapidly, there can be a lag time for marketing to adjust to new audiences, new messaging, and new goals. And the longer that it takes for marketing to catch up, the more intensive the process for change will be down the line. Without the right channels to transfer knowledge and keep the entire go-to-market engine informed on changes, marketing won’t understand changes in strategy or be able to scale their content creation to match new needs. As a result, sales is often missing the right kind of context for their new messaging and why it’s valuable.
So it’s critical for organizations to implement the right kind of processes to make sure sales and marketing are always up to date with the right sales messages, the content that is the most effective, and the shifts in overall go-to-market strategy.
Measuring success — how to find the right analytics
Rapid growth means rapid change — your product has a new capability, a new industry becomes relevant, a new message becomes most effective. Rapid change means that it’s even more critical to understand the value of your content.
I’ve observed that organizations across industries all judge their launches on the exact same metrics: marketing/digital engagement, and revenue. The major problem with these metrics is that they don’t provide you with real-time feedback on how buyers are responding to your new offering. And when your average sales cycle is over three months long, you’re stuck waiting three months to understand if your go-to-market plan was a success.
So how does understanding the use and value of content change this? When we at Seismic launched a new product feature about two years ago, we were prepared. Our communication was carefully orchestrated, training completed, and sellers were delivered a package of content to educate buyers on the new offering. Instead of waiting three months, we were able to start measuring the success of the launch within days.
We had the ability to immediately analyze data around sales rep engagement and usage of sales content from our new offering. Taking it a step further, we were able to see how buyers were engaging with that content throughout their buying journey. This insight allowed us to get real-time feedback on how the offering was being received.
The importance of real-time feedback
This real-time feedback allowed us to fix messaging misalignment immediately, instead of having to wait until the end of the sales cycle. After finding a drop-off in content engagement in one specific vertical, we discovered that the messaging was misaligned to the specific persona. Once we tweaked the messaging, content usage and engagement went up, and the first two new business clients to adopt the new offering, less than six months after launch, were from that initially struggling vertical.
Imagine if we didn’t get that insight and make that adjustment early on. All of the time, money, and resources that went into building and launching that new offering would have been wasted. The difference between making an adjustment one month into launch vs. six can equate to millions. Understanding content usage and success within the context that it is used as an indicator of go-to-market efficiency and performance is a necessity for fast growing organizations today. You can’t afford to waste time and resources or miss the mark.
Similar situations happen at a smaller scale all the time: From responding to competitive threats to targeting new personas and industries, rapid growth necessitates rapid changes, and getting the right insights as soon as possible can allow you to improve and refine your messaging right when it needs to be improved.
Every aspect of your go-to-market can benefit from the insight gathered on your sales content. With this information, you can rapidly adjust to the needs of new messaging and new strategy in rapid growth.
