Why you should monitor the consumption of your marketing collateral

How are you creating your marketing content? Have you a great idea of your target market and

their buying process so that you can spit out collateral that is relevant to each stage of their

buying cycle without blinking an eye? Have you gone to a third party like the Persona Institute

(shameless plug) to learn how to create personas and hold persona interviews with your clients,

prospects and those potential clients who said “no” during their buying process? Oh yeah, have

you approached your customer facing team (sales) to gain an understanding as to what they hear

from prospects on a day-to-day basis and discover which pieces of marketing generated

collateral they use? Maybe your sales people are not using anything that marketing has created

because they are making deals using self-generated collateral.

Monitoring your marketing collateral consumption will lead to apportioning your time to

creating and enhancing collateral that is being used (collateral that is working) instead of

spending your time on material that is not being consumed (collateral that is not working) by

sales. What if you could tell which collateral your BEST sellers were using? With this

information you could facilitate a conversation with those sellers to find out why they are using

particular pieces and in which part of the prospect’s buying cycle they use those pieces. Hey,

what would happen if you leveraged that learned information and collateral practice across your

entire sales team?

One way to gather this pirated collateral from your sales team is to ask for it. I’m sure it will

shiver your timbers a time or two when you start scavenging those adrift pieces of collateral but

the booty you are going to gain will be well worth it. Do not however, limit this harpooning of

hand-crafted collateral to just sales sheets & product overview pieces, ask for prospecting emails,

cold call scripts, etc. While you’re at it, approach internal subject matter experts from

operations, pre-sales, thought leaders and your C-suite for this type collateral as well, especially

asking for insights that might only live in their heads. You know have a treasure chest of

information from the front line & internal subject matter experts in which to help steer you in the

right direction when creating your next customer facing marketing piece.