What Is a Content Management System?

What is Sales Content Management?

Effective sales content management allows salespeople and sales teams to find relevant content in a quick and efficient manner. Sales content management plays a vital role in the success of any sales enablement strategy and sales enablement platforms help to automate certain content management processes.

Why is sales content management important?

In a recent study by XANT, the average sales rep spends 64.8% time on non-revenue generating activities such as content management. Organizations who incorporate effective content management within their sales process can reap huge performance benefits such as improved productivity and time management, increased content adoption, improved lead conversion, and more! Furthermore, organizations with sales content management not only experience productivity gains, but also tend to be more aligned with their marketing teams who supply the content.

Enhanced productivity of your team – A key function of sales content management is consolidating all sales collateral into one easy-to-access place. In fact, sales content management drastically reduces the amount of time salespeople spend looking for sales materials, as well as the time managers spend trying to take inventory of sales materials and keeping it up to date.Increased effectiveness & shorter sales cycles – Sales content management systems helps salespeople find the most relevant content to their selling situation. Salespeople are able to easily find content based on the buyer persona they are engaged with during each step of the sales cycle, providing prospects with a much more personalized sales message and experience.Better content visibility & usage – SiriusDecisions has noted that 60-70% of B2B sales content goes unused. Sales content management systems ensure that all content has an opportunity to be seen and utilized by sales. If the content management system is in place and continues to go unused, this is a signal to marketing that they may need to tweak their content strategy to create content that is more relevant to what their sales team needs.How to improve your sales content management

The first step to improve your sales content management is to come up with a gameplan. Consider the level you want your sales content management to be at, and if additional resources are needed to get there. Implementing a sales content management system could be very beneficial to your organization, but it is important to determine your needs and evaluate all the vendors before making a decision. Consider the five A’s when making the decision of incorporating sales content management into your sales enablement strategy.

Ask your sales team

Sit down with your sales team to determine what sales collateral they feel is effective, and what sales content needs to be improved /updated. Ask about their ability to find, access, and share content with prospects. While meeting with your sales team, take this opportunity to discuss aspects of your content strategy and what they think needs to be improved upon.

You may find that some of the ‘popular’ or frequently used sales content that your sales team uses are either outdated or off-message. Additionally, if your sales team can’t find what they are looking for they may also take matters into their own hands, and create their own content that is off-brand and not marketing approved. Speaking with your sales team is a great opportunity to improve your content strategy before you implement a sales content management system.

Assess your current sales collateral

Before you go and create a bunch of new sales collateral for your sales content management system, it is important to see what you already have. Take a look at all of your existing sales content and determine what is still useful, what can be updated

and improved, and what should be scrapped. You should also determine if you have enough content and assets for each step of the sales cycle and for each buyer persona that your team sells to. From there, you can work with your sales team to create content to fill in the gaps.

Aggregate your content

scattered across a vast number of different repositories and portals. If you notice that your content is scattered, consolidate it in one place and organize it into categories or sales taxonomy that make sense to your sales team and the way they sell.

Assimilate/Integrate with your CRM

Salespeople spend more time in Customer Relationship Management systems (CRMs) than any other software. Since sales teams engage with CRMs regularly throughout their day, inciting them to utilize your sales content on the same platform is an

easy way to motivate your teams to utilize your sales collateral. Integrating your sales content management system with your CRM will give your sales team access to content right within their workflow increasing content adoption/usage and improving sales performance.

Activate content tracking and analytics

Do you find yourself churning out a bunch of sales content without any way to track its usage or effectiveness? By implementing content tracking and analytics you can boost your productivity and efficiency by using insights from real-time data on how your sales content is being utilized. You can gather usage data to create custom reports that provide insights on how your sales team is using the content and your salespeople will be able to see how prospects are interacting with the content that has been shared with them. From there, you can you this data to tweak your content strategy moving forward.

What is a Content Management System?

The CMS is the central hub where all of a business’s content lives and is the engine that drives all content marketing efforts — making it instrumental not only to marketing’s success but to the success of the entire organization.

From a marketing user’s perspective, a content management system is an interface that enables non-technical users to interact with a website’s codebase to manage content and complete other marketing actions.

Marketers most often interact with the CMS in the administration panel or “dashboard,” which is why choosing a CMS is often based on how easy this panel is to use. From this panel, a marketing professional should have access to crucial content management features such as content creation, preview, and publishing; content reviewing and approval flows; content versioning; asset management; and more.

As you can see, using a modern CMS is easier for marketers than the alternative — interacting directly with your database to source the necessary images, videos, and other assets then creating and uploading an HTML content file to your web server.

7 Must-Have CMS Features

A CMS can provide many valuable tools for your web development projects. Creating dynamic websites with a CMS can require some specific features, however. Here are seven essential elements to look for in any CMS.

1. Security

While a CMS has almost infinite utility, it can also easily cause you some security issues. This is mostly due to the interactions taking place between the system and web browsers, along with plugins and themes that add third-party code to your site.

To help combat this, WordPress has initiated automatic background updates for minor releases. This improves the update process for users and means that maintenance and security improvements don’t lapse and cause unnecessary vulnerabilities. Whatever CMS you’re using, you’ll want to check its security options to ensure that you have the protection you need.

2. Multilingual Functionality

You may have heard the term “localization” used in reference to making your website translation-ready. This is a process handled in your CMS and database, which makes it possible for you to offer your site in different languages.

3. Content Distribution Options

To find out what other options are available, you’ll want to look into the Application Programming Interface (API) capability of your chosen CMS. This is a component that enables your database and CMS to distribute content to endpoints such as mobile apps, social networks, smart devices, and more.

Related: Keep Your Content Marketing Fresh by Repurposing Old Blog Posts4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)Related: Take Your Content Strategy Up a Level with a Content Audit5. Support Options

Many of the CMS options we’ve listed are open source. This means their base code is available for free. There are ups and downs to this type of software. One key benefit of using an open-source platform is that there is usually a robust user community that supports the CMS’ development.

For example, WordPress has a very active global support community. Knowledge bases and web forums are plentiful if you have questions. Alternatively, if you want a more dedicated support option, you can hire web managers or look for a web host that can fully manage your website’s needs.

6. Responsive Design

It’s also smart to get a firm grip on the differences between mobile-friendly, mobile-optimized, and RWD. You’ll want to look at how adaptable any given CMS’ available themes are, and whether you can manipulate your Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to set responsive breakpoints.

7. Seamless Integrations

We mentioned APIs earlier, but it’s worth revisiting them here. A CMS solution with a robust API means you’ll be able to connect your content to many different applications. This includes social media platforms, mobile devices, and more.

You’ll also want to look at how open your CMS’ API is. For example, WordPress continually adds new actions, hooks, and filters to its API. This opens up ways for developers to leverage the CMS for more than just placing content on a web page.

Related: How to Build an Awesome Ecommerce Store with the OceanWP ThemeWhat Are Examples of Content Management Systems?

As you begin to dive into content management systems, you’ll soon learn that there are quite a few options on the market. While we’re not going to cover all of them in this article, we are going to look at the four most popular solutions.

1. WordPress

When the average person thinks about WordPress, they often make the mistake of thinking that it’s a simple personal blogging platform, rather than a full content management system that can handle even enterprise-level e-commerce sites. While the WordPress platform definitely did earn its initial fame as a straight-forward blogging tool, it has long since become a powerful content management system. WordPress is the CMS that runs literally millions of websites.

Creating in WordPress requires basically zero prior web development experience. Almost anyone with a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and internet connection can install it, start building a site and begin adding features and content within a few minutes. The huge number of design themes and plugins available also makes WordPress stand out from competing for CMS solutions.

There are, however, some negatives to using the popular platform. For example, even though the core is highly secure, because of its popularity it’s a target for frequent hackers and bot attacks. Themes and plugins that are poorly coded will also bring additional security vulnerabilities to your site.

All things considered, WordPress is a wise choice for both newcomers and experts alike. WordPress remains a simple (but powerful!) content management system solution that will offer you a ton of power and control over your website, especially once you start looking under the hood.

And remember, WordPress is completely free to download and doesn’t even try to sell you any premium options. Beyond that, a lot of website hosts provide a pre-installed or one-click install WordPress option, such as with Liquid Web Managed WordPress Hosting.

2. Joomla!

The platform has cultivated a large community of users that create themes and extensions that work to bolster the functionality of Joomla! Joomla! may be an option for website developers that can’t find the level of control they want in the WordPress environment.

Most Joomla! users are running highly professional business sites with large development teams working behind the scenes. It’s probably not the best option if you’re just starting out or if you’re working alone.

3. Drupal

Drupal was first released in 2001 and is far and away the most advanced content management system on our list in terms of technical demands. It’s an ideal solution for skilled developers that want complete control over the sites they build while receiving little technical guidance.

As you’ve probably guessed, Drupal is most suited for ambitious, highly advanced sites. It’s extremely versatile and allows developers to create nearly any kind of website they want, with almost zero limitations.

4. Magento

If you’re not building an e-commerce site, Magento isn’t for you. But if you are, it’s worth comparing side-by-side with WooCommerce for WordPress. If nothing else, it may convince you that WordPress is going to give you more overall customization abilities than Magento.

What Is the Best Content Management System?

Need even more reasons to check out WordPress? Check out this in-depth article on the 15 reasons why WordPress is such a great solution for websites of all shapes and sizes, from small personal blogs to enterprise e-commerce solutions.

Now that you have a better understanding of content management systems, which one is the best one for your project? Why not start working on your project today by installing the WordPress content management system on your chosen host? Your completed new website may be just a few days away!

Kristen has been writing tutorials to help WordPress users since 2011. As marketing director here at iThemes, she’s dedicated to helping you find the best ways to build, manage, and maintain effective WordPress websites. Kristen also enjoys journaling (check out her side project, The Transformation Year!), hiking and camping, step aerobics, cooking, and daily adventures with her family, hoping to live a more present life.

Resources:

https://www.bigtincan.com/what-is-sales-content-management/
https://www.contentstack.com/cms-guides/what-is-a-content-management-system/
https://www.dreamhost.com/academy/what-is-a-content-management-system/
https://ithemes.com/blog/content-management-system/