Sam Davis, Customer Success Manager

Sam’s been a CSM at Outreach for the past 3 years where she’s worked with a variety of customers ranging in size and industry. Before joining the Outreach team, she used Outreach as a sales rep. Being an early adopter of Outreach, she quickly gained a passion for the Outreach platform and mission of the company. The best part of her job is helping customers unlock success through fine-tuning sales engagement strategies. Outside of her career, she enjoys indulging in all the things the PNW has to offer such as great hiking, great music, and great coffee.

Picture this sports analogy:

“Two cars parked side by side. One is a supercar, the other is an old family sedan. Both have the same potential until someone gets into the supercar and drives it flat out. The coach can have the best strategy, but unless it’s driven, its potential means nothing.”

-John Schuh

Much like sports, sales is an intense field that requires strategic playbooks, adaptability, and collaboration to find success. Think of your Outreach content as your team's playbook - the glue that holds everything together. Content is the backbone of your sales strategy and your ticket to amazing ROI. But the playbook can't win the game alone. Without a coach developing the plays and a team to execute them, you'll lose. Content is no different. As your teams' coach, building a first-rate content committee will ensure:

• Clean, consistent, and updated content.
• Increased enablement, adoption, and productivity of reps. 
• Easy reporting and iteration of content leading to increased ROI.

Think of your sales strategy as your supercar in the above analogy and your reps as your drivers. What, then, is your content committee? Your content committee is the frame of your supercar. Without this frame, reps are required to cobble together their own content without the support of a team-wide strategy. This means increased rep ramp time, lower productivity, limited reporting capabilities, and decreased ROI - outcomes that can all be avoided by building your frame.

Building Your Content Committee

By forming a committee, you bring your resources together, streamlining the content creation process and allowing reps to focus on what matters most - selling. The idea behind this committee is to select a group of your best content writers across your organization to create content that resonates with your target audience, allowing you to make data-driven decisions on how best to iterate over time. 

Below is a step-by-step guide for building an all-star content committee. Continuing with our sports analogy...

 1. Go Scouting

The first step in building your all-star team is to identify its members. It's crucial to include writers from different teams and levels to ensure cohesiveness. Your main goal - get better buy-in by covering your bases and choosing representatives from every angle. Common examples of roles/levels we see included are:

• Sales Enablement 
• Sales Management
• Marketing
• Leadership
• Individual Contributor

For all members, choose individuals with strong writing skills and a firm grasp of value propositions and positioning. 

2. Recruit Your Top Picks 

Now that you've identified your members, it’s time to talk about expectations. Establishing clear membership expectations ahead of time makes it easy for your top picks to commit. Consider listing the following expectations:

• Meeting cadence - Meet at least quarterly. It’s crucial members attend regularly. 
• Types of content to be created and reviewed - Identify the Workflows you’ll be using and what types of content will be needed to execute on each (e.g., Sequences, Templates, Snippets, Meeting Types).
• Expectations on how each member will represent their respective team - Crowdsource feedback from teammates prior to committee meetings to identify common requests and needs. Work as a committee to determine what content will address these needs and support a more efficient Workflow.
• Establish a structure to review content and identify gaps - Organize your content and standardize your reviewal process.
• Appoint an arbiter of good (AKA Content Curator) - As with every good sports team, you need a coach to call the plays at the end of the day. Nominate a member who will accept or reject the final content that goes live in Outreach.

3. Keep Your Eye On the Prize

Putting a content committee in place to develop and deliver amazing content is just the beginning. Auditing and iterating on this content over time is where the magic happens. Discover how to build, audit, and measure the success of your content in our Strategy Spotlight article, Sequences - Creating the Engine for Your Playbook. 

And there you have it, the step-by-step process for building your all-star content committee. But once you’ve built your committee, what do you tackle first? This will vary depending on the answer to one simple question - is there too much content in your Outreach instance or not enough? Stay tuned for upcoming articles that will act as your guide when answering this question. Until then, you’re in the drivers seat and I can’t wait to see the committee your team builds!

Want to learn more about creating content? Sign-up for our Content 2.0 university course and learn how defining Outreach Workflows will help you strategize which content to build in our Ebook and Workflows support section.

What’s next? Stay up to date on the latest and greatest articles by clicking the Follow > New articles button here. We'll send you an email reminder when our CSMs add new content that you won't want to miss.  And as always, visit Outreach University, Support Portal, or contact our Professional Services team to get the most out of Outreach!