Strategy Spotlight: Building Your Content Committee - Maintenance and Momentum (Part 2 of 2)

Danny Kisch, Senior Professional Services Consultant Danny Kisch has been championing Outreach for the better part of 5 years, when he originally helped bring the software to one of his previous companies. Since then, he’s managed several sales teams in the greater Seattle area and eventually charted his path to Outreach HQ where he currently serves as a Senior Professional Services Consultant. A proud Texan and Seattle convert, Danny spends his quaran-time playing intense board games and rearranging his apartment for the 27th time.

Andrew Henningsen, Content Consultant An aspiring Whirlyball player and backyard game enthusiast, Andrew (or Henny as he's known internally) is the Content Consultant on our Professional Services team. He's been at Outreach going on 4 years now and was previously a CSM on the SMB and Emerging teams. His favorite Outreach feature is a nice, crisp follow-up sequence.

Welcome to part 2! You’ve identified your core team of content committee members. What’s next? Let’s chat about how to operationalize your committee to keep the momentum going.

If you need a quick refresher on how to assemble a content crew, check out part 1 of this series. 

So you’ve elected to build a Content Committee. Excellent choice! You’ve even begun identifying the key players to involve in this process. You’re on a roll! BUT, that roll comes to a screeching halt when your Director asks for a roadmap to success and you’re not quite sure what to do next...We’ve got you covered!

In this Strategy Spotlight article, we’ll dive into the three core pillars of a successful Content Committee that you can deploy immediately.

Why should you care about Content Committee strategy?

Between the two of us, we’ve clocked a collective six years at Outreach and three things have become absolutely clear to us -- death, taxes, and the chaos/poor adoption that will ensue if end users are put in charge of your overall content strategy.

Content is the single thread that ties together all aspects of your buyer’s journey. Not only is it the first experience many prospects have with your brand, but it’s also the direct manifestation of your sales strategy, responsible for generating your revenue quarter in and quarter out! In other words, the content your reps use every day is the engine driving your bottom line - so it’s important to make sure that engine is running smoothly. 

With that in mind, we’ve found that successful Content Committees have 3 fundamental traits in common:

1. Their leadership has a defined “Charter” with monthly and quarterly objectives
2. There is a prescribed workflow for processing content requests from end users
3. The committee operates with a predictable/methodical communication plan

Let’s dive into what each of those mean.

Content Committee Charter

As with any new initiative, it’s important to understand what your team’s overarching goals are for success. When it comes to content committees, these goals tend to be centered around the following:

• Content Benchmarking and Review
• Content Maintenance and Audits
• Big Picture Strategy Alignment

As your committee begins to take shape, consider how important each of the above items are and at which frequency you’d like to pursue them. As a general rule of thumb, we see the most success with a two-part strategy that is built around a quarterly content audit and a more regular content review session.

Quarterly Audits are the perfect opportunity to ensure that you’re tracking to your Content “North Star”, while bi-weekly or monthly meetups help to keep your content fresh, relevant, and up to code. Each meeting provides a forum for your Committee to either navigate the content ship on the right path, or maintain/upkeep all of the systems and regular content needs.

While the agenda-specifics for these meetings can vary from company to company, the main thing to keep in mind is that your meeting cadence should feel as natural and organic as possible. At the end of the day, if the Committee never meets, it’s a complete waste of time!

Processing Content Requests

Your Committee should already be representative of your sales team and generally able to speak to the team’s content needs (for more info on who to include in your committee, check out our previous article), but it’s also critical to allow for specific and timely feedback from your end users. 

While there are several ways this can be effectively managed, we have found the most success with creating either a consolidated Slack/communication channel (managed by an admin) or leveraging form-submission tools. For example, a Google Form provides a lightweight yet powerful way to collect and capture content ideas from your users without an endless stream of slacks or emails. Below, we’ve included a snapshot of what it could look like. Keep in mind, just because a submission is made, doesn’t mean the content needs to be created -- it is up to the Content Committee to evaluate the priority level of the content and then act accordingly.

Communication Plan

Here’s a hot take for you - if reps can’t find the right content, reps can’t use the right content… and great content that isn’t used, is useless. Beyond that, it’s a waste of your Content Committee’s time, so make sure all of these content releases, updates, and archivals are shared with the users they impact. One best practice we’ve seen is for Content Committees to create a template highlighting those three points and distribute a recap after each session that content is changed. 

As you continue on your journey of implementing your very own Content Committee, make sure to keep these three core principles in mind to set you and your team up for massive content success!

Disclaimer: A Content Committee doesn’t and shouldn’t operate in a vacuum -- what we’ve outlined above is exactly that… an outline! We encourage you to adapt this Committee’s structure and charter to fit your company’s specific needs and culture.

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