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Andrew "Henny" Henningsen, Sr. Professional Services Consultant Henny's Outreach journey started in March 2017. Since that time, he's worked as a Customer Success Manager and content consultant — managing more than 200 customers and Outreach deployments. Henny's part of the "Content Cowboys" partnership, creating Outreach's newly aligned content strategy methodology with Danny Kisch. |
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Danny Kisch, Solutions Architect 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. He has worked in several roles, such as as a Sr. Professional Services Consultant, overseeing close to 100 Outreach deployments. He's part of the "Content Cowboys," a partnership with Andrew Henningsen that led to creating Outreach's newly aligned content strategy methodology. |
Content is one of the most important components of your sales engagement strategy.
Sales reps engage with the Outreach platform through content; plus, content represents your business' image to prospects. In order to ensure long-term success for your Content Strategy, it’s best to periodically evaluate your team’s content requirements and workflow alignment.
As a sales content manager, it's highly recommended to take a closer look at your content strategy if you’ve been using the same sequences, templates, and snippets that you originally launched with. That is also a great indicator that your content strategy might not be as well-developed as you’d like.
[This article is an excerpt from Outreach's Unleash Customer Workshop: "Content Therapy."]
Your content strategy evaluation should start with understanding your team’s current challenges. The below Dunning Kruger Curve can be a helpful aide in gauging your content strategy maturity.
[18:25] Starting at the left, someone in stage 1 is just beginning their journey and is generally filled with optimism but lacks the deeper system knowledge. Stage 2 content strategists tend to find themselves in an overwhelmed state, unsure of how to best wrangle in their growing content portfolio. In stage 3, a system might be in place, and your focus is on ensuring you have strong user adoption. The final stage represents the “expert” level, where the whole sales team is clear on the plan and it's working; now it's time to step back and make sure best practices are in place.
No matter where your strategy falls on the spectrum, just remember there's no "right or wrong." You're simply identifying your stage to inform the path to improvement. Additionally, all stages of development can benefit from addressing the following scenarios, as needed.
Scenario 1: It's Unclear What's Working and What's Not
[24:35] This problem is characterized by too many sequences or rulesets and “stuck” prospects. You may also experience content stagnation or have a lack of data analytics. Moving forward without a clear strategy can result in poor rep adoption, longer onboarding times, and even burning through your high-value leads.
Understand what's working and what's not by:
- Identifying your North Star content strategy
- Reviewing reporting and analytics to identify the best content
- Auditing/reviewing content and archiving the “noise”
Scenario 2: Out of Control Content
[33:34] This can look like nonexistent governance limits, many cloned sequences with almost identical content, and a fear of "bottlenecking" content requests that resulted in allowing too many people to create content. Additionally, a lack of documented workflows and/or ownership translates to confusion and extra work. Continuing down this road can make it impossible to create clear reports or achieve operational excellence.
Fix out-of-control content by:
- Reevaluating your governance model
- Reviewing, reconciling, and aligning your workflows
- Planning for change management, which includes testing, communication and highlighting wins
Scenario 3: Too Much Content to Maintain
[45:36] When you find yourself with simply too much content to maintain, your strategy will go stale. Content development overload is keeping you stuck if your resources are already stretched thin, there are no guidelines for creation in place, or you don't have sufficient budget. Basically, there's no method, only madness.
Improve manageability by:
- Developing a Content Committee or Center of Excellence
- Establishing a schedule for content review and improvements
- Setting benchmarks for performance and measuring them
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