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How to Track Inside Sales Collateral ROI

3 min readApril 26, 2013

Do you know which pieces of marketing collateral are helping your inside sales reps close deals? Heck, do you know which collateral is even being used?

Sales collateral TrackingAccording to a recent survey from research firm ITSMA, businesses spend more of their budget on creating sales collateral than on any other marketing category. That’s right – brands are spending more creating datasheets, whitepapers, presentations, proposals and other marketing content than social media, PR, or even advertising.

Inside sales collateral is intended to enable reps to close more deals, yet as much as 90% of marketing collateral goes unused. To put it plainly, if you’re not tracking every piece of marketing collateral, you are most likely wasting a significant portion of your marketing spend.

The good news is that  by using Salesforce.com with a call tracking solution, it’s easier than it has ever been to track every piece of marketing collateral and know which efforts are truly driving sales.

Salesforce.com Content Library

With Salesforce.com, marketers can easily share content with sales reps. You can store all of your marketing collateral in a single location. Since the content is stored in the cloud, sales reps can access it from anywhere, including on mobile devices. Marketers simply upload content to Salesforce.com’s content library. Sales reps can then download collateral to help them close deals. Reps can do a search for specific content or Salesforce.com can even recommend content to sales reps that has worked in similar deals with a single click. Reps can sort through their content library based on document type, tags, or get more granular and search by industry, product or competitors in order to find content that’s most useful. Reps can then rate content based on how useful it is in closing deals.

Marketers benefit as well. They can see which content received the highest rating from sales reps as well as which content was downloaded most. This is helpful for two reasons. First, it shows marketers the content that is driving ROI so that they can plan similar content efforts. Secondly, it can inspire dialog between Sales and Marketing. Marketers can speak with inside sales managers to find out why certain content isn’t being used.

Using Call Tracking with Marketing Collateral

While a CRM can show you which content was used by sales reps during won opportunities, it still doesn’t guarantee that a piece of collateral truly impacted a sale. However there is one sure-fire way to quantify marketing collateral ROI. By provisioning a unique call tracking number and then attaching that number to a piece of marketing collateral, you can see which piece of content a lead saw before calling. Through the power of CRM integration, you can extend that visibility to know how content impacts the bottom line. For example, imagine that you provision unique numbers for a YouTube video, a whitepaper and a slide deck. After a month, you might notice that the more expensive YouTube video is driving much less revenue than a cheaper whitepaper. Going forward, you might therefore decide to create more whitepapers and fewer videos.

As a marketer, I know firsthand how much effort can go into creating those pretty infographics, videos, whitepapers and decks. However, during my tenure as an inside sales rep, I saw marketers spend a lot of resources on collateral that didn’t actually help me sell. That’s why it’s so important to track which collateral actually enable sales.