The 2020 pandemic has brought about a lot of change in our lives, especially in the way we communicate with and sell to our customers. Consumers are becoming increasingly educated and empowered, while at the same time more and more inundated with information — from the first time they check their email in the morning, to the last ad they see at night. To successfully cut through all the noise, marketers and sellers face the challenge of consistently delivering high quality, relevant customer experiences at the precise moment buyers need them.
“More than half of business buyers prefer to conduct their pre-purchase research online rather than work with a salesperson.”
Use Rich Media To Drive More B2B Conversions, Forrester Research, Inc., September 3, 2020
To set your sales team up for success, you need to enable your sellers to create an emotional connection with all types of buyers, and help them contextualize how a product brings benefits and solutions to their precise challenges. The fastest way of creating a connection is through rich, interactive media, such as video and 360 images. This is especially true for complex products – the more complex the product, the higher the need for asset enrichment.
“If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how many words is a video worth? We think 1.8 million, which sounds crazy, but when you think about the emotional connection that video can deliver or the nuances that it can demonstrate in product features and functionality, it becomes understandable.”
Use Rich Media To Drive More B2B Conversions, Forrester Research, Inc., September 3, 2020
Authentic storytelling involves bringing meaningful experiences to customers, while building trust with them. From a business perspective, successful sales teams must always be seeking out ways to reduce the cost of selling, while simultaneously maximizing revenue.
Digizuite™ DAM for Sales Enablement for field sellers, resellers, and distributors maximizes every customer interaction by enabling tailored, high impact experiences — all the while ensuring that the team stays brand compliant.
Differentiating the reseller experience
If your company uses resellers, you know the complexity of having this added layer of sales. It can be tricky not only in terms of distributing your products, but also with how you transfer knowledge and ensure that each reseller has the content they need to be successful. The more complex the product, the greater the need for rich media and accurate product descriptions.
“Marketing teams use rich media to tell the brand story, but the feeling often dissipates the closer a buyer gets to the buy button.”
Use Rich Media To Drive More B2B Conversions, Forrester Research, Inc., September 3, 2020
Companies with strong brands tend to have marketing permeate everything — to communicate the brand story throughout the entire product lifecycle. It takes a coordinated effort to communicate your brand to your resellers and beyond. For example, most buyers will do research online before even engaging with a sales representative or even reaching out to the company. The more interactive and engaging content, the better the results. According to Fast Company, 90% of online buyers said they find videos helpful in making decisions.
One way to solve the challenge of connecting resellers to media and branding is to set up portals – a one-stop shop where resellers can log in to access all the information and resources they need to initiate and then facilitate a sale. This self-serve, instant access approach transforms the experience and ease of interaction. Having a portal also allows for a strict governance protocol, in which resellers can be divided into different access groups, e.g. different geographical regions, reseller level or status and types.
The Digizuite™ DAM allows for a portal experience and is built to handle rich media assets, such as videos and 360/3D files. It’s governance structure and configurability makes it an excellent fit for any enterprise with a team of resellers.
Set your sales teams up for success
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Making field sellers more competitive
Field sellers are faced with a number of challenges every day: staying up-to-date on the products they are selling, finding new prospects, nurturing existing ones, creating meaningful connections with their buyers, closing deals, just to name a few. Not to mention the pressure of quota and the new challenge 2020 introduced: not being able to interact with customers face-to-face.
Buyer preferences have also changed as a result of the pandemic, and the long-term effects remain to be seen. What we do know is that humans process visuals 60,000 times faster than text, and that a staggering 65% of people are visual learners. Content with visual representation is also much more likely to get seen and share. Also visual content gets 95% more total views than text-only content and is 40 times more likely to be shared on social media. (Fast Company)
Forrester predicts that:
“In 2021, B2B sellers and sales leaders will continue to evolve their methods and strategies in the face of pandemic-related challenges: 40% of B2B reps plan to modify their tactics to adapt to remote selling activities, and 58% of B2B sales leaders plan to make deeper investments in tools with AI and automation. Companies will activate more non-quota-carrying employees on behalf of their commercial goals.”
Predictions 2021: B2B Sales, Forrester Research, Inc., October 23rd, 2020
Content is at the heart of the communication with your customers, and having a solution like the Digizuite™ DAM provides customers with one single source of truth for all digital assets. This facilitates instant knowledge transfer throughout the company and ensures that sellers will only ever see and have access to relevant, brand-compliant content. With this DAM, organizations can measure content performance and achieve a shorter feedback loops between sales and marketing. Knowing what assets are being used and which ones are not begets better content, and being able to provide the proper forms of content to the right audiences.
Also, selling in places with limited or no connectivity? No problem! Digizuite Mobile allows you to download content for offline accessibility. As a result, Digizuite users are always prepared to provide meaningful customer experiences.
The most successful sellers in 2021 and onward will be the ones who remain very careful how they spend their time – as little as possible on repetitive tasks that easily could be automated through workflows. After all, automating workflows — through technology like the Digizuite DAM — allows professionals to focus on value-adding activities that affect both the bottom line as well as customer satisfaction and retention.
Transforming your distribution channels
Who is responsible for creating and maintaining content – the distributor, or its customers that sell it to the market?
According to Forrester, manufacturers who use distribution channels to sell product benefit greatly from investing in their product content:
“Reducing friction on the customer journey is key to creating a great experience and building loyalty, especially for business buyers who increasingly look to do their research and buying online. Yet, eBusiness pros at B2B distributors routinely tell us about getting incomplete product data from their suppliers. It constrains search and doesn’t convert. It annoys buyers by wasting their time. And, ultimately, customer loyalty suffers.”
Distributors Bear The Burden When Manufacturers Skimp On Product Content, Forrester Research, Inc., July 12th, 2020
If your enterprise sells through distributors, you must take the entire product and content into serious consideration — all the way from manufacturing the product to when it reaches the end user. Much like it is for resellers, having one central location for all your assets allows for instant transfer of product knowledge, and ensures that everyone in the chain of sales has access to the material they need to convey the right product story.
For an even richer product experience, many of Digizuite’s customers have integrated Digizuite DAM with a product information management (PIM) system to optimize all their product information and listings, and to make sure they are all-encompassing.
Finally, to distribute the content across multiple channels, check out Digizuite’s native integrations to Optimizely and Sitecore.
Customer success stories
Don’t just take our word for it. Check out real-life examples from Dura-Line and MCR Safety, and schedule a call with one of our DAM experts today to discuss how Digizuite can help you excel in a world that demands powerful content.
Want to find out how DAM could enable your sales channels?
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