Content has transformed the sales process.
Today, instead of a cold call from a rep, prospects initiate the buyer’s journey with a quick internet search to find a product that meets their needs. From there, they likely download a few pieces of content and a sales rep reaches out.
While it’s marketing that owns the top of the funnel content strategy that gets those qualified leads in the door, things get more complicated once that lead turns into an opportunity. That’s because both marketing and sales have to agree on which pieces of content are shared in order to move prospects through the funnel to purchase.
Problem is, there hasn’t been a systematic means of connecting content used throughout the sales process to business outcomes like deal size, revenue attainment, or other key metrics.
That is, until now.
Introducing DocSend Custom Field Mappings for Salesforce
Sales and marketing teams, struggle no more.
With our latest enhancement to DocSend, we’ve made it easy for you to connect content to ROI like deal size, deals won/lost, and revenue attainment using custom field mappings in Salesforce.
If you’re a marketer, that means you’ll finally understand which pieces of content actually drive the sales process. If you’re in sales, it means you’ll get more of the collateral that actually closes deals.
To get started you’ll need a DocSend Enterprise account. Don’t have one? Go ahead give us a call at (888) 258-5951 or shoot us an email.
Owners and Managers of DocSend accounts will then need to head over to account settings to find the new Salesforce administration area. If you don’t already have your Salesforce account connected to DocSend, go ahead and take care of that. Once you return, you’ll see the following:
When DocSend logs visits to Salesforce, we log them using the Activity object. This group of settings will allow you to tailor how that happens to suit your needs.
Using Custom Activity Fields
If you want the right context for understanding your document’s performance, you’ll need to set the correct values for Activities. For example, in the Activity Fields section, you can choose to set the Type field to be “DocSend visit”. This way, when you’re looking at sales team activity, you can break out “DocSend visit” activity from the rest of your sales activities, like calls or emails.
One other aspect we find super helpful here at DocSend is to use a custom activity field called “Source” when hooking any third party software into Salesforce, and set that field to the vendor’s name, in this case, “DocSend”. This helps us easily break out that data from other vendors later.
Queue the Magic Moment
The next step is to take any property of a DocSend visit–document name, visit duration, percent viewed, link name, and full stats link–and map that over to any Activity field of your choosing. For the nitty-gritty details on best practices for setting these fields up, take a look at the details in our help center. Once you do that, you’ll be able to report on DocSend data from within Salesforce.
Here’s a look at how we have this set up internally at DocSend:
Now that you’ve got the implementation complete, let’s dig into what you get out of this enhancement to DocSend.
The New Frontier: Determining Content ROI and Performance
Content is king. But closed deals… well, they’re what actually grow your business.
That’s why it’s crucial that marketers measure the performance of their sales collateral differently than they do the content that attracts MQLs. That requires paying attention to things like content performance and content ROI as they relate to new sales opportunities and closed deals.
Up until now, though, this was pretty much impossible to do. But with DocSend for Salesforce, you can authoritatively tell your sales team to use specific documents during the sales process to drive key outcomes.
Let’s briefly dig into how you can do this (for even more info on this, check out our knowledge base).
Content Performance
Say the marketing team at ACME Corporation puts together a company overview document that they share using DocSend. If they want to know the performance and engagement with that piece of content, they can run a quick report in Salesforce and see which contacts and accounts have viewed that piece of collateral.
Awesome, right? Definitely. But there’s lots more you can do with the integration to optimize the sales process and marketing activities across the board. We recommend paying attention to two key metrics–“average percent viewed” and “average visit duration”–to identify and take action on the following:
Low-performing content. With DocSend for Salesforce working together, sales and marketing teams can finally see which content isn’t cutting it in the sales process. This makes it easy for marketing teams to prioritize the content that needs further improvement, optimization, or elimination from your sales process altogether.
High-performing content. By paying close attention to “average percent viewed” and “visit duration”, you’ll be able to highlight the content that drives people through each stage of the sales process.
Key trends in content performance. Finally see how different types of content influence account types. For example, your comprehensive buyer’s guide might crush it when you’re selling to big companies, but fall flat when you’re trying to close a deal with a medium-sized business. With this DocSend for Salesforce integration, you’ll finally be able to pull insight like this from your reports and streamline the content you use in your sales process.
Let’s take a look at an example. In the screenshot of a Salesforce report below, it’s clear that the company overview document has been used by at least four different sales reps and across at least seven different accounts. By tracking this, your marketing team will finally see how much engagement content receives and how widely it’s used during your sales process.
ACME Corp. Overview Content Performance Across Accounts
Content ROI
When a lead becomes an opportunity, it crosses over from the marketing side of your organization and into sales. The content a prospect receives from that point forward is up to the discretion of the sales rep and isn’t tracked in any way.
In the past, this meant that you’d have no way of knowing the ROI on a specific piece of collateral. But with DocSend for Salesforce custom field mappings, you can now track content throughout the sales process, all the way to deal size and revenue attainment.
How does this work?
Let’s say your marketing team spent a ton of time researching and producing an ACME Corp. Buyer’s Guide for the sales team. Instead of wondering if the content contributed to closed deals, you’d be able to run a report in Salesforce and find out.
You can also use the DocSend for Salesforce integration to compare the performance of two different pieces of content used in your sales process. For example, in the screenshot below, we compared the ACME Buyer’s Guide to the ACME Corp. Overview. If you take a close look at the column on the far right, you’ll see that on average, prospects spent more time viewing the guide compared with the overview. But perhaps most importantly, the guide played a key role in generating an average of $157,344 in revenue compared with the overview, which only generated $23,420.
ACME Corp. Overview vs. ACME Buyer’s Guide
Insight like this makes it incredibly easy for marketing to see which content delivers more ROI, and helps them prioritize creating more of the content that works to drive revenue and less of the type that doesn’t.
DocSend Works Where You Do
The best tools are the ones that work where you do, and for successful sales teams, that’s inside of Salesforce. That’s why we’re so excited about this latest enhancement to DocSend, and the potential it has optimize your content and sales process.
Have more questions? As always, we’re here to help! Call us at (888) 258-5951 or send us an email.
