How to customize sales and marketing content at scale? Explained

Sellers creating decks, instead of pitching to clients. Sales Strategy creating reports, instead of finding insights. Marketing creating one-size fits all content, instead of resonating with their audience. And case studies being produced, instead of going online.

Recognize any of these?

Your organization might be doing something wrong. Creating and customizing sales and marketing content is not a cost-effective activity. Customization is getting increasingly important, but it should not be a manual process taking up to 40-50% of the time of your team.

If you are looking for an answer to reduce the time invested by your sales or marketing team on the customization of presentations, you will find this expert article extremely useful.

This expert article is for founders, COOs, CMOs, sales leaders, marketing leaders, revenue operations managers and those in analytics or sales strategy. You will find new strategic ideas to:

• Understand the importance of customization of content
• Prevent pitfalls when personalizing presentations for clients
• Get to know for which which content you want to automate customization
• Enable your team to customize while reducing investment to a minimum
• Leverage revenue operations to facilitate the automation of data-driven presentations

Megan Foster is a sales leader and revenue operations manager with 5+ years of experience in high tech SaaS. She has experience in both regional and global sales and marketing teams. She is the co-founder of SlideFill.

Three reasons: saturation, saturation and saturation.

The internet has made content a very saturated playing field. Potential clients are spending up to 4 hours per day on social media, but barely engage with 0.6% of all the content they see.

The average professional is receiving 121 emails per day with an open rate that’s less than 1 out of 5. The saturation of content is a worsening issue which most companies try to solve by sending even more content. An issue Google and Yahoo are bound to tackle in 2024.

Enter a vicious cycle asking more from your sales, marketing and content teams.

Still content is important, but if you want to survive in a world with ChatGPT and GenAI you will need to embrace content as a unique differentiator for your brand. Or simply put: be different.

To stand out in a content saturated internet, you need to focus on the alignment of your value proposition or message to your prospective and current customers. This will lead to an increase in engagement and eventually revenue.

To do so: you need customization.

And you don’t have to take my word for it. Smart people at McKinsey created “The Value of Getting Personalization Right – or Wrong – is Multiplying” study showing that 71% of customers expect personalization and companies mastering customization realize 40% more revenue.

40% more revenue!

Tailoring your message to needs, giving relevant recommendations, offering target promotions, addressing people personally, celebrating milestones and sending your communications timely is more important than ever before.

And still we are here:

1. Unpersonalized content examples © SlideFill 2024

This is ridiculous and we all recognize it. The irony of it all: organizations are being pushed by FOMO to adopt Generative AI which will lead to more of these – personality dead – messages.

I could have written this whole article in a matter of minutes using ChatGPT, but it would have sucked my soul out of it (and most likely yours)!

The future doesn’t look bright. Companies that see the change to even more plain, undistinctive and dull content coming, will be victorious in the long run.

You will need to proactively prevent that your messaging, pitch decks and one-sheeters will end up in the saturated pile of GenAI driven content.

Companies consolidating all their content creation through GenAI will win in the short run (saving cost) but will lose in the long term by lack of differentiation and personalization.

Why?

71% of your customers expect it, you will have 35% more conversion leading to 40% more revenue and you will differentiate your brand in the long run.

Before you go back to your leadership saying ‘Megan said Generative AI is just a fancy fad’’, you need to dig a bit deeper bringing multiple concepts together.

Consider Generative AI or tools like ChatGPT the “automation of content”.

Customization, which also can be automated, is your “ability to personalize”.

Based on this definition, the same principles covered in the chapter about automation are true. Depending on the use case of your content, automation (or GenAI) will be desired:

• Content of low value: can be automated through ChatGPT with a minimum of customization

When thinking about content of low value, you should think about sending a confirmation message, an out of office or similar low value activities.

Example: Low value content

A lead books a meeting to go over a demo, you send an automatic confirmation message of the meeting.

You can create this material using tools such as GenAI as the lack of customization will only impact customer experience minimally.

There are also plenty of tools, such as Outreach or Salesloft, allowing you to customize these sequences pretty easily.

But what happens when we change the example?

Imagine now that you want to share a presentation slide deck showing your product and how it can help for your leads’ specific industry attached to the confirmation.

Example: High value content

A lead books a meeting to go over a demo, you send an automatic confirmation message of the meeting with a link to a slide deck showing how your product can help for their specific industry (Customization).

The function of the personal slide deck tailored to the lead’s industry is to make the lead warmer and confirm you have a solution for their specific use case.

This is a high value activity, given it can have a direct impact on the likelihood of this lead to convert and purchase your business.

Customization should go further than just personalizing their first name in your messaging.

• Content of high value: should be less automated through ChatGPT with a maximum of customization

There are plenty of examples of ‘high value activities’ that require in-depth customization.

Imagine activities such as doing:

• Sales pitches
• Following up with leads
• Sending out marketing collateral
• Pitching a new product feature

All of these activities are asking the client or lead to do something:

• Purchase your product
• Adopt a new feature
• Attend a marketing event
• Increase their investment

It’s unbelievable most companies and individuals use a one size fits all approach with effort similar to a swipe on Tinder to ask their clients to commit to more resources (money or time).

It doesn’t work. And if it does for you, it’s still guaranteed you are losing a lot of revenue.

We need to customize to get our 40% increase in revenue.

Now the ‘why’ is established we can move to the ‘how’.

First of all, the use of generative AI and the ability to customize, are not mutually exclusive. The right customization requires creating templated data-driven content.

A template can consist of multiple modules, which in themselves can be either customized or generic. Your goal is to find the right balance between the two based on the value of the activity.

Let’s look at an example of a lead filling in a lead form, scheduling a call and our first sales call with this individual.

Example – Step 1 – Capturing data

The lead fills in a lead form including their first name, last name, website, country and industry and main reason for reaching out.

Example – Step 2 – Low value confirmation

We send them a confirmation mail that one of our sellers will reach out.

This is a low value activity (the confirmation email), given it’s most likely an automated process and the main function is to have a quick confirmation that we received their data.

That email in itself, based on the example above, will be a template containing different modules:

Example – Step 3 – Higher value book a meeting

The next step will be to have the lead book a meeting with us. This activity is more valuable, given we know that leads booking a meeting are x% likely to convert and generate value for our organization. As this is not a confirmation email, we can add more specific, personalized information that’s relevant for the lead in order to convince the lead to book a meeting:

Example – Step 4 – Highest value conversion focused pitch

Once the lead has booked a meeting, we will jump on a sales call in order to ‘convince’ the lead why our service or product is solving their issues based on their provisioned data. The presentation we prepare contains both modules with generic and customized information.

By doing so we:

• Increased the likelihood of conversion by ~35%
• Increased the revenue potential by 40%
• Increase productivity of our sales team

And we elevated the experience of the customer as 76% of customers get frustrated when being presented with only generic information.

Most of you will recognize all of this is best practice, but struggle with the execution of it. I struggled with the execution of this.

Different SEPs such as Outreach, Apollo, Salesloft allow you to customize your emails using parameters, but they are quite limited to email only. Sending a customized email with non-customized material in attachment is not going to do the complete trick.

That’s why SlideFill is here.

SlideFill is 100% free and will allow you to create data-driven sales pitches, case studies and marketing material at scale simply using data from a Google Sheet which can be created from your CRM.

It will give you the benefit of customization – and a 40% increase in revenue – while taking away the pain of spending hours to customize material. In 3 easy steps, you will be able to create hundreds of data-driven presentations filling in the customizable modules of your template using your customers’ data.

In our simple guide you can find out how it works and start saving hours (you can calculate how many) today!

Similar to Revenue Operations objectives under automation, your Revenue Operations will be a key consult and decision maker when it comes down to deciding which process (prioritization) requires data-driven presentations.

Decision will be based on:

• Customization need of the activity
• Risk of customization and organizational readiness for it
• Efficiency gain in terms of output value from customization
• Data availability and quality of data in order guarantee success

These different factors are all intertwined and shouldn’t be considered as stand alone items. Whatever the factors for your decisions indicate, the need for customization is a question of ‘when’ and not ‘if’.

In the next couple of months and years, generic content and pitch material will be more saturated, given every company now has access to a semi-qualified copywriter, ChatGPT, that bases their generated copy on existing content.

There will be a fatigue amongst the receivers of such content, which will simply result in your emails and pitch material landing in your customer’s bin.

To prevent this, now is the time to take action. By creating personalized scaled content, you can influence the decision of readers today to open your emails, read your decks and jump on calls with you in the future. Building this trust should be a long term strategic priority before the window of opportunity closes and damage is done.

You’ve been warned.

Regardless of your decision when and if you will customize collateral for marketing, sales, customer service or all of them (best case), you will need to decide which input parameters will define the customization you want to provide.

The proximity of your Revenue Operations Managers to the data around these different teams, puts them in a good position to decide on demographics and client-specific information to be used to decide which variables to dynamically replace in your marketing one-sheeters or sales decks.

The earlier in the funnel, the less information you will have. For leads and new clients, demographic data will be typically used: industry, vertical, company size, location etc.

Further down the line, you can start incorporating data specifically to your clients such as their investment, their return on investment, their usage of your product and other sales or product usage led parameters.

This is how most sales organizations will position a new feature today. The problem: it doesn’t resonate. So what if we customize the presentation based on triggers?

• You will use the current ROI of a client and showcase the future ROI based on their own data (instead of a generic why)
• You will use a case study of a client in the same industry as the client we are pitching to (instead of a generic social proof)
• We keep the generic how as it’s not dependent on the client

Let’s go back to Jane who is running a Fashion & Retail company in Australia:

By doing so our messaging related to the opportunity of implementing ‘Superboost’ will resonate much better with the client. The client will be able to see:

• Direct expected impact from implementing the solution for their business
• How implementing the solution helped a similar company (social proof)

Creating such data-driven presentations at scale is something you can do today using SlideFill.

You just need to upload your data using a Google Sheet, set a presentation with variables as template and you will get hundreds of presentations related to your specific client needs.

Given the endless opportunity here, your Revenue Operations Manager will play a key role in facilitating the availability of such customization to your sellers, marketing and customer service teams; guiding them which triggers and data points to use effectively.

RevOps will also steer your content teams, to create such templates allowing for customization as you want to decrease the amount of hours sellers need to spend on creating decks or customizing templates given this can be done as scale.

Additional note of self-reflection:

The last job of Revenue Operations related to content is making data-driven presentations and templates available to sellers. There are two options, depending on the size and structure of your company:

• Centralized content operational excellence
• Decentralized content operational excellence

Option 1: would require the set up of one team that is responsible to centrally create the templates (with variables) or to create the presentations themselves at scale.

This approach has benefits including time savings, global alignment and brand consistency but also comes at the cost of regional nuance, relevance and depth of customization.

Given regional sales, marketing or customer service teams have no ‘input’ in making the customized presents for different clients, they are ‘forced’ to use the ones provided by a centralized team. This will save time (you only have to create them once at scale) but the willingness to use them might be lower (no early buy-in from the teams).

Option 2: allows the sellers to create their own presentations from their own templates, which will still save time, increase regional relevance and elevate early buy-in. The cost is simply losing brand control and global scale.

The solution is somewhere in the middle. By providing global templates, one can control their brand and benefit from global scale. Allowing the sellers freedom within these templates to decide what variables to add, keep or remove will increase relevance.

Revenue Operations will lead the trade-off exercise based on the activity to decide the room for flexibility.

You want to invite all the clients globally to a global webinar that has one-size fits all content. The follow-up material will be solely customized on the industry of the attendants.

This is something that can be led from a global content center of excellence, given it doesn’t require high customization. There is additional importance for brand consistency given this is global marketing led. Option 1 would be sufficient.

You want all sellers to talk to their clients about an upcoming product feature increasing ROI by x% based on industry, size, location etc.

This requires flexibility for sellers, given they can decide which variables and insights would best resonate with their local market, audience and the culture of that audience.

A template can still be provided by the global operational content center of excellence, given some slides in the presentation will be client agnostic (for example: how to implement the product feature).

Before you head to the conclusion of this article, you can find answers on frequently asked questions related to how you can personalize sales and marketing content at scale:

If you are looking to convert 35% more clients and generate 40% more revenue, personalized data-driven presentations are the right strategy. Customizing content scale can be cost effective with the right tools and mindset.

These are the best three steps to customize material and build brand value at scale:

Make an overview of all the sales, customer success stories and marketing material you have. Rank the content based on the need for personalization, the value it generates and the desire to tailor the content to your clients needs. Decide which content to customize first.

Ensure your processes such as newsletter form, sign up form, webinar registration or CRM is set up to collect the right data. Collect the right data directly from clients or enable your sales team to collect and validate data points during customer calls.

Implement a process to create data-driven presentations at scale. Make templates consisting of modules and placeholders. Set up a flow to ingest data from your CRM in the content you are creating. Or use SlideFill for free to get the same result instantly.

SlideFill has a variety of free presentation templates you can use to try out your first presentation automation. Download your favorite and start creating now.

This expert article is part of a free eBook and 7-part series addressing multiple aspects of how to do scaled business in today’s economy:

1. Lead Scoring and the impact on revenue
2. From reporting to revenue generating insights
3. Automation of revenue generating activities
4. Closing the service gap through data
5. Making marketing initiatives measurable
6. Customization of content at scale
7. Revenue Operations and generative AI

Or download the eBook for free

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This article does not contain any promotional or paid placements.
Views are personal and not affiliated to employers.
No generative AI was used to write the article.
All examples are illustrative and fictional.