Sales departments in tech companies find themselves in a turbulent period. With major shifts in work habits since 2020 and the looming recession that’s been impacting SaaS brands for over a year, brand alignment and employee retention are becoming more challenging with every day.
The goal for most companies is 10% employee turnover rate, but a B2B SaaS report from the Bridge Group found that:
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- The average salesperson turnover rate is 34%.
- One in ten companies are seeing turnover rates over 55%.
- The average time it takes to onboard and train a sales rep is 5.3 months.
If the average sales rep spends 18 months in a position before leaving, that means almost a third of their tenure is spent aligning with the brand and sales goals before they’re actually selling.
This has impacted tech brands more than other industries since the pandemic. An Xactly survey found that:
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- Sales organizations experienced 58% higher employee turnover in 2021 than in the prior 12 months.
- Technology and software companies saw 67% more sales reps leave than other industries.
So why do salespeople leave companies? According to SiriusDecisions data, two top reasons high-performing salespeople leave a brand are:
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- 60%-80% due to lack of connection with leadership
- 75% due to concerns about the brand’s ability to meet market needs
It’s costly in terms of finding new hires to fill the open positions, and it can cost a brand opportunities while having to constantly onboard new employees every few months. That makes it hard to keep an organization aligned across sales, marketing, product, and leadership. Successful brands are the ones who can keep every employee in the company up to date on what your product or service offers, what the competition offers, and industry trends.
But if your brand has a B2B podcast or video series, you’ve already got content that could help align all your departments and enable your various teams to serve the business more effectively.
Hugely successful companies, many of which have their own public-facing podcasts, have already further leveraged the format as part of their internal enablement plan to solve onboarding, training, and brand education challenges, like:
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- Slow or outdated onboarding programs
- Inconsistent brand-wide updates on wins and industry trends
- Lack of company-wide communication about brand products or services
But what about repurposing your podcast for internal enablement? Or creating new audio/video content for enablement that you can easily manage and privately distribute?
Casted’s Perfect for Your Internal Enablement Plan
If you’re familiar with B2B podcasting, you already know what a tremendous source of branded content it can produce. An essential part of any content strategy into today’s world, amplified marketing is the perfect methodology for taking that podcast content and repurposing it into other formats across all your marketing channels.
Just like fueling blogs, ebooks, social media, email, and paid ads, the Casted platform makes creating internal enablement content from your podcast easy. You can create clips of anything you want, whether you do short clips focused on a particular important idea or create a compilation of key takeaways.
Here’s how your content displays inside one of the five Casted players you can choose from. You can create meaningful titles for your “episodes,” include a transcript and key takeaways, and manage related resources for amplification across your company.
Why a Podcast Is So Effective for Enablement
If you’ve already invested in a podcast, why not repurpose that content for enablement? Plus just as nothing like a podcast humanizes your brand for your audience, the same is true for humanizing leadership for solid brand alignment.
On a recent episode of The Casted Podcast, Eric Quanstrom, CMO at CIENCE, illustrated just how valuable his Enterprise Sales Development podcast is for capturing authentic conversations with expert guests.
“Largely because we think the voices that we have on — the experts, the people inside of lead generation and sales development — oftentimes have really interesting things to say about the craft, about how they run their programs, about how they've built their teams,” Eric says. “Insights that they have from hard-won victories, as well as a lot of best practices learned from failure. And I think that capturing all of that in the body of work that is our weekly podcast is pretty interesting, to be perfectly honest, and something I look forward to every time I'm recording.”
This is prime content to share across your organization to get everyone on the same page, and it’s especially effective if your brand is in the SaaS industry.
“As you might expect, sales development leaders are a big focus of both the guests as well as the listenership,” Eric shares. “But we have our fair share of SDRs who are practicing the role, other company executives, especially in the sales suite, or sales department, and occasionally marketers like myself, along for the ride. That said, I think that I've heard a ton of folks kind of cite when we survey them, like, ‘Hey, I heard about you guys because of the podcast. I found your podcast interesting, and now it's in my regular rotation. I'm downloading it. I'm actually playing it for my team.’”
CIENCE then leverages this incredibly relevant content internally for account-based marketing initiatives but also for sales enablement and brand education.
“Podcast guesting is a thing, and if you use your podcast to figure out what are these personas all about, that can be really effective,” Eric points out. “And then taking those learnings directly over to your outbound team and saying, ‘Hey, pretend for a moment that we're targeting CISOs, and we have a cybersecurity solution.’ If I really want to learn how a CISO thinks through cybersecurity at their organization, having he or she on a podcast walking me through, not in detail, because they would never break NDAs and give away the goods, but you would get this really rich, vibrant treatment of how those personas think.”
Internal Enablement Podcasting Examples
Your entire company needs to know what your customers want, what your prospects are looking for, to be on the same page, and nothing does that better than enablement and educational content repurposed from your podcast (which should be a goldmine of brand awareness details and thought leadership driving your entire business). Here are a few of the ways you can wring out your podcast for sales enablement and brand education, all of which you can do quickly and easily in Casted.
Sales/SDR Enablement and Company-Wide Education
Within the Casted platform, you can take all the thought leadership and ideal customer information your podcast uncovers and create a series of short clips to stress the big ideas that only your internal teams can listen to or view.
For example, at Casted, our Customer Experience team has their own podcast series called Bread & Butter which helps our customers get up to speed quickly with the platform. Each episode covers a particular part of the platform and how to use it. Here you can see an episode on metrics, displaying the analytics for a particular episode along with key takeaways and the complete transcript on the right.
This same example applies to enablement where each enablement episode covers a different marketing or sales topic that reveals something about audience, ICP, customers, industry, or anything useful in better understanding how to target prospects and generate leads.
This is just what the Customer Success team at Gong did, tapping into their internal experts to create a series around how Gong uses their own product to drive revenue. Just a few minutes long each, these enablement videos come from a wide variety of revenue-impacting roles.
Likewise, Eric Quanstrom at CIENCE leverages his Enterprise Sales Development podcast for SDR enablement, and he sees this as having long-term effects beyond brand alignment.
“The other [thing] that I think is really relevant and maybe not that obvious is what [enablement content] can do for recruiting, and retention, and your current employee base,” Eric shares. “So one of the regular listeners that I care most about for our podcast is our own SDRs. The ability for them to learn tips, tricks, best practices, from the leading lights in our field, and internalize those, put them into practice in their own day-to-day, have regular listenership. It actually tickles me pink when I get feedback from our own SDRs. ‘Love that show, totally thought this was amazing,’ so on and so forth. And then our HR department, putting that into practice for hiring next SDRs, and again, brand halo type stuff, around, ‘This is kind of what we do here at CIENCE,’ as a good example. You can use it to recruit and have an edge there as well.”
Customer Stories as Valuable Use Cases
Whether you interview customers on your podcast or create a separate series of recordings, you can take this rich content and turn it into customer story enablement. Feedback from customers is critical to serving them well, and the whole company needs to know what they’re saying and what they want. But it can be especially useful to equip your salespeople with key takeaway clips (audio- or videograms) from customer conversations.
For example, at Casted, we’ve taken customer story clips from The Casted Podcast interviews and created content on a use case page in our content hub. This not only serves as a great resource for our sales team in conversations with prospects, but thanks to our Insights analytics and our HubSpot integration, we know when that prospect engages with that content and can quickly follow up with them.
Live Events Turned into On-Demand Enablement
Don’t forget your live events and the incredible insights you can capture and then turn into enablement content. You’re already recording it, perhaps to create public-facing on-demand content or material for your B2B podcast. Why not repurpose it into sales enablement?
Many Casted customers are doing exactly this, using our platform to capture and repurpose both in-person and virtual events, with these benefits:
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- Longer keynotes and presentations can be broken down into key takeaways to highlight the most relevant enablement content.
- Because all recorded content is automatically transcribed in Casted, you have a solid starting place for creating other kinds of written content around the enablement pieces.
For example, here is how live event content captured by Planful at one of their Perform events looks inside the Casted player, complete with takeaways and the transcript.
Sales Demos with Takeaways and Commentary
Another critical part of enablement is training new staff on how to talk about your product or service during prospect meetings. Casted allows you to create not just a training demo, but also highlight the big ideas with key takeaways and provide related resources on the enablement episode page.
Product Enablement Videos
Casted is a great solution for your Product team to internally enable the whole company about new releases, what they offer customers, and best practices for how to talk about new tools and features in prospecting.
Private Podcasts and Video Series
You can also use Casted to create and privately distribute any kind of internal communication content to your teams. Private content will not be published to your RSS feed or a landing page. Only your teams can access it via a direct link.
At Casted, we use private podcasts and video for:
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- Recapping our bi-annual kickoffs
- Summarizing our Revenue team meetings
- Sharing customer interviews across teams
- On-demand lunch-and-learns
Just like every piece of content in the Casted platform, key takeaways and a transcript will be included, like here in one of our lunch-and-learns.
Create Valuable Enablement Content with Casted
B2B podcasting offers so many different ways to use and amplify your content, and when you look at the low cost in creating the podcast source material in the first place, why wouldn’t you look for other ways to leverage valuable content, such as for internal enablement?
This is just one of the ways Casted can help you do more with your podcast or video content. If you’d like to find out about all the things our platform can do for your brand, from brand awareness and thought leadership to business growth and brand alignment, reach out to us.
