Yet many organisations are still struggling to close silo-minded thinking within sales and marketing culture. This is often because of a lack of technology adoption, but often it’s down to access to content.
Content marketing created specifically for sales can act as the tool that gets prospects over certain hurdles. To do this you first need to understand what challenges your sales team are currently facing. Doing this will give insight into the content you should create.
Once you have that insight, you need to create content and the platforms to go with it to overcome those challenges. Here are some ways to do that.
Technique #1: Transform objections into content
The majority of the insight you will yield from your sales team when beginning this process will come in the form of objections and queries. These are specific queries your reps have to overcome as and when they arise.
These objects are prime topics for content. For example, a prospect who doesn’t see the ROI in what your solution will provide will likely find value in an ROI calculator or ROI-driven case studies.
Your salespeople will also come across a lot of competitor related questions. Again, case studies where a client of yours can come in handy here. Another idea for content can come in the form of a comparison matrix.
When sitting down with your sales teams, listen carefully and dig as deep as you can on each piece of insight they provide you with. Find out what the ideal piece of content looks like to them.
Technique #2: CRM optimisation
Your sales team likely have various processes they use within their CRM. Whether it’s Salesforce, Pipedrive or NetSuite, there will likely be collections of email templates and guidelines for various sales cycles and client segments.
Once you’ve created content to tackle various objections and prospect challenges, you can optimise these processes to deliver the content to the right segments at the right time.
For example, to add some value-driven weight during early conversations, you could include a P.S. at the bottom of certain emails.
Help the sales managers within your organisation to review these processes with you. See how you can tweak and optimise messaging to better serve prospects. These can really help connect the dots between missing steps in a sales sequence and more effectively nurture opportunities.
Technique #3: Tailored content environment
The content you create for sales enablement should help guide your prospects from one step of the sales sequence to the next. The challenge here, however, is that sales cycles are non-linear. Each step arises from specific objections and queries.
The traditional way of doing this is to take them as they come, and send over relevant content that will help overcome these objections. The issue with this comes when several people are involved with the decision making process.
The solution? Create an environment for specific buyer persona segments that houses content most relevant to them. This makes it easier for the point-of-contact to share the value you provide within their organisations.
Want to go one step further? Develop a system that allows salespeople to create an environment for each individual prospect. This way they can add carefully selected pieces of content that will be most relevant to the individual and their organisation.
Conclusion
Sales enablement through content marketing can really help take your sales reps’ game to a whole new level. It can connect the dots between points in a sales process where huge gaps use to reside.
In a previous post, we’ve talked about the necessity to understand what your sales teams really need. When going through this process, we’re there to serve them.
Therefore, the key is to extract as much information and as many ideas as possible. If you can take these piece of insight and categorise them effectively, you’ll have a whole library of content to help sales close more deals.
Comments