Help salespeople use the right content and conversations to create value for buyers and win more deals.
Buyers want valuable ideas from salespeople.
Research shows that executives remain unimpressed with most conversations held with salespeople. What they’re looking for are business insights that help them envision new ways to achieve priority objectives. They can learn about feeds and speeds on your website.
Conversations held with salespeople should provide them access to expertise and meaning that they can’t get from the vendor down the street. At the speed of change, salespeople need help keeping up. They’re expected to be “social” to become resources for their prospects — to be a value-add to the buying process.
The problem? Most salespeople don’t understand your content strategy. They don’t know where to find the right content, what to do with it, or fathom how it can help them accomplish their goals. Marketers are in a prime position to enable salespeople to meet your buyers’ ever-changing expectations.
Buyer enablement takes a village…
The way customers buy has been forever altered. The power is irretrievably in their hands. Access to information and technology means that your buyers may know more about your company and solutions than you do. But, the true opportunity here is inspired by this environment. Marketers with truly relevant and engaging digital content strategies are capable of telling a bigger story, engaging and motivating buyers throughout the process and shortening the time they wait to request a conversation.
But this means that when they do request a conversation, their expectations have grown. They expect that the salesperson will pick up the conversation where it was left by the content they’ve been engaging with provided by the marketing side. You see, buyers don’t care whether they’re engaging with sales or marketing, they care about the context and information provided during the conversation.
Marketers can help salespeople connect these dots by providing tools that help them acclimate quickly, learn what they need to know and do what they can do best — help buyers take next steps toward change with your company’s expertise.
“CliffsNotes” for Sales can help drive extended conversations.
Salespeople won’t spend a lot of time looking for or reading the content that marketing creates. But they will scan a one-sheet synopsis if they can sense value in doing so.
Even shorter than the CliffsNotes you may have used in college, these one-sheets are concise summaries of key points and factors that will help salespeople find the assets they need quickly and with less effort than they’ve ever expended before.
By indicating persona, buying stage, topic, premise, key points, related questions, and follow-on content that the buyer may find valuable, your salespeople can prepare quickly and step into conversations fluidly, keeping the momentum going.
Without this type of assist from marketing, salespeople often step into a conversation with their own agenda, despite whatever content and interactions the buyer may have engaged with previously. This halts momentum in its tracks by missing the mark. By helping salespeople avoid the stalls that result from missed expectations, marketing must become proactive in aligning with sales needs and priorities.
Close the loop for continuous improvement.
For buyer enablement to work, marketing and salespeople must work together. Tossing CliffsNotes over the wall is not going to do it. But, by working with them, inviting their feedback on which content is working and which could use improvement, relevance can be vastly improved. And your buyers will appreciate the effort.
Get in Touch to find out how to build buyer enablement into your digital content strategy.
