Contrary to popular belief, content isn’t just the responsibility of the marketing team. Smart salespeople utilize content to generate leads, deepen relationships and close deals. Below are three ways sales reps can incorporate content marketing tactics into the sales cycle.
1. Be Relevant – Each piece of content should be created with a specific buyer persona in mind. This ensures that the context of that content is speaking to someone in particular who is interested in your offer. Content that tries to speak to everyone often ends up speaking to no one.
After leaving a sales call, there’s a lot of information to digest. It’s important to keep the prospects main points top of mind. Your follow up contact with that prospect should ideally include a piece of content relevant to the conversation that took place in the meeting.
For instance, if your prospect is concerned about price, email them content that breaks down the ROI of your product/service. This may be content that the marketing department has already created or something you’ll need to quickly pull together. Keep in mind that if one prospect has this concern, there are likely others that will have the same concern. This piece of content should be repurposed, making this exercise more than worth your time.
2. Tie it to CRM – Typically, CRM is used to track actions with potential customers, such as meetings, calls and follow-ups. Today, savvy sales teams are also using CRM to track content. This provides a more complete picture of your prospects’ needs and wants.
Additionally, it’s important to define what content should be delivered at what stage of the sales cycle. For example, if a prospect reads a few of your blog posts, maybe they are showing entry-level interest in your company. While downloading a white paper may normally take place in the middle stages of the sales process.
The key is to examine what kinds of content and what topics they’re reading to determine their interests and leverage that knowledge in your communications with prospects.
3. Add Variety – People digest content in different ways, therefore, it’s important to provide your contacts with content in a variety of formats, including presentations, videos, infographics, blog posts, podcasts, white papers and case studies. This greatly increases the chance that a piece of your content will appeal to your specific prospect, increasing the likelihood that you close the sale.