Your sales tool: a valuable channel in your content strategy

Do you ever have the feeling that the content you produce is being under-used during a sale? If you have a sales tool, look at it as a channel and integrate it into your content strategy.

The traditional sales funnel has lost its moorings. Everything has been turned upside down or simply declared DOA.

Potential customers are increasingly gathering information on their own via a wide range of digital channels before making contact with salespersons. Content marketing responds to this trend with the right content at the right time via the right channel. Customers and their needs are central to this effort. However, due to the well-established wall between marketing and sales, this content is often under-used during the actual sales talk.
You can avoid this by employing your sales toolkit as a channel within your content strategy. Here we’ll examine the problem and give you the start of a solution.
 
Customers doing research
Research from the CEB Marketing Leadership Council  has shown that potential customers are increasingly gathering information for themselves when contemplating making a large purchase. Almost two-thirds of the overall purchasing process will be completed before they contact suppliers.
They use a large number of digital channels for this. They surf to and within the corporate website, sift through brochures, look at videos, scan forums, read white papers, consult social media. In this way, they search out the pros and cons of various products and services that might be able to solve whatever problem confronts them.
Content is crucial in this. The major challenge for marketers is to be present during the sales process in channels where potential customers are present – and at the right time with the right content.
 
Under-used content
If you have a good content marketing strategy that takes the aforementioned trend into account, this can still work out nicely.
So when does it become difficult? When a potential customer comes into contact with a seller – it’s at this moment that content seems to be woefully under-utilised. According to a frequently cited study from the American Marketing Association, 90% of marketing material isn’t used by sellers in a B2B environment – a consequence of outmoded marketing and sales silos. The two departments have little or no communication with each another, and because of this, walls are erected and too little information is exchanged between them.
 
The sales moment: marketing’s blind spot
The content that is created by marketing remains under-used not only during the sales moment. Marketers also become frustrated because, for them, face-to-face talk is a black box.
They can measure the rest of their marketing efforts with all kinds of metrics, but only very little information flows back to them from the sales team about the actual sales talk and the use of marketing material during it.
 
Sales tools as a channel
According to Jesse Noyes, senior director of content marketing at Kapost, you must offer your sellers content for the moment when they make a deal. (Be sure to read our interview with CMA director Clare Hill on this subject.) In many organisations, that means making use of a sales tool that sellers always have with them on the road. 
Platforms such as Showpad and Salesforce enable you to upload your content (such as brochures, slide shows, videos, technical sheets, etc.) onto your sellers’ mobile devices. Folders are created there from a central management to provide sellers with the necessary content for use during the sales talk. 
This generates opportunities. The content is centrally managed and thus always up to date. Moreover, these tools make it possible, via analytics, to see what content has been shared and used during a sales talk.
As a content marketer, do you want your content to be used more by your sales team? Do you want to receive more usable feedback about that use? Then look at your sales tool as a channel and produce content for it.
 
How do you do this successfully?

• Gain insight into the sales talk: How did it go? What content was used and when? What aspects could be improved?
• Show sellers how they should deploy certain pieces of content. Who is it intended for? Which message belongs to which phase of the sales process? What’s the call to action that should be emphasised? 
• Make sure that your content can be found. Always communicate with your sales team about new content, and ensure that your tool has a clear file structure – for example (depending on the target group), the moment in the buying cycle, the product group, etc. – so that the right content is easy to find.