Think fast! How does content marketing help your company drive sales? Are the white papers generating leads? Is the blog driving clicks? If so, good job. You’ve hit the status quo.
You probably have more pages of content than you know what to do with. So let’s put that content to use. When applied properly, content can be part of your sales enablement solution. The problem is often organizing all the available content and presenting it to your sellers in a way that enables them rather than overwhelms them with the additional work of sifting through to find the right piece at the right time.
Imagine this scenario: One seller walks into a meeting with case studies the client already found online and a deck he spent three hours creating based on slides from previous presentations.
The other is armed with case studies relevant to the client’s industry that she knows the client hasn’t downloaded yet and a deck customized to the client’s needs that took a fraction of the time to put together. Oh, and she’s got a standard agreement on her computer that she can update with client-specific requests and send to them for an e-signature in real-time. Who’s better prepared?
The second seller knew what she needed and when. Although her marketing team probably had dozens of documents that could have been used in her meeting, she was able to identify the right ones and bring them up at the right time.
It sounds easy. But too often we hear sellers say that marketing’s content doesn’t fit their particular deals, and marketers tell us requests from sales are too specific or last-minute to fulfill each one. Yet both groups have the same goal: more business!
In order to organize this process, we’ve categorized the different types of content associated with content marketing into four main types:
- Static: White papers, blogs, case studies, your website—anything people can access anytime. This type of content is often used in lead generation and branding.
- Dynamic: Customized documents used during the sales process, such as presentations, slideshows, or calculators that are tailored to the unique needs of the prospect. Templates can be helpful here, but there are ways for sales to customize these types of content even further to help engage potential clients.
- Legal: NDAs, SLAs, and other documents that come in at the end of the sales process. With documents like these, it’s especially important to have the right content available quickly and in the right format, such as a mobile-friendly e-signature contract.
- Internal: Private, in-house-only documentation used to support fellow sales colleagues for specific selling situations, from market research to notes about prospect meetings. This content, once proven useful, is captured and re-purposed with the broader sales team.
This upcoming blog series will explore each of these four types of content and look at how a well-run content machine can remove the silos that marketing and sales often find themselves in. After all, everyone has the same goal. Make sure your content is helping you reach it.
