How Marketing Can Help Sales Sell – Stop Creating Content
Maybe you misread. The hot trend is Big Data, not Big Content.
70% to 90% of sales content produced by marketing is not used by salespeople (SiriusDecisions/CSO Insights).
Why is that?
The Content Marketer’s Dilemma
Is it that your salespeople are too engrossed playing Worlds of Warcraft or reading food blogs to alt-tab over to your sales portal? Is it that they’re not sophisticated enough to appreciate Clio award-winning content when they see it? Is it that you don’t have enough Nuclear Physics PhDs in your sales org that might better appreciate your footnotes?
Or could it be that the content you’re producing just doesn’t cut it when it comes to helping advance the sale? Could it be because you’ve produced an Amazon fulfillment center’s worth of content, your CMS is so bloated that the salesperson stares at your CMS landing page, scratches their head trying to figure out where to start, says “___ it” and goes back to making calls?
Could it be that your sales folks have tried serving your trend-laden, 22-page, eight-point font whitepaper replete with eye-popping pie charts and hand-drawn stick figures to their prospects, but the reaction has been something along the lines of “Neither I nor my colleagues know the Google algorithm to decipher if your content relates to how your solution applies to my situation”?
Content Management is Not the Answer
So, what is? If you’re in Sales Enablement, walk down the hall and ask your head of marketing to stop creating content. Since 70 to 90% of it isn’t being used, you and your marketing cohort need to figure out the 10-30% that is working and do more of that.
Use this filter: Does it help your salespeople have better conversations with their prospects AND does it make it easy for your prospect to have better conversations with his or her peers/management? Your goal is to supply both parties with content they can use to sit across the table or screen from someone and make a compelling case for change and your solution.
Conversation Enablement is the Answer
Sales Enablement is fundamentally about equipping salespeople and by extension their prospects to have better conversations to initiate and facilitate the buying process. Ultimately, Sales Enablement is about conversation enablement. It’s about helping your salespeople escort their prospects through the “buyer journey” (who came up with this term?). The same person who wrote that 22-page whitepaper would be my guess.
Stop creating content and start enabling conversations.
