B2B buyers genuinely value good content and increasingly depend on content in making purchase decisions. In fact, in a 2015 Content Preferences Survey, Demand Gen Report found that roughly two-thirds of buyers (67%) rely more on content to make purchasing decisions than they did in 2014.
Buyers are consuming more kinds of content and sharing it with colleagues — about half of survey respondents said they consume three to five pieces of content before they ever talk to a sales rep.
So what’s the bad news? While customers value content, your own sales team might not be sharing it with them. Research from SiriusDecisions shows that 60% to 70% of marketing content is never used by sales. Content that should be helping to close late-funnel deals can be ignored by reps, or they might substitute their own content, which could be outdated and out of synch with company branding.
How can marketing ensure more consistent usage of its content? The key is to understand what makes content work for sales. Sales wants content that reps can personalize, that is easily accessible to sales teams and can move the buyer forward in the sales journey.
Personalization: Sales reps want the ability to modify content to align with their customers’ needs. According to Aberdeen Group, best-in-class organizations allow reps to personalize content for prospects. If they’re sending out a presentation, they want the ability to customize it for the particular prospect — bringing in a similar use case scenario or adding a slide on a capability they know is a hot-button for the customer. Clearly, marketing can’t produce content to support thousands of different usage scenarios. However, marketing can organize content — e.g., by industry or product feature or pain point — and give reps the freedom to tailor particular types of content while providing guidance, an overview of the story and branding compliance instruction.
Aberdeen says that by using sales tools for content personalization, organizations are achieving up to a 21% stronger lead acceptance rate and a 36% higher conversion average.
Easy accessibility: Sales people need a clear process for accessing content and discovering new content they haven’t used before. Start by establishing a single trusted repository for content. If reps rely heavily on email, the repository should be accessible from their desktops. If they use a CRM system like Salesforce, ideally it should be integrated with that tool. If they depend on cloud storage, the repository should be able to pull content from tools like Box or Dropbox. Involve sales in tagging and organizing content, for each buyer persona and each stage in the journey.
Content that moves a buyer forward in the journey: Marketing needs to understand the sales process for each buyer persona and deliver content that supports that process. You need to create content that addresses the buyer’s challenges – with case studies showing real-world applications. Writing for marketing at the top of the funnel is different from writing for prospects further along the journey.
So how does marketing get the insights it needs to do that? Talk to sales. Marketing should attend sales meetings to hear about their pain points/needs, make sure content is buyer-centric — not feature-focused. Meet at least monthly. In fact, marketing should present regularly at sales meetings, to share campaigns and content.
Finally, don’t just let your content fall into a black hole. Marketing should pay close attention to how and what content is being used by sales — and which content performs the best. Sales analytics tools help with this by delivering visibility into how the sales rep is using the content with prospects.
Engagement analytics can show marketing what happens to their content, such as how often it was used, what pieces got the most engagement from prospects and which particular pages in a piece of content were viewed longer than others. All of this data provides marketing with valuable information about what type of content is used the most by their sales team, as well as what messaging resonates best with the company’s target customers.
Micheline Nijmeh is the CMO for LiveHive, Inc., a sales acceleration platform which provides engagement analytics to understand buyers’ interests and improve sales follow-up. A seasoned Silicon Valley executive, Nijmeh has served as Senior Director, Integrated Global Campaigns at Salesforce.com, where she led the market launch of Salesforce’s Chatter and Force platform.
