Organizations, big and small, are putting a lot of marketing content on their website. With the continued success of inbound marketing and to build mindshare among prospects and customers, organization’s websites are rich with, both, gated and non-gated content. Well-crafted Whitepapers, Blogs, Case Studies, Analyst Reports, Industry News, etc. are available for consumption and subsequent action.
However, we see that organizations are limiting themselves by leveraging this content only to drive inbound leads and build mindshare. They are missing out big time on using this content in later stages of the buyer’s journey. Enabling SDRs (Sales Development Reps), AEs (Account Executives), and CSMs (Customer Success Managers) with relevant content can yield significant dividends.
Here are some concrete steps for marketing and sales enablement to make most of this missed opportunity.
Funnel Focus
Don’t consider your website content with a single purpose of generating leads. Explore opportunities to leverage this content down the funnel at different stages of the buyer’s journey. Furthermore, it will drive efficiency. Without any additional content creation effort, your customer-facing teams will have additional options to engage their prospects/customers and drive relevant and effective conversations. In today’s buyer-driven sales process, reps should be playing the role of a trusted advisor. And no better way to execute that role than enable your buyer with useful and relevant content. Give reps a way to discover content they never knew existed.
Connecting the Dots
We know that you want to avoid redundancy. If a prospect has already downloaded a whitepaper from your website, you don’t want your SDR to be sharing that whitepaper again with the same prospect. That is why connecting the dots between your inbound content engagement and your outbound enablement efforts is important. Providing your sales team visibility on content engagement will help drive intelligent conversations and reduce the risk of redundant messages. Your ability to measure content engagement is another added benefit. By connecting the dots across the funnel, you can measure which content is more effective and continue to refine your investment in content creation and distribution.
Consolidating Access
This is hugely important. We all know your customer-facing teams are busy. And they are not going to hop around from one system to another to find the right content for their conversations. Hence it is very important that irrespective of where the content resides (i.e. your Cloud Storage, your Website, Marketing Automation etc.), there has to be a single access point for that content. The moment you require your AE to step out of one app and access another app, you have diluted their engagement. They are less likely to follow that route next time. And more likely to email you (drain on your productivity) requesting that content.
In addition to consolidating access to the different content assets, you also need to supplement existing communication channels to drive sales adoption. To start, find out where you reps are communicating with their buyers. Are they using a CRM app (Salesforce), or a sales engagement platform (Salesloft or Outreach), or are they simply using their email app to communicate with their buyer? Make content available where reps are communicating with their buyers.
Relevant and Quality Content
It is common for organizations to have hundreds of different assets on their website. And while that is awesome, you don’t want to overwhelm your reps with too much content. Providing the right content to your account team is important. And that is why you need to invest in tools that will help you filter and identify relevant content for a particular scenario. You want to organize these assets that aligns with your business objectives. Some examples,
- Buyer Persona
- Industries
- Solutions
- Partners
- Corporate Functions
Reusing your content is the single biggest opportunity for a marketing team to drive efficiency and sales enablement. Not every member of your customer or prospect account is up-to-date on your content. Arming your account team with quality content elevates the quality of their outbound conversations. It is a win-win for everyone and a no-brainer.
