Revenue generation is top of mind for every sales and marketing leader. And every sales and business head already knows just how crucial content development and the right content marketing strategy can enable better sales and in turn, better revenue generation.
Sales enablement is one activity that is meant to enable a better sales strategy and process, but without the right support of the right content, most sales and marketing activities might not see their full potential.
According to LinkedIn, less than 20% of organizations reported they were using sales enablement in 2013, but by 2019 over 60% have embraced the strategy.
Here’s how the right content and content marketing strategy can impact your whole sales and revenue generation process.
Multiple Digital Channels Need Different Content
In the old days, traditional marketing and sales activities often involved using a certain type of pamphlet, brochure or PPT to tell a prospect about a product. With the introduction of multiple digital sales channels and marketing mediums, your potential customers are not only harder to reach, you have to reach them through the channels they are most active on. Here’s the secret that most sales leaders now capitalize on: creating content to suit these multiple channels, while ensuring they target the same prospects across these channels in different ways.
A simpler way to do this for teams who struggle with bandwidth is by developing one key content material or content asset and breaking it down into different versions that can be used across various channels easily.
Creating good quality content is a difficult job. Instead of stressing the team that is responsible for this, being street smart about how best to achieve sales goals by re-purposing content will help enable the end goal –> revenue generation.
Read More: Is Account-Based Marketing The Best Thing For Sales?
The Sales Cycle Has Various Stages, Content Development Activities Need to Suit these Buying Stages
Buyers in tech and B2B go through a long sales cycle and process. One good way to shorten this usually-lengthy sales cycle is by creating content that is not only personalized but content that caters to different buying stages.
A generic brand PPT will work during an introductory sales pitch. To move your prospect to the next stage, during your sales follow-up, re-sending that same PPT is not going to work. Another version of the PPT, a shorter, crisper one-page document that only highlights the main features of your product might be the next best thing to consider.
Understanding your prospect’s stance on your product and knowing whether they are warm or cold at that moment will also help you decide what kind of content will work best to move them through the sales cycle and buying journey.
Sales leaders who capitalize on use cases based on buyer personas and those who use actual case studies will be able to shorten the typically long sales cycle – because that’s what potential buyers want to know most: how did your product help other teams achieve their business goals.
Read More: How Enterprise Sales Can Survive And Thrive Without Field Marketing And Other Face-To-Face Efforts
Creating Content that Answers Typical FAQs
The good thing about being in tech sales for a certain period of time is that it allows you to pre-empt what your prospects would like to ask or what they would need more information on.
Creating content that caters to these FAQs and saving them in your content bank will enable sales teams to access what they need when prospects pose a question, much faster, – thereby also helping to reduce the lengthy sales journey and helping in potentially closing a deal quicker.
The speed at which you respond to a prospect query will better the chances of a prospect signing a deal with you. The more you make your prospect wait: the better the chance of your competitor swooping in and acquiring them.
Read More: Five Things You Can Do Now To Build Revenue Resilience
Alignment with Sales and Marketing
Team alignment helps achieve core business goals, a lot faster. While better alignment between Sales and marketing is an age-old struggle that tech and B2B teams today have sophisticated tools and technologies to help with, content too can play a crucial role here.
For content marketers -> creating content that is aligned to what the sales and marketing team needs every quarter besides maintaining a content dump or content bank that allows teams to access what they need as they need it will help in easier revenue generation.
Sales are at the forefront of the whole revenue process and are exposed to customer queries first-hand while content teams might not be exposed to this information because they don’t interact with the customers or prospects as much. When sales and marketing works closely with their content team to align content creation efforts based on actual customer questions, based on how customers are engaging with the content that is being sent to them (for instance, does a customer have more questions after looking at the brand PPT or do they simply get confused?), it will help achieve revenue goals.
Various content marketing tools and even heatmaps can allow teams to assess how their content is performing in this case to enable the right changes to the core content plan.