In this article, she shares that perspective with three ways content marketers can provide value to the sales team. Use content as pass-through materials to customers. Since the essence of content marketing is about creating relevant and engaging materials for customers, content used on the marketing side could be used for sales onboarding and training. As a content marketer, you can obtain the agenda of sales onboarding and the curriculum of continuous training from your sales team. If you review Amy’s agenda, you can see content marketers can provide value in many ways. Content marketers can share how they tell product stories relevant for the sales team when they work with customers. In your company, you could share with your sales training manager any show-and-tell videos that marketing has created. One approach is to list key marketing content based on the customer journey. Now, you can work with your sales team to identify their sales tactics at each sales stage. Have a list of content for your sales team to share via email or leave behind after customer meetings.
Editor’s note: Pam Didner recently authored the book Effective Sales Enablement for marketers. In this article, she shares that perspective with three ways content marketers can provide value to the sales team.
Most content marketers focus on meeting marketing’s needs to build brand awareness, drive demand, or nurture prospects to convert them to qualified leads. Marketing, working with business units or product marketing, generates many content pieces and customizes them to satisfy various marketing channels.
Sales, in a way, can be treated as another marketing channel. Marketers can enable sales leveraging different elements – one of those ways is through content. Here are three quick and easy ways content marketers can provide value to the sales team:
- Incorporate marketing content into onboarding and continuous training.
- Map select content to sales processes.
- Use content as pass-through materials to customers.
Incorporate marketing content into onboarding and continuous training
Generally, it’s not marketing’s job to create sales training and development. However, marketing can easily exert influence and provide value in this area. Selling complex equipment, machinery, or newly found technology requires salespeople to be properly trained so they can talk about the benefits of new products and technology in the context of their customers’ challenges and pain points. Since the essence of content marketing is about creating relevant and engaging materials for customers, content used on the marketing side could be used for sales onboarding and training.
As a content marketer, you can obtain the agenda of sales onboarding and the curriculum of continuous training from your sales team. Review the agenda and the curriculum to get a sense of how training materials are created and by whom. In some cases, you may be surprised that you and the training team use the same subject matter experts from the business units or product marketing teams to create similar content.
Amy Pence, director of global enablement from Alteryx, shared her daily onboarding agenda with me:
Alteryx’s platform allows content marketers to build workflows by prepping, pulling, and blending data from various legacy systems. Then, they can use the data on their platform to run regression models or different statistical analysis to forecast or predict the outcomes of various scenarios. The offerings are technical and complicated and therefore require in-depth explanations.
Proper onboarding is critical for new sales talent to be successful. If you review Amy’s agenda, you can see content marketers can provide value in many ways. The first agenda item is storytelling. Content marketers can share how they tell product stories relevant for the sales team when they work with customers. For the second agenda item, live demos are conducted. In your company, you could share with your sales training manager any show-and-tell videos that marketing has created. As for the sales playbook, you can contribute product messaging, a buyers’ guide, and customer testimonials. The next item on her agenda is competitive corner. At this point, you could share product comparison guides, performance benchmark data, competitive analysis, and additional resources or reference materials. If you know the overall content landscape, you can help sales enablement or sales training managers source content and accelerate salespeople’s knowledge and performance. It’s a win-win.
Map select content to sales process
There are several approaches to map marketing-centric content to sales stages. One…
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