The Importance of Content Marketing

The following is a guest post by Jared M. Wells from TSL Marketing:

“The fourth Quarter is an interesting time for B2B Sales and Marketing professionals, you’re focused on closing the year with strong numbers.  Being in sales, I’m guilty of thinking low hanging fruit is the most appetizing, at times.  However, I have to ask myself if I’m cutting myself short.

Sales and Marketing teams work diligently throughout the year filling sales pipeline and often times lead generation efforts go to waste when the sales team is focused primarily on short sales. Buying intent is often underestimated with longer-term opportunities and leads are overlooked.

This is why it is important to enable your sales team with tele-prospecting support and lead nurturing tactics. This helps assure that you will get you more mileage out of your pipeline and leads will not slip through the cracks.

The Importance of Content Marketing

B2B marketers have gotten more sophisticated with technology and taken steps towards better alignment with sales in recent years; because of this many coin 2010 as “The Year of Content Marketing” Sirius Decisions released some excellent research in this area. Content generated will have the most impact if it’s targeted to the prospect’s position along the Buyer’s Journey:

“Content is Key” but be warned – it’s not just about content…  A recent study by IDG Market Fusion determined that in only 42% of cases, prospects received relevant content; that means 58% of the time the WRONG content is being shared. Marketing Sherpa also discovered that irrelevant or off-target information reduces your chance to win the business by as much as 45%. Keep it relevant!

Leveraging your Inside Sales Team for Lead Progression

Longer-term deals require time and attention in order to realize their full potential.  Automated Lead Nurturing is great, however nothing beats an actual conversation!  Leveraging inside sales for lead qualification will help ensure proper lead nurturing, and most importantly, pipeline acceleration are taking place.

Inside Sales is best suited to enable the Sales Team by qualifying and helping to ensure proper content is being provided. This will enable the field sales team to do what they do best, focus on closing deals.  If history has shown us anything: That’s what they’ll do, regardless.

To learn more on the importance of lead progression, TSL Marketing recently released a free whitepaper, “The Payoffs of Lead Progression”. In this whitepaper you will learn how you can increase lead conversion rates by upwards of 44%.”

Reading List – Beginning of September 2010

“Engage early with Senior Execs, or Lose the Deal” (Tom Pisello: The ROI Guy; May 13, 2010)

“[...] Many salespeople are not armed today to adequately engage executives in the consultative strategy phase. That can be changed with Executive Assessment tools, providing a structured way to connect and engage with executives in this crucial early buying phase. [...]“

“In Sales Productivity, Coroners’ Inquests Won’t Improve Life Expectancies” (John Cousineau, CEO, innovativeinfo; AUGUST 27, 2010)

“[...] Today, one of the productivity-improving therapies often recommended in sales operations is Loss Analysis. When a deal’s lost, do a post mortem to determine what happened + what should be done to prevent future deal deaths. In my view, it’s a bit like holding a coroner’s inquest. It accepts that fatalities are unavoidable other than by learning from them after the fact. It’s a strange way to stretch life expectancies. [...]“

“Meet the Chief Listening Officer” (Neville Hobson; August 30, 2010):

“[...] So I wonder how a Chief Listening Officer will do.

In my view, such a role implied by the title is surely and exactly what organizations need today, especially large organizations. It’s not enough just to listen to conversations, analyze what’s going on and interpret the metrics: you need to know exactly, with precision, what the huge amount of interpreted data means to your organization specifically and what the people in their different roles can and must do as a result of the knowledge and insight you’ve gleaned from that listening, from that interpretation of the data.

Above all, you must know who in your organization needs what information, and be able to get that info to those people, on demand, when they need it. [...]“

Reading List – End of August 2010

“Forrester’s Santucci: Sales Enablement Defined” (Kathleen Schaub; August 23, 2010):

“[...] more and more people touch customers along the demand chain. [...] extend Sales Enablement constituents to include influencers, as buyers are also extensively socially-engaged. [...]“

Enterprise 2.0 › Blog “Is it Knowledge Management or Business Intelligence?” (Rich Blank @sharepointpmp; 08/19/2010)

“[...] Knowledge management – the buzzword of decades past that might be synonymous with other buzzwords like collective intelligence or intellectual capital. Or maybe you’ve heard of tacit and explicit knowledge – differentiating between what is in our heads vs what’s written down. From a technology perspective, KM represents the mounds of documents, information, conversations, blogs, wikis, emails, social networks, knowhow, and expertise …. it’s all the “stuff” that continues to overload us daily and continues to present challenges for individuals and organizations in filtering out what is important vs. what is just noise. KM is also about the way we create, collect, manage, consume, share, and leverage the unstructured information combined with the structured data [...]. [...] BI has many parallels to KM… and at the end of the day it’s all about being able to filter out the noise, identify all the variables in the equation, and make the right decisions based on what you know and assume to be true – be it structured or unstructured.”

“A Salesperson’s Seven Deadly Sins” (Steve W. Martin; August 23, 2010)

“The Content Economy by Oscar Berg: The business case for social intranets” (Stefan Pfeiffer; August 26, 2010)

“Selling “Naked” & 8 Other Truths About Content Marketing” (demandcreationspecialists.com; August 13, 2010)

“You’ve got to love Jill Konrath’s straight up approach to sales enablement: how to use content to engage with “crazy-busy” executives mired in a multi-tasking swamp. Her popular new book, SNAP Selling: Speed Up Sales & Win More Business with Today’s Frazzled Customers [...]:

• Don’t be the “Naked Seller” – woefully unprepared to make successful sales calls because they’re still speaking “seller” when the language has changed to “buyer.”
• Salespeople desperately need content, and they need guidance about how to use it. This is marketing’s job…and marketing has not done a great job at this.
• Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is often camouflaged. It needs to be loud and clear, in the form of case studies, white papers, webinars and great content.
• Decision makers today have chaotic lives. They’re overburdened and burned out. Their psyches cry out for “don’t waste my time” sales and marketing content that simplifies your value proposition and makes their lives easier.
• Buyers want to talk to experts. People who know their vertical, its pitfalls and challenges. Good content fills this need, and supports the sales process.
• Whether you’re in sales or marketing, ask yourself: have you aligned with the buyer’s objectives? Does your content reflect this? If not, you’re toast.
• Content must demonstrate value, and be delivered for short attention spans.
• Acknowledge and work within the customer’s process:
1) Allowing Access – takes 8-12 contacts to achieve this.
2) Decision to Initiate Change – where clients break out of the status quo.
3) Decision on which option to choose – Content quality can make or break this.
• The acronym says it all – Simple; iNvaluable; Aligned; Prioritized (SNAP)”

“The Importance of Context: Why Enterprise 2.0 Still Fails to Deliver Value” (AARON ROE FULKERSON Aug 25, 2010)

Four ways Gen Y is changing the B2B sales process

’4 Ways Gen Y Is Changing the B-to-B Sales Process’ by Hallie Mummert, from July 21, 2010:

“As the older segment of Gen Y—the population segment generally defined as being born between 1980 and the early 2000s—takes on bigger roles in the buying process for their employers, B-to-B firms are challenged to adapt their selling strategies.

A survey of 300 managers up to age 35 was conducted last year by Chicago integrated marketing agency Colman Brohan Davis and research firm E-RM. The results indicated a “propensity for social and interactive communications,” the agency reported. In fact, only four out of the 13 tools that respondents indicated they use to research products and services are traditional media, and the agency noted that even their influence was waning. Use of social networks, on the other hand, had increased 152 percent year over year. [...]“

See the entire two pages long post and comments here.

Jill Konrath on Closing the Gap between Marketing & Sales

On July 21, 2010 manticoretechnology.com/blog/ posted ‘Thought Leadership Interview: Jill Konrath on Closing the Gap between Marketing and Sales’:

“[...] CD: What does marketing need to do to get salespeople to use the content they provide?

JK: Write good content. Most of what marketing produces today sucks. It’s self-serving tripe that highlights the company’s fabulous products, unique methodologies and state-of-the-art technologies. When sellers use this type of content, it trivializes them with customers. They’re seen as product-pushing peddlers who add little value to the sales process.

Educate the sales force. After an eternity of only getting crap from marketing, salespeople don’t have a clue how to use good content. They need to know how to follow up effectively on leads with content during the sales process.

Make it simple. Salespeople don’t have a lot of time. If it’s scattered across the website, it won’t be used. If it’s not intuitive, it won’t be used. Make it as much a no-brainer as possible.

CD: In SNAP Selling, you talk about the prospect’s three decisions. What are they and how do they related to content?

JK: Basically prospects make three primary decisions when it comes to dealing with salespeople.

Their 1^st Decision is to “allow access” to them. Sellers may only want a small amount of their time, but today’s crazy-busy buyers are stingy with it. At this stage, salespeople could use content related to the value other firms have used from using the company’s offering. This supports their reason for getting together and increases their chances of setting up a meeting.

The prospect’s 2^nd Decision is to “initiate change” – which is something they are loathe to do with everything else on their calendar. Sellers desperately need good content to help prospects determine if making a change would provide significant value for their organization. This could include case studies, white papers, podcasts, articles, analyst reports and more.

Finally, the prospect’s 3^rd Decision is to “select resources.” At this phase, sellers need content that differentiates them from other vendors and supports the company’s strengths.

Please notice that I didn’t say brochures. They provide little value except at the very end of the sales process. In my opinion, fancy four-color glossies are a relic of the past – even though salespeople may still be clamoring for them. There are enough sales dinosaurs out there who haven’t yet realized that brochures create significant collateral damage and destroy more opportunities than they gain. [...]“

See the full interview and comments here.

Reading list – July 9, 2010

All blog posts below were posted on July 9, 2010:

The Sales Force of the Future

More on Social Media and B2B Buying Cycles

How Knowledge Management Is Moving Away From the Repository as Goal
(video blog)

Implementing Sales Enablement

slideshare.net/dbatup/implementing-sales-enablement by David Batup, founder of perperitus.com:

David sums up Sales Enablement as “a range of activities, disciplines and thinking focused on removing the barriers that often get in the way of successfully closing deals”.

“Sales enablement is all about maximising the outcome of the opportunity development time a salesperson has, and minimising the time spent on activities that can only be described, unkindly by some, as sales procrastination. To do this, sales enablement is about preparation for, the holding of, and follow-up from customer meetings to ensure the salesperson has the greatest chance of success, where success is moving the sale forward or closing.”

“Central to sales enablement is the idea of harnessing the knowledge and best practices of your best salespeople (the so-called ‘rainmakers’), to the benefit of the whole sales operation. And it is also about approaching the sales cycle not from the perspective of your company’s products and services, but from your customers’ perspective.”

“I suggest the major steps for sales enablement are:

• Understand how to articulate your products to customers’ business needs, buying cycle and information needs. Engage with your top performing salespeople
• Overlay the ‘moments of truth’ (MOT) onto the customer’s buying cycle to create an MOT map and include the levels of responsiveness required to meet their needs
• Define the sales enablement problem from the perspective of the customer and salespeople’s needs. Identify the collateral, tools and solutions that will support the salesperson before and after the appointment
• Invest in developing or aligning your assets to meet the customer’s business and process needs. Deploy the assets in a way that makes them easily accessible to sales, ensure they are in the context of the sales cycle and where appropriate provide customer self-service [...]“

“[...] Sales and marketing teams may say, “So what, this is what we do already, isn’t it?” But there is evidence that there is still a big shortfall in the way salespeople are prepared for and conduct themselves in front of the customer, relative to the customers’ expectations.[...]“

• 57% of customers felt the salesperson was not prepared for the meeting
• 33% of customers say deals could have been won if the salesperson had been better prepared
• 65% of sales time is spent not selling
• 7 hours a week is what the average salesperson spends looking for relevant information to prepare for sales calls
• 70%–90% of marketing material goes unused by sales
• 50% of information is pushed through email
• It takes an average of 7 months to ramp up a new salesperson.

Every now and then there is a discussion on the definition of Sales Enablement

Every now and then there is a discussion on the definition of Sales Enablement. I tried to capture some at salesenablement.wordpress.com/about/ and here.

Craig Rosenberg (@funnelholic), author of the b2b sales and marketing blog funnelholic.com, started the discussion “How do you define Sales Enablement?”, on May 25, 2010:

A user called “ED” responded with the following interesting point amongst other points:

“[...] I don’t define it as sales enablement; rather I use “Sales Optimization”. I say as I had one rather perturbed head of global sales once say “My sales people don’t need enablement from marketing”. So I’m always careful as to how I position the effort. [...]“

Ardath Albee from marketinginteractions.typepad.com wrote the following response:

“1. Sales enablement is the process for helping salespeople to have conversations with buyers that the buyers’ perceive as valuable because the interactions is focused on helping them to achieve a high-priority business objective.
2. Sales enablement puts the conversational tools, storyline and end-stage content at a salesperson’s fingertips to help them engage buyers by focusing on what their products enable buyers to achieve, rather than the feeds and speeds of the products themselves. I agree with ED’s idea above that every marketing program should have a sales chapter.
3. Sales enablement is jointly owned by marketing and sales. Unless both sides collaborate on what’s needed (content, conversational guides, personas, etc.), integrate it with top of the funnel programs and construct a seamless end-to-end process across the cycle, no one is enabled.
In fact, this process should actually be called “buyer enablement.” The focus needs to be on helping buyers buy, not selling them products/solutions. That’s what drives relevance. The kicker is that both marketing and sales have insights that must be merged to create the best overall process. Marketing and sales are not two separate functions – not for buyers.”

A user called “perramond” said the following amongst other things:

“[...] Customer 2.0 doesn’t need your data sheets, positioning docs, competitive matrix, etc. They can find all that stuff (as well as your competitors’) without your help. So when your sales people do engage, they had better come to the table with something relevant and timely, something that helps the customer move to the next step in diagnosing and addressing an important business problem (wherever they might be in their buying process, vs. where they fall in your sales process.) [...]“

Tamara Schenk (@tamaraschenk) (Portfolio & Offering Management – Innovation Center; T-Systems International GmbH) wrote the following:

“Our sales enablement initiative is based on the broad Forrester definition. Important criteria from my viewpoint are: it is a cross-functional discipline, it is a strategic ongoing process and it has very ambitious objectives: to equip all people touching the accounts with the right information in a well-structured, reusable way at all stages of the customers problem solving process / the customers buying cycle. Most important in an approach like this:

Sales enablement will deliver measurable business outcome!
Who owns sales enablement: I’m always wondering when this question appears. Wouldn’t we overcome “functional silo thinking” with an integrated sales enablement approach? As I see sales enablement as a joined approach, there can be no dedicated owner. There will be major stakeholders and other stakeholders, and normally one business unit sitting in the driver seat. And that’s not necessarily sales or marketing – portfolio & offering management can also be in a leading role.”

Let me extend what Tamara Schenk said:

It’s a cross-functional discipline, it’s a strategic ongoing process and it has very ambitious objectives: to equip all people touching the accounts (more than just presales and sales) with the right information (sales playbooks, campaign information, ROI calculators and alike, documents/links, contact details of subject matter experts, etc.) in a well-structured (what is applicable where, who authored what, what can be used for how long?), reusable way (output in different formats or even auto-generation of tailored content) across all silos in the enterprise and in the right language(!) at all stages of the customers problem solving process / the customers buying cycle.

Having been on the enterprise side and having seen how many marketing dollars go into content production and towards polishing the look&feel I want to highlight how important it is that the money is only spent on content that works (content planning, content intelligence like tracking usage and ratings/comments) and if possible can even be done in-house.