Studies have shown that the typical sales rep spends about 35% of their time with prospects. That leaves 65% of their time doing other things like composing and developing sales content of their own.
If you have a marketing team, this sales time is highly redundant, not to mention possibly inconsistent with your core brand and messaging.
How can you make the best possible use of your sales team time and marketing’s quality content generation?
Marketing and sales politics
80% of reps and managers say they don’t read the content that their marketing department publishes. As a result, sales and marketing teams often lose touch, especially when it comes to motivating customers to buy, and in cross and up-selling opportunities.
Education
It is important to make sure that your marketing team is educating the sales team about the meaning and objective of the content, at what point in the sales process that it is most appropriate to introduce it to the customer, and how to use specific content to provoke a mindset shift.
Sales people want relevant and thought-provoking content, that is tightly focused on the product and solutions their company sells. They also want it to be easy to understand and communicate to the client, so that it is effective in growing accounts and making sales.
If the content strategy is too complex, often the sales department will say it doesn’t work, and just use their own improvised content, wasting their own, and marketing’s time and efforts.
Quality content
Content marketing can start well before sales is even in the picture. Quality content can be communicated in more ways than ever before – email, networking, tweeting, social media; all enabling your company to capture the prospect’s attention until they are ready to have a conversation with a sales rep. The sales department then needs to be able to amplify that content, and may also need additional content specific to the selling process.
Plan for content – collaboratively
All of this requires a well-thought out content plan that includes both the marketing department and the sales team collaborating. They need to evaluate the effectiveness of current content, reusing what is effective, and revising what is not. Marketing departments can facilitate the use of their content by creating creative pathways for the sales team to convey this information to clients, preferably ways they can reuse, like email templates, video emails, or personalized web pages for the clients to look at.
Developing content marketing ideas as a group ensures that content development and delivery is effective and efficient.
Improve sales
Content marketing and the sales process have to be in constant communication for a truly effective sales process.
Marketing needs to educate sales reps about how to use their content in a timely manner, and also listen to what is working and what is not.
Sales reps need to trust in the brand message and work to creatively convey sales information to prospects and clients in a way that is appropriate and useful.
This approach continually and consistently offers value to clients in a way that builds momentum and interest, and ultimately sales, at the same time reducing redundant content development for both sales and marketing teams.
