Sales and Fulfillment
Five ways in which content can help in converting sales
What’s common to doctors, architects, designers, and carpenters? All of them have a set of tools specific to their skills. It may surprise you to know that salespeople have similar requirements. Sales enablement is the “toolkit” that sales teams need from their organisation-the provision of effective resources which help them consistently engage with clients at every stage of the selling process. Sales enablement comes in many forms-content, information, processes, and training materials, for example, which enable sales teams to develop strategies to drive sales.
In this toolkit, sales enablement content-videos, blogs, brochures, case studies and more-hugely influences the number of successful sales efforts. Smartly designed content helps to boost the sales team’s efforts in multiple ways by:
- Spreading brand awareness
- Generating leads
- Establishing thought leadership
- Offering insight into customer psychology, and
- Building audience engagement.
An effective sales process management solution, consisting of production, storage, organisation, and distribution of content, enables sales teams to dramatically reduce the time between the initial pitch and a successful sale.
Let’s look at ways in which content must be developed to enable your sales team to close deals.
1. Empowering sales teams
Even the most creative content needs to be managed well for sales teams to leverage their power. An effective sales content management strategy dramatically reduces the time span between the initial pitch and a successful sale.
Also, a good content management system allows teams to organise sales collateral based on the sales team’s needs, the region in which the team members are based, target audiences, themes, and campaigns. Content should be made available in a single place rather than multiple sources to facilitate easy access.
2. Developing and sustaining audience engagement
B2B selling is a lengthy process. Sales teams can take months to close a sale. During this time, it’s important that the leads they develop don’t lose interest and drift away. Content that sparks curiosity and inspires meaningful discussions helps salespeople to keep their audience engaged over the long haul.
3. Addressing customer pain points
Content that is of practical use to prospects attracts genuine interest and can drive the path to conversion. Content also helps salespeople to keep networked and connected with prospective clients.* To develop such content, content marketers must collaborate with salespeople who interact with customers every day and are ideally placed to offer critical insight into content development strategy. Working with sales teams, content marketers can understand the challenges and concerns their target market faces and write content that addresses customers’ problems.
Further, once content is published, the feedback from salespeople on how the content resonates with customers can help marketers fine-tune their strategy for the future.
4. Using diverse content types
Typically, content marketing is associated with blog articles and social media posts. But while blogs and social media play an important role in building brand awareness and generating leads, there are other tools—product information sheets, cheat sheets and brochures, for example—that can help salespeople tangibly demonstrate the value of their company’s product or service. Further along the sales funnel, content in the form of white papers and case studies helps customers evaluate organisations to make informed decisions. Diverse content, tailored to meet the challenges thrown up at every phase in the selling process, helps drive sales forward.
5. Strategizing smaller conversions
Hiking up conversion rates is not a straight road; typically, many smaller conversions are needed on the way towards a final sale. Content can enable a sales team’s efforts through several means such as drawing in newsletter subscribers, sales enquiries, or e-book downloads.
Content is a critical component in sales enablement. Arming your sales “warriors” with practical, engaging and easily accessible content that pushes deals forward means that salespeople, always hard-pressed for time and resources, can better focus on selling.
Finally, no matter how delighted your sales team is with the content they have been provided, you arrive at this question: how does one know which content pieces have worked and which have not? The answer to this lies in analytics. Typically, content marketers judge the success of their campaigns by measuring website traffic. However, web statistics cannot provide granular data. For example, it cannot say which sections in a blog resonated with the readers. Heat mapping tools reveal how readers interact with web pages—where they pause to read, whether they are using important elements like CTAs and links or whether non-clickable elements are distracting them. Other analytics tools provide page-by-page analytics on how your content is performing. Using this, a marketer can, for instance, track whether a prospective customer has opened and read an information sheet provided to him by a salesperson.
Content, in its many avatars, namely, blogs, e-books, videos, social media posts, case studies and more, is akin to an energy that can propel leads to your salespeople and support them in the path to conversion. Leverage the power of content marketing with a digital content management service, devised in collaboration with your sales team.
*For organizations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed on organizational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism, will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organizations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organizations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.