Take the Pressure Off Your Sales Team, Let Content Educate Your Prospects

Hopefully this blog will help you see how digital marketing and inbound methodologies can take the pressure off your sales team. I'm not aware of anything as effective as inbound marketing to generate leads, condition the market, shorten the sales cycle, and keep your sales team from cold-calling.

With all the effective options in the world of digital advertising, it's easy to take your eye off of proven methods like inbound marketing with content as the backbone. Don't. As an agency, we've shifted a good bit of our focus to getting better at Facebook and LinkedIn ads. We've created a strategic partnership to offer IP targeting services for clients where this tool makes sense. We have the ability to offer retargeting ad campaigns for our clients, as well. And, yes, we still use Google PPC ads to drive traffic before we've earned those SERP rankings organically. These are all great tools in the toolbox. However, the lead still has to convert and they don't always convert at the bottom of the funnel.

The traditional business to business sales model is to hire a sales force, then hire more sales force, then hire a couple more sales people. At some point, a marketing person may come into the mix, but marketing most likely falls to the owner, operations manager, or even a sales person. We see this a lot as we're out prospecting in the B2B world. Whenever there is a longer sales cycle, sales people enter the equation. When sales people enter the equation, it's important to help them be as efficient as possible.

6 Reasons Why Your Content Takes the Pressure Off Your Sales Team

1. Content helps overcome objections for your sales team. Every objection can become a blog post that addresses the objection. Now you can have your sales team tell prospects, "We addressed your concern in a recent post," then email away and prepare for follow-up.
2. Content educates your prospects whether they are kicking tires, or starting to truly consider your product or service. Let a pricing guide on your website do the compare and contrast of your products or competitors and save your sales team the time.
3. Content conditions the market by messaging about how your product or service sets itself apart. Let website visitors know about your unique selling proposition and distinguish yourself from the competition. Your content may be the difference in whether or not your industry looks to you as a thought-leader or a mere peddler of goods and services.
4. Content shortens the sales cycle by creating content downloads for the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. We call these the awareness, consideration, and decision phases. A good goal is to create content for each phase, which helps shorten the sales cycle and saves time for the sales force.
5. Content can automate marketing emails and help take your prospects down the funnel. It turns a marketing lead into a sales lead, ready for follow-up. This not only helps the sales team, but is a handy tool for marketing.
6. Content helps build a larger audience of prospects and helps turn those who have already bought into advocates, raving fans, and promoters. This is where social content can really come into play to build your brand and to generate leads.

If you're considering on hiring that next sales person, maybe you should consider investing in content marketing or inbound marketing first to make the job easier for those sales people already starving for good, warm leads.

Contact us to learn more about getting started down this road.