Give Sales the Tools to Effectively Align Marketing Content with Customer Needs
Key Ideas
- Align content to customer — as individuals — to drive higher levels of engagement.
- Sales teams are struggling to use content quickly and efficiently.
- Ensure consistent content is flowing from marketing to sales to buyers — from generating initial interest to nurturing them through all stages of the sales cycle.
- You can measure effectiveness of focused content on specific buyers quickly.
The days of "one size fits all" marketing messaging are long gone. Today, there is a clear uptick in marketer focus on understanding their buyers — both what they are listening for and the journey they go through to make purchasing decisions. Let's say you understand the different buyer types that your sales team needs to reach. A crucial step is to position your offering using content that's focused to these buyers — but perhaps the most difficult step is feeding this knowledge, content, and context to your sales channel.
Giving buyers the content they need makes it easier for them to do business with you.
Align content to customers — as individuals — to drive higher levels of engagement
Matching the right content to customers starts with understanding their specific — not generic — circumstances. While marketing may have provided a number of resources to help a Chief Operating Officer (COO) persona along the buyer journey, a specific customer may only need economic value studies, contracts for review, and case studies with testimonials from fellow COOs — or they may need something completely different.
Giving sales the ability to engage with customers as individuals, presenting content tailored to their specific needs and values, is an investment in a higher level of engagement vs. relying only on generalized marketing content.
Sales teams struggle to use content effectively and quickly
Your customers are busy — just like you — and don't want to sift through stacks of marketing materials. Yet salespeople may default into an overwhelming “more is better” or untargeted “spray and pray” approach when it comes to content.
Take a look at these statistics from Forrester®1:
- 60% percent of business buyers say that sales vendors give them too much content, and many find that the content they get is useless to them.
- 2/3 of sellers can spend up to 10 hours a week modifying marketing content before sharing it with their customers — that's a lot of time spent not selling.
Failure to use content effectively hurts both sales and marketing. Content-related pain points for Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and Chief Revenue Officers (CROs) include:
- Under-utilized sales content
- Sellers spending too much time searching for content
- Lack of content alignment to buyer's specific needs
- Slow response time with needed information
- Lack of visibility into which content is working — and which is not
Additional factors include demands to reduce sales cycles, improve collaboration between sales and marketing, and enhance sales representative efficiency.
Organizing content effectively — such as by market or by stage in the sales cycle — can enable and educate sales.
A consistent flow of effective buyer-focused content is critical
Generating content with the right talk track for different types of buyers can be a good start, but putting that content to its best use can be challenging in the field. Buyer personas may help marketing identify your target audience, but this type of profiling (or worse, stereotyping) doesn't help salespeople connect with customers as individuals. Instead, focus on providing a consistent flow of effective content that sales can match with the right buyer.
Sales needs the flexibility (and tool simplicity) to connect content with each customer's specific needs and questions. They also need to be able to retrieve and share information at the moment it's helpful — not hours (or even days) later when buyer interest has cooled.
Marketing needs metrics to know which content is working and which is not. They also need fewer demands on their time so they can focus on enhancing program effectiveness and producing quality content.
Marketing can craft content for anticipated customer needs and put it in the hands of their salespeople.
Driving consistency between content marketing activities and deal cycles with sales is key. When you can ensure useful content is flowing from marketing to sales to buyers, facilitating the buyer journey — from generating initial interest to nurturing them through all stages of the sales cycle — becomes more effective
Quickly measure effectiveness of content focused on specific buyers
In order to push the right content to sales and keep opportunities moving forward, marketing needs to know what's being used and whether or not it aligns with current strategies. Without this information, it can be very difficult to get outdated, off-brand or ineffective content out of circulation.
With metrics for sales content, marketing can devise strategies and provide sales with content that will resonate with customers.
For example, let's say your dashboard metrics show that an economic value study is being widely used. This can give insight into the customer needs your sales team is likely engaging with, as well as the specific content that is being used most. If metrics show that clicks are consistently high relative to clicks for other content, you have likely aligned that content with the right customer and at the right time in the sales cycle.
Metrics about content use and engagement provide insights to sales and marketing.
Flipdeck is purpose-built for sales content
We designed Flipdeck to make it easy to share the right content with buyers — and make your business look good. Our simple cards & decks approach helps ensure that your sales team can quickly find and deliver content that best matches their customer's individual needs, driving higher engagement and accelerating the sales cycle. For even more personalization, the Collections feature enables salespeople to gather content cards into a publicly available (or password-protected) URL that can be easily shared with customers.
Why Flipdeck?
- Visually consistent structure that's easy to navigate
- No need to move content from its existing location or build an underlying repository
- Collections functionality enables sales to group, personalize, and share content with individual customers
- Gives marketing insights and control to push the right properly branded content
- Adds value to Direct sales, Channel marketing, and Inside sales
- Easy to use, fast to start, and low cost
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