7 Steps to Help Sales Trust Content Marketing
Sales teams, especially business to business sales teams with complex deal cycles, simply do not trust content marketing. This distrust is sadly ironic because a well executed content strategy not only helps the marketing team drive demand into the marketing funnel, it also provides strong sales support at every single stage of the sales cycle. If the sales team doesn’t see it this way it is likely that they believe the available content doesn’t help move deals ahead, and instead leads to huge volumes of unqualified leads.
Fixing this perception demands that the marketing team humbly look in the mirror and determine why the perception exists. It means figuring out how to better orient content so that it directly impacts deal stages. The Best way to get started? Dust off the standard sales pitch deck.
There is plenty of bad PowerPoint out there, and we always need to be careful to develop our slides in a way that support and underscore the main point of what is being verbally communicated. Sales teams are dependent upon PowerPoint to help them punctuate the unique perspective they are selling to their prospects. So the standard PowerPoint sales deck is the perfect place to start improving the trust that sales has of content, and these 7 steps will help guide that effort.
1. Diagram Deal Stages: Is our sales process completely ‘us-centric’ used to help our company manage our activities and pipeline? Or is it aligned to the manner in which our customers make their decisions? To figure this out marketing and sales needs to work together (preferably in the same room) to talk through what defines each deal stage and what part of the story is necessary to communicate at each stage. For example a popular descriptor in the sales cycle is frequently ‘has budget’, meaning that the prospect has a line item that aligns with what we are selling. That is important to be sure, but the prospect’s decision criteria is more detailed than just that one line item. What are the trade offs for them, what are the pressures for those same budget dollars, and what people are impacted when those dollars are spent? Marketing and sales working together on this exercise immediately helps place some much needed context around the standard ‘pitch deck’
Identify Major and Minor Themes of the Pitch Deck: With the more colorfully defined prospect-centric deal stages in hand, the next step is to order the pitch deck against these stages. The goal is to being to frame out the major themes that are important to communicate and then group all the supporting minor variations of those themes that the sales team will have to communicate in order to move deals from one stage to the next. Another exercise best done with marketing and sales working face to face. The result is usually a simple outline of the story that the different parts of the deck tell to our prospects.
Create and Order Slides with 80/20 Customization: This step is where marketing begins to prove to sales they are all about making it easier for sales to do their job. With the major and minor themes defined against the deal stages the actual slides are now created against that outline. They are built with standardization in mind, yet allowing sales to quickly and easily customize them enough to suit each individual prospect. The slides must be built with the idea that 80% of the content is delivered as built, while the remaining 20% is quick and easily customized.
Create a Lego Bin: Children for decades have used legos to reflect their imagination. The resulting standard sales deck must be legos for the sales team. Stored in some kind of library (a bin if you will) that makes it easy for sales to find, decide quickly which slides they should be using when, and used to craft a more imaginative tale to their prospect when one is called for. Here marketing helps sales stay true to the message while enabling them to exercise their discretion over how that message is shared.
Create Content on the Newly Defined Foundation: The next step is to consciously align content against each step in the sales cycle, and each section of the newly refined standard pitch. Those major and minor themes we developed are perfect chapters to the perfect story. Content production should follow those chapters, and marketing must clearly communicate to the sales team how each piece of content aligns with that collaboratively developed standard pitch deck.
Create Short Stories: The pitch deck is likely to be long when put completely together, but there are plenty of sound bytes to be found across the entire story. Marketing must distill these sound bytes into short stories that boil those major themes down to presentations that can be used anywhere and everywhere sales or marketing has opportunity to tell the message. One example is to make preview reels, or ‘movie trailers’ of those major themes. Five to ten slides that when presented are two to three minutes long. Sales instantly has conversation starters or extenders, and marketing has videos clips that they can use in their demand generating activity.
Create More Variations on the Themes: The last step is to stay true to the collaborative work between sales and marketing, and use the results to continuously create new versions of the story in different formats. Visual, audio, video, written, ebooks, white-papers, presentations, webinars, and on and on. Content used to drive demand, and completely aligned to helping sales.
The approach will not only increase the trust your sales team has in content marketing, but it will make it easy for them to use the resulting content to naturally drive their deals from one stage to another.
