The 4 Steps to Align Content Marketing and Sales

Sales doesn’t trust content marketing, they don’t have the patience to leverage content marketing, and they don’t even really care about content marketing unless it delivers to them highly qualified leads.  The reason for this is because most content marketing efforts are only aligned to the marketing funnel and not necessarily to the the sales process.  There are four simple steps that can be used to better align content marketing and sales. 

1. Understand the Trends that Your Marketplace Cares About

You are doing this already?  Well great, but my bet is you’re giving the trends that impact your customers’ businesses a cursory look so that you and your sales staff are aware of them.  That is a good step, but to better align content marketing and sales you have to take a good hard look at the details of the trend and better understand the nuance of how the trend impacts your customers’ businesses.   

align-content-marketing-and-salesNeed an example? Well go find your copy of marketing myopia, dust it off and revisit the dilemma that buggy whip makers had on their hands when the combustion engine went into mass production.  These sorts of trends are happening in your customers’ market every single year.  You need to be intimately familiar with them, and offer up strong recommendations on handling the impacts of these trends. 

2. Pick the Most Interesting Trend to Talk and Write About

There are likely going to be two to five significant trends that your customers care about, so which one do you pick?  The one that allows you to tell the most grabbing story without going to dramatic extremes.  This is tricky because it demands a creative element that will help weave together say two or more degrees of separation to make the story compelling.

To do this we use a simple formula:

Trend + Impact = A Very Specific Action to Take to Address the Trend

Example using the marking myopia buggy whip:

Mass production of internal combustion engine + Buggy Whip rendered useless = Buggy Whip Manufactures must turn their craftsmanship towards the the new ‘horseless carriage’ interior.

What is the “if-then” of the trends that are impacting you customers, and how can your product or service help them address those impacts?

3. Create, create and create some more against that story

Once we have the formula down, and we know how to address the “then” we go hard at telling the story.  We cover every detail, we define every nuance, we offer every viable insight.  And we do so consistently, and in every way that our ability to produce content allows  We write, we create images, we do audio, video, interviews, press, you name it.  We create a story that leads our customers not to our marketing funnel but to the natural decision point that they’ll be forced to eventually make because of the trend. 

4. Enable Sales to Tell the Story

We are obviously going to use this story to drive inbound marketing activity, but more importantly we are going to arm sales with the narrative.  We are going to help them to become masters of the story, and help them to broadcast and communicate the story to their prospects.  Help them challenge their customers’ status quo and force their customers to get to their natural decision point a little more quickly than if we didn’t share the story with them at all. 

We align our content marketing and sales with perspective, impact, and action.

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