Why Sales Pros Don’t Trust Content Marketing
Business to business sales professionals simply don’t trust content marketing. Why? Because many B2B sales professionals believe that content marketing has become the only thing that their marketing peers are focused on. They see varying forms of content that may or may not be of use in their sales cycles. And they observe the multitude of unqualified leads that seem to result from a content marketing approach. Sales is suspect of the approach, and in some cases unhappy that content marketing is the main demand generating activity of the marketing group.
How has it come to this? Because sales isn’t completely bought in to the idea that they can effectively use what marketing produces to get their latest deal to the next stage.
To build the trust that the B2B sales force has in content marketing we need to consider how the sales process mirrors the marketing funnel. Both sales and marketing have to also realize that small space that exists between the marketing qualified to sales qualified lead transition is not a flat left to right reality, but multi-dimensional no-man’s land that any prospect can end up in. Neither teams, sales nor marketing, want prospects in that no man’s land. Properly applied content that aligns not just to the marketing funnel process, but to the movement of a deal from stage to stage is a sure fire way out of that no man’s land. This is the foundation of trust that can be built between sales and marketing where content is concerned.
Marketers don’t own the sales process, they simply don’t. But what they must own is an intimate understanding of the sales process, especially from the perspective of what will help their sales peers in moving prospects from stage to stage and closer to close. What this means for our content marketing efforts is that we have to develop every single piece of content as it will assist sales in moving their deals along. Does this double our effort? No it does not because a piece that aids the sales process at a particular stage is easily applied to moving a lead from say the top of the funnel to the middle. It does, however, demand a more disciplined content production process, and improved communication to sales about how the content affects deal stages.
Moreover marketing must understand that the sales team being supported by the content has a taller task today than it did even five years ago. Latter part of 2000s into the ‘10s most B2B sales forces were able to rely on a large and well compensated sales support infrastructure. Those infrastructures have all but disappeared because they are too costly to maintain and don’t align well with the nature of most B2B pricing models (think of today’s SaaS subscription versus the multi-million dollar license deal of yesterday).
Complicating matters is the fact that buyers of all services have become significantly more educated about their buying process. Google makes anyone who is willing to bone up about what they are about to buy a specialist. Not a new trend to sure, but one that has only gained momentum in the social media age. The person you are selling to today knows their pains, the solution they seek, and what they can expect to pay for it more than ever before.
So in this environment how do we build the sales team’s confidence in our content marketing efforts? By aligning nearly every single piece of content against not the marketing funnel but the sales process. Heresy you say? Absolutely not. Marketing’s job is to know the buyer, and this knowledge must get us to a point where our targeting is more often than not developing a marketing qualified lead. And once in MQL land we’re working to furiously uncover buying readiness and signals as fast as possible. This is what sales professionals do for a living, nurture their prospects in an effort to move them to a decision. If our content is aiding them in their efforts to do this then they will naturally become not only trusting of the content but dependent upon it to manage their prospects through every stage of the deal.
The best way for marketers to strength the sales teams confidence in content marketing? Run every piece of content thorough this simple test; “Does this help sales move their deal to the next stage?” If the answer is no the content probably shouldn’t be produced.
