What is your sales content DOING while the Buyer is engaged with it?

Most businesses only focus on what sales content IS – not what it DOES. And that has a hugely negative impact on revenue. Why?

Statistics clearly show that today’s B2B Buyers don’t want to speak to sales reps. Instead, they want highly-personalized smart content through which they can self-progress and be fully educated, compelled, and convinced that the purchase is right for them and their business. THEN they’ll reach out to sales – to close the deal.

Just look at this new report from Demand Gen Report.

Now, what the content IS – is important. It obviously needs to align with the kinds of questions Buyers will have in each stage of their journey – for example educating the Buyer more specifically about the product early on, then in the later stages proving how it solves their very specific painpoints, then, finally, clearly showing the bottom-line value it can bring to the business.

But now comes the big question – how exactly do you “show” and “prove” these specific things to this specific Buyer while they are in the content? Back to what the content must DO.

This type of bi-directional information and persuasion has always rested with the sales reps as they lead the buying conversation. But with Buyers increasingly ignoring these reps – that simply can no longer be the case. The answer is simple…

You now must plan and build STRATEGIC SALES INTERACTIONS WITHIN THE CONTENT that do the same thing this sales rep would. The Buyer provides some information in the content via some method of input and IMMEDIATELY gets back highly personalized and relevant answers just as if they were on the phone with the rep.

And this takes us to the graphic below. The good news is that through newer marketing and sales models such as ABM and Revenue Marketing, both teams are now collaboratively overlapping their efforts across the entire Buyer Journey (as opposed to outdated Lead Gen and Demand Gen models which left much of this work to the SDR). But most of this work and alignment has been far more about internal operations (and/or top-of-funnel efforts) than it has been about working together to give these Buyers the FULL-FUNNEL content-driven sales journeys they demand. And this too has to change.

Sales teams now need a CLEAR INFORMATION STRATEGY that aligns with Buyers’ content demands at each stage of the pipeline. And they need to work more closely with marketing (and content creators) to create this kind of sophisticated, strategically interactive smart content that enables the new content-based sales conversation.

This is the new era of self-serve, automated sales development. Are you part of it?