The Content That Drives Sales: Increasing Use in Your Team
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The Content That Drives Sales: Increasing Use in Your Team
Why Content?
Why Isn’t It Used?
Increase Relevance
Build a Virtuous
Cycle
We Will Cover
Impressive Marketing Statistic?
60% of the buyer journey is complete before a prospect
reaches sales
Does that number seem right?A low hurdle for a B2C buyer to purchase a product
means that a sales person could slow down a buyer’s journey. But is that the case for your B2B sale?
Solu
tion
Com
plex
ity
Buying Environment Complexity
Try and Buy
Challenge
As complexity of solution and buying environment increase, the value of a sales person increases.
The Reality for Sales People
In-market for your solution
As little as 3 – 5% of your prospects are looking for your solution now – are your sales reps prepped to have the best conversations with them?
Most prospects are experiencing pain, but not current priority
Inbound / Outbound /
Allbound
The average B2B purchase
includes 20 individuals.
Source: Four Quadrant
• Sales people need to engage their prospects and identify pains in these accounts.
• Sales people need to build coalitions of support across the decision making committee.
• Marketers support the sales team as they seek to build out a justification for changing the status quo.
• Marketers should directly support sales people to build a business case for change.
The Buying Environment
What are the priorities of your prospects?
Help sales address those priorities. Develop a business case for your product or service.
Help sales reps challenge the status quo of your prospects.
Changing the Demand Waterfall
Marketing andSales
Marketing
Sales
Traditional New Demand Waterfall
How important is content to your sales process? 99%
of sales people said content is a critical part of their
sales processes.Respondents = somewhat or very
How often do you use content in sales process?
Just 20% of sales people add value to buyers.Source: Forrester
When prospects don’t see value from their
sales people, they don’t have the information
they need to influence change across the 20
influencers in their companies.
They simply won’t be able to push through and change anything.
More than 80% of marketing content is unused by sales.Source: IDCWithout content, sales reps are less engaging and less likely to advance a deal
So, why the gap between use and need?
Two major challenges:
Challenge 1:Can’t Find What They Need
“When we surveyed the sales team, one result really stood out. It was clear that sales teams were losing
time looking for or re-creating content for prospects.”
VP, Sales Operations
“We wanted a way to arm sales reps with valuable content that supports the sales cycle.”
Director, Marketing Operations
Challenge 2:Sales Needs Confidence in Your Content
The remainder of this slide deck will address this challenge in three
sub-points.
Detailed technical needs?
What about: High-level content?
Infographics and blog posts might be great for awareness and interest. But they aren’t necessarily the kinds of pieces that help build a business case, especially later in the sales process.
It resonated with prospects and met their information
needs
Why did specific content win?
It worked in a given sales
situation – not one-size-fits-all
Number of reps that don’t know how best to use
or share their organization’s
content:
How do I use the content?
41%
How to Address These Issues
+Sales people that are
armed with summaries and templates are
significantly more likely to share unfamiliar
content.
Provide Email Templates
Content Takeaways /
Stats
#1 A Starting Point: Email Templates
IndustryProduct
Buyer Persona
Primary Pain
Sales Stage …other
2. Did It Win?How did the content perform in these situations:
• They send digests to their sales teams weekly letting them know which content their colleagues used and which content was most effective.
• They rank content recommendations to reps based on the Sales Content Impact score. This number assesses the effectiveness of content by sales situation.
• They push recommendations to peers based on the actual closed won deals. This is like a win wire, except instead of passively advising reps on what content worked for a deal, our customers suggest winning content to reps with similar sales situations.
Our customers identify what content wins in several ways:
IndustryProduct
Buyer Persona
Primary Pain
Sales Stage …other
Did it work?Which content should you build?Do you know what content works in the
sales funnel?
Get qualitative feedback from the sales team;
Use it to re-evaluate your content portfolio from a sales
perspective
Segment by industry, sales stage, solution area, geography, or
persona
Quantitative Feedback: Measure, produce, measure.
(This approach can double the rate of engagement prospects have with sales)
Then track which content is used in each
sales situation and measure effectiveness and attribute revenue
Amount of B2B budget that goes to content that sales doesn’t use: 18%
Early Sales Stage Late Sales Stage
Research Findings: We analyzed 1 million content shares performed by our participating customers. A few of the findings, separated by stage….
Early Sales Stage Results:What Content Sales Reps Share
34%Presentation Sales Content
Impact Score
32%Implementation Guide Sales
Content Impact Score
29%Video Sales Content Impact
Score
Late Sales Stage Results:What Content Sales Reps Share
72%Video Sales Content Impact
Score
69%Case Study Sales Content
Impact Score
52%Datasheet Sales Content
Impact Score
KnowledgeTree customers find that:
more content gets used
Push
Prove
Predict
In summary, if reps aren’t using your content:
Predict which content is effective by sales situation. When you have data about content performance, you can suggest winning materials.
Push recommended content to your sales team. Don’t wait for your reps to come to your content. Let your marketing team reinvest in effective content.
Prove content’s effectiveness by sales situation. Let your marketing team reinvest in content that makes it truly effective.
Push
Prove
Predict
Predicts what to pitch for every prospect.
www.knowledgetree.com
The Content That Drives Sales: Increasing Use in Your Team
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