Content Marketing for Sales Enablement
Whether online or in person, selling is fundamentally about providing the right content, to the right person, at the right time—in other words, guiding the customer through their buying journey while delivering an excellent experience.
It has become essential for sales professionals to understand the nature of online sales. This adds value to marketing content and creates new requirements for sales and marketing teams to align in a joint sales effort.
Sales teams are generally successful at selling a product or service face-to-face, but when it comes to online selling, an orchestrated effort is required from both the sales and marketing teams. In this article, we will discuss how Content Marketing helps sales deliver better results.
What is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is about making marketing help sales achieve better results. This is possible when marketing and sales teams work together to serve customers; aligning their criteria is key to supporting a strategic sales enablement system.
Sales must ensure they provide the necessary content to help buyers make a purchasing decision. Bringing marketing and sales teams together benefits customers because it helps identify opportunities, solve problems, create value, and foster differentiated conversations.
Opportunities for problem-solving: By understanding what drives customers to seek products or services, the right content can be developed with the appropriate keywords and messaging, and then made available to those customers who are actively searching for solutions.
Value-creation conversations: Once a customer sees a company as an information resource, conversations are likely to follow. This is a crucial moment, as it represents an opportunity to earn the customer’s trust.
Differentiated conversations: Customers may need a particular product or service for different reasons; having this type of awareness leads to differentiated conversations that address those specific motivations.
¿How does sales enabling work?
In essence, selling products or services online is similar to selling in person—or, as they say, “the old-fashioned way”—except that when selling online, technology takes the wheel and attracts potential customers.
Sales enablement begins with understanding your customers’ buying cycle as the foundation for establishing touchpoints along the way. Throughout the customer buying cycle, there will be touchpoints where engagement is driven by salespeople, as well as touchpoints where engagement is driven by strong marketing content and a bit of automation to deliver it.
By picking up on signals from customers’ digital body language—that is, understanding their engagement with content across these touchpoints—there is a great opportunity for lead qualification. And by qualifying them, potential customers can be routed to the optimal nurturing strategy or, if they’re ready, passed on directly to sales.
Sales enablement establishes that marketing creates content to drive sales. This places emphasis on creating content that equips sales teams to have strategic conversations that solve problems, create value, and are differentiated—rather than relying on the same generic product presentation for everyone.
Sales enablement is about delivering the right content to the customer at the right time.
When valuable information is directed to customers who are actively seeking it, they tend to be more receptive and willing to engage with it. Just like in a conversation, if it’s interesting enough, it opens the door to an exchange—otherwise, it gets dismissed. Engagement is a key sales indicator; customers want to make sure they’re making the right decision before buying. Therefore, engagement allows customers to assess whether their perception is accurate, whether a problem can truly be solved, and whether the company can deliver on its promise. Selling is about keeping the conversation going. Once the customer is convinced or ready to buy, the sale can happen.
Lead Scoring Strategy
A lead scoring strategy begins with the alignment of sales and marketing teams to define systems that will identify where potential customers are in the buying cycle. Scoring mechanisms allow marketers to identify prospects who are ready to buy, so that teams can assign appropriate follow-up initiatives.
Therefore, it is crucial that this system be agreed upon by both parties, because scoring occurs when engagement is driven by sales or by marketing content. Being consistent in the process improves the quality of leads that marketing generates for the sales team.
Lead scoring is a process that takes time to perfect—time that is worth investing because scoring sales opportunities helps ensure that the best sales opportunities are followed up on immediately by prioritizing them according to revenue potential and buyer readiness.
Content for Sales Enabling
In a sales enablement environment with scoring mechanisms, content has a key purpose: to keep the conversation going until the customer is ready to buy. Just as a vehicle takes you from point A to point B, content should support sales.
When it comes to follow-up efforts, sales teams have more opportunities to shine if they communicate when customers request it or send clear signals about their buying intent.
With regard to technology, content is typically delivered through a Content Management System (CMS) and then its performance is measured. Depending on the level of engagement, the score is updated in a CRM, and Marketing Automation will continue providing relevant content until the contact reflects readiness to buy. The intelligence generated from this is used to create segments that drive personalized messages, which in turn improve engagement and therefore drive more sales.