marketing content that drives sales: getting more content used to drive revenue

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