to reap rewards
Content is a serious business asset, creating that all important bridge to potential customers, hot prospects, current customers and the world at large. And so it follows that it shouldn’t just sit in the marketing department. It’s there for the whole organisation to optimise and reap potential benefits from. And, no surprises here, in particular the Sales team.
The importance of aligning marketing and sales has been a prominent topic for a considerable amount of time and is particularly relevant to the creation of content. Marketers generate content to aid lead generation and Sales should be using content assets to aid the whole customer journey.
When looking at content’s role as a sales driver, how can you ensure peak performance? In the first instance it’s imperative that marketing and sales work together.
Content has to be generated with the need of the Sales team in mind and it’s crucial that Sales communicates those needs to the marketing team.
The Sales team is in the perfect position to gain invaluable insight into customer needs at each stage of the buying cycle and beyond. By communicating these pain points to the Marketing team content can be generated that specifically addresses and provides a solution to these needs.
And thus content can be used proactively as well as reactively. By pushing this type of content out, whether via social media, blog, website etc you’ll be answering prospects' questions even before they’ve had a chance to ask them.
So get the Sales team to carefully track questions, problems, needs. They’re right there, on the front-line so to speak. But this invaluable information needs to be recorded and stored and importantly, accessible to the marketing folks. Content creators can then use it to create content that is genuinely useful, content that provides solutions. And then, hey presto, this gets passed back to Sales. It’s a perfect cycle.
This process serves as a perfect and obvious starting point.
Watch Hubspot's CEO Brian Halligan give his views on the best content to drive sales on the right and read on for some further tips on how to generate your own content to achieve sales success….