10 steps to a deal-winning sales content strategy

There’s a big difference between marketing content and sales content.

Marketing content is about starting conversations and building relationships. Sales content is the resources you can point to at the end of the deal that helped you win it.

Marketing isn’t sales and sales isn’t marketing. Trying to do both with a single piece of content leads to failure…

Which is why you need a sales content strategy.

#1 - 10 steps to a deal-winning sales content strategy

Sales content is the resources your sales team needs to help them close more deals. These resources include content, tools, knowledge, and information to effectively sell your products and services to customers.

Here’s a 10-step process to help you deliver a deal-winning sales content strategy for your business.

1. Document all stages of your sales funnel - So that everyone is clear on the journey prospects take to become clients.
2. Audit your sales content - To see what existing content you have for each stage of the sales funnel and identify any content gaps.
3. Identify sales goals & pain points - Understand the biggest pain points salespeople encounter and their short, medium and long-term sales goals.
4. Create buyer-persona content - Clearly identify your target audiences and create buyer personas for each to develop unique persona-based content.
5. Create different content for different use cases - Some content works better for different parts of the funnel. Some are better suited to certain audiences and some are a better fit for certain channels.
6. Focus on differentiated content - Use your buyer personas, sales goals and pain points to create unique stand-out content.?
7. Make content easily accessible - Sales teams should have access to relevant content as and when they need it. Reduce or eliminate the need for Marketing to act as content gatekeepers.
8. Help sales understand what to use and when - As creators and curators it’s Marketing’s role to help salespeople understand how and when to use the content.
9. Have shared metrics - Marketing and Sales must have shared content-related KPIs to understand how well the content being produced is working.?
10. Improve with feedback - Use feedback from Sales, customers, and your own marketing data to refine and develop your sales content strategy.

#2 - Tell ‘em quick and tell ‘em often

In 1891, 29-year-old William Wrigley Jr. arrived in Chicago with $32 and an idea to start a business selling Wrigley's Scouring Soap.

He began offering premium items to help sell his soap, such as an umbrella and baking powder. He switched to selling these premiums as they became more popular than the main item - from soap to baking powder, then on to chewing gum.

Launched with two flavours; spearmint and juicy fruit, Wrigley’s Chewing Gum was aimed at a younger demographic.

Noticing that chewing gum was an impulse buy, Wrigley’s pioneered the ‘by the checkout counter’ placements common today.

However, the banking crisis of 1907 meant impulse buys were cut from buyers' baskets. While his competitors cut costs Wrigley mortgaged everything, increased advertising and gained massive market share.

Wrigley was a pioneer of direct marketing and in 1915 sent free packs of gum to all 1.5 million homes listed in the US telephone directory. By 1919 he’d mailed over 7 million homes!

In 1921 he bought the Chicago Cubs baseball team, and in 1925 became the first owner to broadcast all their games on the radio for free. Skyrocketing attendance.

During the war, he further positioned Wrigley's as “allaying soldiers' thirst and steadying their nerves.”

Wrigley’s was bought by Mars in 2008 for $23 billion dollars.

William Wrigley Jr. was a pioneer of marketing and a master of innovation. When asked his advertising secret he said “Tell ‘em quick and tell ‘em often”. Still a fine maxim for today’s marketer.

#3 - Don’t use money for referral rewards

Referrals are powerful.

The average value of a referred customer is at least 16% higher than that of a non-referred customer.

So what’s the most effective reward to encourage more referrals?

Turns out that giving money rewards might not be the best way to encourage referrals from customers.

Instead, non-money rewards such as a free extra product (e.g. an ebook for free) or more quantity (e.g. 1 extra bottle of wine, more data storage) work better.

Why?

Well, we recommend products to friends mainly for social or altruistic reasons. We want to help them by referring something we think would benefit them.

When money comes into play it switches us from ‘social mode’ to ‘business transaction mode’, and we get more suspicious about the motive of a recommendation.

To make this work for you, don’t make rewards too valuable. Research suggests you’ll attract gradually worse customers the higher the reward.

Instead, offer rewards that are related to your product (e.g. product upgrades, free mini-courses, merchandise if you have a fun brand).

To get more insight go to Airyh

To your success

Richard

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