In sales enablement, content is king. There has to be a source where reps can come in and get information about products, features, competitors, and how they all relate together, and content serves the need pretty well. But it is underused for good reason in the high-speed world of sales development.
Content is designed to make a quick impression. But you need more to earn a serious meeting.
Sales is the meat and potatoes of your 10-month deal. Sales is where buyers are educated on the value of your solution, the features and benefits, the financial benefits and the ROI, and the proof that your solution will be worth it. It’s where the buyer becomes convinced that the solution is the right fit and will solve their problems and challenges to save and make them money.
The mistake many companies make is to mix sales and marketing content together, resulting in sales prospects getting marketing-oriented content in their inboxes. This is not what they want; they want customized messaging that speaks directly to them. Experienced buyers see right through content they know wasn’t made for them.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.
Content marketing is not about inking deals.
When it comes to enterprise solution sales, the buyer wants to know why your solution is the best fit for their business. They want to know how your solution will solve a problem, make things easier, increase revenue, and make them more money. They want to know how your solution is different from the competition. They want to see proof that your solution will work for them. They want to know that your solution is secure, reliable, scalable, and that you are the right people to handle their needs. How do you scratch all these itches?
Sales Dev needs its own type of ‘content.'
When SDRs send 50 cold emails and make 100 dials a day, they don’t have time to find content or a tailored outreach strategy for every type of buyer they try to reach.
So they blast out boiler-plate messaging because their managers hawk their activity metrics. Outcomes suffer because prospects get frustrated, reps get de-motivated, and everybody ends up losing.
Enterprise and commercial buyers are smart. They know the difference between canned and curated material.
The best SDRs know how to make their cold calls sound like they're coming from within the company. This same ethos must carry over to email, SMS, LinkedIn, and video pitching.
SDRs need short, simple, highly targeted value propositions.
They are simple, searchable, and deployable on any platform. These typically live scattered among private google docs in the SDR team.
Branded, good-looking presentations are still critical, but after you've earned it.
Earning a conversation with an important enterprise buyer is no easy task. It requires immaculate work from multiple layers of the selling company. Product, Marketing, SDRs, AEs, Solutions Architects, and Leadership must move in lockstep to demonstrate value to picky enterprises. Everyone in the cycle requires a different strategic toolkit.
Marketing needs good-looking branded content to make necessary impressions on social media. Account executives need good-looking presentations to tell a great story and solidify the same brand impressions that marketing left. But there is an intermediary step between Marketing and Closing where deploying content too soon can actually destroy your chances of closing a deal.
Sales emailing has become a skill on its own lately. Companies will pay tens of thousands of dollars every year for some trainer to come in and give email workshops where they show you how to organize your simple messaging in a spreadsheet.
Align is here to provide a dedicated, fast, intuitive platform for sales teams to collaborate on raw messages and value propositions.
