Crossing the Line by loop_oh | CC BY 2.0
On September 3rd at 11 a.m. CST, Mediafly will be hosting a free webinar featuring Peter O’Neill, Vice President & Research Director of Forrester. Peter will discuss how salespeople should use and deliver marketing content to bridge the last mile of the sales process, and how marketers can optimize that content.
We’d like to set the stage by talking about why bridging that last mile and investing in sales transformation is so crucial for salespeople and marketers releasing content.
A common myth is that a B2B buyer goes through two distinct stages:
- Consuming Content — They take in content put out by marketing, whether ads, case studies, product brochures, emails, etc.
- Ready to Talk to Sales — The buyer is interested in an offering and is only now ready to talk to a salesperson to answer their questions and present an offer.
But with long buying cycles and content constantly coming at the buyer, there is no neat divide, and companies who don’t align sales and marketing throughout the buyer’s journey risk not meeting a buyer’s needs. Here’s why companies should embrace Peter’s concept of salespeople as “Content Concierges” who carry content through to the end of the sales process and not merely order takers who come in once the marketer’s job is “done”:
A Salesperson Should Help Inform A Buyer’s Decision
Buyers don’t only engage with salespeople after they’ve expressed intent to buy or later in the buying cycle. In fact, if a salesperson represents providers with portfolios of strategic accounts, a buyer might want to have a low-stakes conversation with a salesperson very early on.
To prepare, a salesperson must be equipped with all of the content the company has issued and find the appropriate content for whatever stage the buyer might be in. They must also be ready to describe, position and deliver that content (and the most up-to-date version of it!) at a moment’s notice.
Salespeople Must Be More Than Presenters
Even if a salesperson comes late in the buying cycle, “order taker” just isn’t going to cut it. Buyers don’t expect to sit back and stare at a generic slide deck; they expect serious considerations of their project.
The huge amount of content that B2B marketers put out (in 2014 alone, the number of content produced increased by 78%) is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can overwhelm both the salesperson and a potential buyer if there is too much content, and they don’t know what to do with it. On the other, if the salesperson knows that content inside and out, they have an arsenal of selling tools that they can use at any point in the sales process.
A Sales Meeting is its Own Medium
This isn’t all to say that the burden for delivering content through the last mile is all on salespeople. Marketers write differently for a case study than they do for a brochure, a product video or a tweet, and so they should consider sales meetings as their own interactive medium. By examining how their content works independently and in combination with other collateral, marketers can equip salespeople to personalize and deliver that content in sales meetings.
Please join Peter O’Neill and Mediafly on September 3rd to find out how you and your company can drive sales transformation with our webinar, White Glove Delivery of Your Sales Content to Bridge the Last Mile.
Have any questions you hope Peter will cover during the webinar? Leave a comment below!
Comments are closed.