Like a hotel bed with a short quilt, there is often a gap in a vendor content or product marketing strategy that can leave the prospective customer cold.
You know the drill: Marketing has programmatically identified and nurtured someone from contact to being potentially interested. The machines have done all they can, it’s time for a human connection to feed this spark of interest.
However, they are only potentially interested, this is not the time for a salesperson to call, this is only a marketing qualified lead, it’s time for business development.
Typically a junior team of young professionals needing to personally convert them into pipeline via email and social outreach. Techniques that during the pandemic and the profound shift in how we continue to work have become increasingly important as we embrace virtual selling.
The buyer has already been slowly shifting to virtual buying. Studies (like this from Gartner) have shown the buyer is spending as little as 6% of the buying process engaged with a salesperson. But, of course, the pandemic has accelerated this, it’s how the business needs to be done.
Simply put, we no longer have desk phones and if we did, we are not at our desks, and if we were we probably wouldn’t answer them.
Virtual, social selling and email outreach all need plenty of one thing: Content.
During the business development process, the potentially interested executive at this prospective client may need to be touched a dozen times. To be successful, our heroic BD professional needs a constant content supply to keep the conversation going.
However, in many organizations, sales development lives in the content twilight zone. There is plenty of quality content greasing the wheels of the marketing automation machine and the salesperson has their deck and their finely honed patter.
But, in between, our business BD professional, has neither the experience nor the content. And, so playing the funnel numbers game, with a stack of emails to send, feeds from the crumbs and sends whatever they can find. So they share content that is dated, inconsistent, and irrelevant to the needs of the prospect. And of course, the interaction does nothing to help tell the brand story or convey the quality experience the business would like to promise.
(Check your inbox, you’ve seen it!)
And, guess what, the spark of interest in the potential buyer dies.
Another lead drops out of the machine, an opportunity lost, before it made it to the starting line.
Another victim of the sales content gap.
Good content sells. To close the gap we need to include sales in the content supply chain, aside from making the life of the BD easier, it improves consistency, increases engagement, and brings to bear all that marketing investment in understanding the customer to the point when the rubber hits the road.
We call this content activated sales, and if you would like to close the sales content gap, please get in touch.
