Marketing departments may understand the value of content, but what about your sales team? Using content in sales follow-up, whether it’s videos or blog articles, can actually help make their jobs easier.
From educating new leads or re-engaging prospects that have gone dark…marketing content can bolster your salespeople, too.
Sales are key to any company; no sales means no revenue means no business.
So if you somehow speed up the sales process, you’re going to start bringing in more buyers.
1. PREEMPTIVELY ANSWER QUESTIONS
Got a lot of common inquiries that you find yourself forced to address over and over again? Ask your marketing team to create content accordingly!
List out the top five or top ten questions you find yourself repeatedly answering.
If you have a video or blog article or landing page for every question, imagine how much faster you’ll be able to respond to those common requests!
Remember our recent episode with Kobalt Tools? Danny was chatting recently recently with a lead who was considering their own video series. So he sent that episode straight to the prospect: boom! Question answered, instantly!
Sometimes it’s even worth it to have a piece of material for people who contact you about the wrong product or service, if they do it often enough.
For example, Optimum Productions (the source of our lovely studio set) used to get a lot of calls or emails from Michael Jackson fans, asking about his Thriller video. Why? Because that video happened to be made by an Optimum Productions Inc. way back in the day. Ouch.
But lately, Optimum has managed to cut those solicitations almost in half. How? They just made a small landing page for anyone who happens to search their site for the term, “michael jackson.”
The page took almost no effort at all – and it’s benefitted the studio greatly by reducing the number of calls from fans, thus cutting down on wasted time.
2. INSTIGATE NEW CONVERSATIONS
Answering questions doesn’t have to be the sole purpose of content. It’s easy to respond when leads reach out to you and begin a conversation, but you don’t necessarily always have to wait for that to happen.
If you think an article or video may be valuable to a prospect that you want to reach, take the initiative and send it as a conversation-starter.
The content doesn’t even have to be yours!
We often send materials made by others to our own prospects. And we certainly don’t object if you share our podcast with a lead if you think it will help them!
If someone sends you a relevant piece of information that provides value, you’ll be more inclined to listen to them next time they offer more help.
3. STAY RELEVANT AND INFORMATIVE
Of course, no matter how much you try, some people just aren’t ready to make a purchase.
Many B2B companies or industrial manufacturers have very, very long buying cycles, and there’s not much you can do to change that. But you can make sure prospects will come to you when they are ready to shop again.
As opposed to generic newsletters sent to everyone on your email list, try delivering a personalized message with relevant content to an individual prospect every now and then.
Don’t send a follow-up without a point.
Use valuable content in sales follow-up so you stay top-of-mind during that ‘dead period’.
The more you educate your prospects on their own time, the faster you’ll get to a more meaningful conversation with them.
It’s the same song, second verse, which our show has pushed for some time now.
Provide value…because content is king.
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If there’s a particular topic that you’d like for us to talk about, or if you have a particular a challenge that you’d like us to take a crack at, send us an email. We’d be happy to answer them for you – and if your topic gets picked for a future episode, you’ll win a free IndustrialSage t-shirt!
Sponsored by Optimum Productions
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