How good content helps the sales team sell - especially when you have long sales cycles i.e. in B2B :)

An excellent blog about the long sales cycle by Darren Bond, Head of Strategy at Coast Digital, in this he explains the role of content at different stages in the sales cycle

Only five per cent of leads that come into a business are ready to make a buying decision right now – sound familiar?

In my role I get to speak to a lot of marketers, from a lot of different businesses and I hear this (or something similar) a lot. When I ask what the number one challenge is in terms of marketing to a pipeline, it’s content. Not because they can’t get enough content resource from the business to do any marketing at all (most marketing teams have access to someone who can write copy), but because they don’t really know how to plan content, or put it to effective use online. Here are some useful tips to get your content planning started.

Map your pipeline

What you’re trying to do is work out the process a typical lead would go through when engaging with your business. Align your marketing and sales teams to make sure you can take a lead from one end (prospect) to the other (paying customer) without changing the experience they’ve received. From a recent survey of B2B buyers, 53 per cent said buying experience was the main driver for decision-making, not brand, not the service offering, not even (believe it or not) the price! Making sure the experience is smooth and consistent is vital to success. Look at your pipeline and consider what kind of content a user at each stage is likely to be interested in.

Early

The prospect knows they have a challenge and is researching potential solutions. At this stage, they’re likely to be interested in informational content.

Middle

The prospect knows their challenge well enough to start creating a business case to solve it. At this stage they’ll be looking for buyer’s guides, and be more open to products and brands – ready to become a lead.

Late

Now the prospect has got budget approval and is looking for a brand, solution or product that can meet their need – essentially they have a quotable opportunity. When it comes to planning, you need to think about what content can be produced to support each aspect of this decision-making process.

Work out who your prospects are and what information they’re looking for. The easy way to do this is to take a sample, and give them a call. Ask them about the challenge they’re trying to solve. This will give you a great starting point for what content to produce.

For a more quantitative view, if you’ve got email data, use a drip campaign (send automated emails) to test different subject matters. Send email messages focused on a single service offering or product. If the user opens and clicks, they’re interested. If not, send them the next email about a different service. Repeat this process. If you’ve got lots of data, this will help you quickly segment it into silos of interest.

Plan your content creation

You know what the decision-making process looks like. You also know who your prospects are, and their potential challenges. So when it comes to planning, think of it like this: you’re aiming to give the right person, the right content, at the right time in the buying process.

From a text content perspective, you need to consider where you’re going to get your content from, especially in technical industries. Often there’s lots of great product and solution-based knowledge in a business, but getting it out of people can be like getting blood from the proverbial stone. Remember these guys all have full time jobs and marketing isn’t in their remit. A 10 minute chat can often give you more than enough information to deliver high quality web content.

It’s easy to think about content in the form of words, but don’t limit yourself to that. Think whitepapers, guides and blogs, sure, but think outside that too. Think video, webinars, social media. All of these are great ways to deliver content to your target audience.

Delivering to your pipeline

The important thing to note is that at this stage it’s not just a hit and hope content delivery. By now you know who’s receiving it, what their challenge is and what content you have got to address said challenge.

You can monitor the response to this content, learn more and start mapping prospects to parts of the pipeline.

If someone responds to an education piece, you can assume they’re early in the buying cycle, so you can try calls to action to introduce them to a potential solution. If they don’t respond, they probably aren’t ready to take the next step through the pipeline. What more value can you add with content? Do they need more informational/educational content?

If they’re receptive to solution-based content (and therefore in the middle of pipeline) will they respond to a specific product-based message? If so, they’re taking the step into the last section of the pipeline, and should be passed to sales.

It’s simple to apply a ‘snakes and ladders’ analogy to describe the nurturing process. You’re looking to get someone to the end of the board as effectively as possible. Delivering the right content at the right time will help push the prospect one square along, but what you really want is for the prospect to hit a ladder (ie accelerating them through the pipeline), so you offer them messaging to encourage them into the next stage of the pipeline. If they don’t respond, consider it a snake, and put them back where they were. If they’ve engaged with educational content, promote your solution-based content to them. If they’ve engaged with solution-based content already, try a harder product or brand-based message.

This can feel like a hefty process, and it can be, so it’s worth starting small. Break these steps down and prove the value along the way. Take the simplest aspect of your business, and test it. If you get it right the results will speak for themselves. If it doesn’t work out first time, don’t quit. Let’s not forget the advice from the nineteenth century German Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder: “No plan survives first contact with the enemy”.

I think that’s the first time I’ve referred to prospects as ‘the enemy’ but the point stands true. Don’t get too attached to your plan. You need to be pragmatic, developing your plan to maintain effectiveness. If you can get in the cycle of delivering content against an ever-changing plan then you’re on to a winner!