Randy Wootton, chief strategy officer, and president, Percolate, Seismic, talks about how COVID-19 has impacted sales enablement and what lies ahead for marketers.
This year, businesses have had to quickly adapt to new ways of working. Marketing and sales teams, now operating remotely, have to work even harder to ensure they’re aligned on the stories they want to tell and how to activate them in a compelling way for each and every prospect across their buying journey. With nearly all B2B sales now happening virtually, marketers must help their sales teams curate digital experiences that are as effective as classic face-to-face interactions. This means that all marketers must now double down on the digital marketing playbook.
Seems easy enough.
Build some ads, write a great thought leadership piece, and deploy it to your sales enablement system. However, the reality is that all companies are making this shift to digital channels at the same time. There are no field events, no VIP experiences, and no in-person networking opportunities – which strikes at the heart of what many sellers think is their superpower: creating and building productive relationships. Overcoming these hurdles requires marketing and sales to work together to build compelling content “experiences†that actually speak to a buyer.
Learn More: Content and the Customer Experience—Create Empathy, Not ContentOpens a new window
Building the Foundation for an Aligned Digital GTM Engine
I have been in marketing and sales roles for nearly 20 years and know that one thing is true when it comes to go-to-market (GTM) content production: sales does not think marketing provides good content, and marketing thinks sales does not use the great content they produce. The best marketers do a lot of research about their ideal customer so that they can deeply understand their needs and use these insights to create – what they think – is content that will compel a buyer to act.
At most companies, sellers then pick and choose the content they think will be the most effective based on their past experience and often shun the new campaign coming out of marketing in favor of their trusted deck. In an offline world, this merely looks bad. Your company’s story comes across as disjointed, but sellers are able to compensate through their charm and professionalism. They tell the “story†in person. The marketing content is leave-behind material at best.
In the digital world, however, this approach can be disastrous. True sales enablement empowers and supports sellers by helping them use the right content at the right moment to make the biggest impact with their buyers, but it requires sales and marketing teams to embrace a collaborative mindset. To operate effectively, they must implement frequent and direct communications, as well as establish joint performance metrics and track against them.
Another way of aligning sales and marketing teams is to centralize and automate content management. Sellers should only have access to the latest brand-approved content, so marketers and sales enablement professionals need to ensure that everything is stored and organized in one single source of truth. They also need processes to update and approve the latest versions of website copy, social posts, emails, and sales materials.
While adopting a centralized content repository and establishing a process for approving content quickly can help prevent sales and marketing from operating in silos, businesses also need a system that can recommend the most relevant content to sellers based on the opportunity they are working on. It’s about getting the right content at the right time to the right seller, who then, in turn, can share it with their prospect or customer. It’s critical for marketing to be able to get the right content when sellers want it, not when marketers publish it. Sellers care only about the opportunity they are working on at that exact moment. They need help knowing “what to do†or “what to show†next. Too often, they cannot find what they want in a content system, so they fall back on their “old reliable†deck. When this happens, marketers have lost the opportunity to make an impact.
Ultimately, aligning sales and marketing teams with a unified marketing and sales enablement solution will result in a GTM engine that supports resonant storytelling in the market. This will help you break through the digital tsunami that we all face each and every day.
Match Where Buyers Are on Their Journey
Today’s B2B customers have high expectations for the content they receive. This is largely due to the engaging and tailored experiences they now enjoy in their personal lives when engaging with B2C brands – something which has to be replicated in the B2B world. However, most of the content created today is not targeted for customers at various stages in their purchase journey and not personalized enough to address their specific needs, making it unlikely that buyers will engage with it. Just ask yourself a couple of questions:
â— What content have you recently read online?
â— Where did it come from?
â— Which pieces of content did you actually share with others?
â— Why did you share it?
Take this article as an example. If you are still reading at this point, thank you! Now, are you going to share it? If not, why not? If so, why?
GTM teams have to put feedback loops in place that allow sellers to know what content has been consumed by a prospect when they engage with them. For example, sellers should know if a prospect has read a contributed article from the company (like this one) before they interact with that individual. They need to have a clear idea of what content they should “show next†based on where the buyer is in their decision-making process. If the salesperson presents irrelevant information, they have wasted the buyer’s time. However, if they can share content that builds on the ideas in the content the prospect has already viewed and interacted with AND present new ideas, they will have anticipated the buyer’s needs and moved the conversation forward intelligently.
This type of feedback capability is only possible with AI-powered predictive engines that provide automated content recommendations and surface top-performing content for sellers to use in specific selling scenarios, as well as unlocking insights that marketers can use to continuously optimize their entire content portfolio.
Learn More: How to Ensure Content Marketing Impacts the BusinessOpens a new window
The Power of Interactive Content
One of the most interesting recent developments in the world of content curation is the rise of interactive content. Much like we saw digital advertising evolve from static banner ads to rich media to full-on video, we now have the ability to produce interactive content that augments the content copy to create immersive experiences in the B2B GTM motion. The best marketers work hard to craft compelling stories, but much of the impact is lost when confined to boring static PDFs or PowerPoint presentations that prospects have to scroll through. People want sight, sound, and motion. If they are really engaged, people want to jump around in the content.
They want to explore, at their own pace, different ideas and concepts. The way we present content as B2B professionals today does not reflect how people want to consume content. Interactive content, however, can significantly improve customer engagement, as it allow buyers to click and explore different parts of a content “experienceâ€. Dynamic content types such as microapps, quizzes, or videos are easy-to-use formats that can be personalized to provide the immersive, engaging experiences that today’s buyers expect.
But it isn’t just about the experience itself. When done right, interactive content can also help sellers gain valuable insights about what buyers are interested in. Technology can track where buyers click and measure the amount of time buyers spend on different pages or in different sections, which can help sellers better understand what is resonating with an individual. Moreover, this is data that trains AI-powered personalization engines that can then, in turn, more deeply understand what content is working, in which situation, to inform what content should be shared in future similar situations. Most importantly, the recommendation engine can also, help the seller better understand what the next best action is.
While the ongoing pandemic has certainly presented many sales enablement challenges, marketing and sales teams should use this as an opportunity to re-imagine the way they work together. The key is to align internally, understand where buyers are on their journey, and provide the personalized content and rich, immersive experience they now expect. Doing this well should result in sellers loving their marketers; marketers feeling as if their creativity is making an impact, and both teams celebrating record sales.