As B2B buyer behavior evolves, the content demands on vendor organizations and sales teams continue to grow. Adequately addressing these demands is possible only with a strong content strategy — one that addresses important questions such as what purposes the content should serve, what goals it should achieve, who the content should serve and how, and how it should be designed, created and managed.1 
As the above figure (Fig 1)2 clearly illustrates, a strong content strategy impacts both win rates and quota attainment. While that's the good news, the bad news is that a partial content strategy or one not fully implemented leads to lower-than-average win rates. Hence, it's essential to build a consistent and comprehensive content strategy to fully leverage the benefits of effective sales content.
Here are 10 critical steps to creating an effective content strategy:
1. Defining Strategic Objectives
Creating effective sales content is only possible when the purposes and goals of the content are clearly understood. Hence, the most fundamental question to answer when developing a content strategy is why sales content is being created.
When this question is being raised within a customer-centric sales process, it becomes a matter of mapping out what objectives of the buyer organizations are sought to be met through different types of sales content. What's important to remember is that the definition of objectives must cater to the different kinds of customers being targeted by the sales content strategy.
2. Defining Metrics to Evaluate the Plan
If the goal of sales content is to increase the velocity of the buyer’s journey through the sales funnel, it’s important to define how this movement and the role of content in aiding this movement will be judged. Understanding what content is effective involves having a comprehensive view of how the content is used, consumed and acted upon by both the seller and the various stakeholders within the buyer organization.
Key metrics should comprehensively cover content awareness, level of content usage and engagement, content freshness, the most viewed content and its impact on revenue. Importantly, this process of mapping out the key metrics cannot take a top-down or unidirectional route. Rather, it has to be a consultative process involving all the different stakeholder teams.
The most significant part of this process is to ensure alignment between marketing and sales, as they are two of the primary stakeholders in the creation and use of sales content.
3. Audit Your Existing Content
When building a content strategy, it's important to remember that the journey isn't beginning at ground zero. Instead, it's a question of re-examining existing content assets and deciphering how much of that content does or does not adhere to the content strategy. Much of the content may need to be repurposed to fit into the new strategy and plan.
4. Build on Internal Documentation Content
In terms of existing content assets that can form the foundation of a content strategy, it’s not only assets produced by marketing that have to be taken account of. Another important resource for creating sales content is existing internal documentation. Internal documentation is likely to contain valuable information on the nature of the vendor organization, its business processes, and products and solutions that the buyer organization would find useful in understanding the key differentiators from rival vendors. Of course, since internal documentation is created for very different purposes from those of sales content, it would have to be tailored to suit the sales perspective.
5. Align Sales and Marketing Teams in Content-Creation
Both sales and marketing bring different sets of competencies that are crucial for effective content creation. Marketing brings in the content know-how, the expertise for understanding what creates maximum effectiveness and engagement in content. On the other hand, sales teams bring in the on-ground knowledge of what buyer organizations are seeking from sales content and the specific contexts in which content works.
It is essential, therefore, that these different perspectives be integrated within the content creation process. If this is not done, the sales content creation process will fall into the earlier-highlighted siloed traps of unused content produced by marketing and haphazard, on-the-go content created by sales.
6. Empower Sales Reps to Make Requests
While one side of sales and marketing alignment involves bringing sales reps on board for content creation, it’s also important to create a feedback mechanism for sales reps to request specific content assets. After all, sales reps are in the trenches, with the most up-to-date information on what buyers require in the present. To ensure that they can respond agilely to buyer demands, it's not enough to formally integrate them into content creation processes; they should also have the ability to make requests on-the-go for building specific content assets as needed.
7. Collaboration in Content Creation
As seen in Fig 23, there is a variety of content creators found in most companies and content creation isn’t the exclusive purview of marketing, nor even that of marketing and sales. Several other departments within the vendor organization, from product development to operations to legal, also have unique competencies that can offer different perspectives and insights that can enrich the content process. Hence, an effective content strategy needs to build a global, organization-wide approach to content creation.
8. Map Content to the Buyer’s Journey
One of the most critical considerations in building effective content is mapping it to the buyer's journey.
As the graphic above shows (Fig 3)4, the buyer’s journey influences what kind of questions buyers are likely to ask at different stages. This determines what type of content buyers would find relevant at any given point. A mismatch between the buyer's journey and the nature of content provided by sales reps can easily derail the sales conversation. For instance, if a buyer is in the awareness stage where a business problem is still being identified, and the vendor sales rep provides bottom-of-the-funnel content such as a detailed product comparison, the buyer will have no sense of what to make of such content. Such a buyer is likely to dismiss the sales rep as having no understanding of the buyer’s needs.
9. Match Different Content Types to Buyer Personas and Buying Stages
Mapping content to the buyer’s journey starts with understanding how different types of buyers approach the buying decision. This requires an understanding of the key factors that drive a buying decision, such as the buyer’s needs and goals, motivations, their research and purchase behavior, and other profile characteristics.
All of this will help identify what kind of content would shift perspectives, spur action and aid decision-making among different types of buyers. When buyer personas are combined with the buyer’s journey, it will help define what content types are most likely to inspire the buyer's confidence in the vendor — confidence that their business problem and critical pain points are being understood at every step.
10. Work to Improve Content Over Time
Even with tons of data at hand, it’s unlikely that every step of a sales content strategy is met with success on the first go. Instead, the process is likely to be an iterative one of constant optimization, as every new piece of data offers avenues for further improving the reach and impact of new content.
Keeping these points in mind during the framing of a sales content strategy will result in one that focuses on widespread collaboration within the vendor organization, takes a customer-centric approach to building relationships with buyers and builds a robust, data-driven structure into the sales process. With such a comprehensive strategy in place, higher win rates, greater quota attainment and higher revenues are all sure to be easily within reach.
Need help developing a content strategy to enable your sales teams? Learn about our content services and schedule a call today.
Reference:
https://www.csoinsights.com/blog/why-you-need-a-sales-enablement-content-strategy/
https://www.csoinsights.com/5th-annual-sales-enablement-study/
https://www.csoinsights.com/5th-annual-sales-enablement-study/
