Editors Note: Adam Brophy, Content strategist at Uberflip, discusses how to make content work for you in sales.
In the words of fellow Torontonian and international rap star, Drake: “If you’re reading this, it’s too late…”
Content marketing is already working on you.
But you knew that already. However, it can also work for you.
An SDR’s world is a busy one. Between banging out dozens of emails, cold calls and demos per day, we’re held to what seems to be an ever-growing quota of qualified opportunities to pass off to our AE team.
That’s why I’d like to share with you a few tips on how to actually use all that content your marketing team creates to help you accomplish your key objectives:
- Breaking the ice with cold leads
- Handling prospect objections
- Creating that sought after qualified opp to chip away at your quota
But before we dive in, there’s one crucial relationship that must be established…
Sales & Marketing Alignment (or “Smarketing”)
If your Marketing and Sales team doesn’t meet regularly, you’re both doing yourselves a disservice. The SDR team are the troops on the front line, the first point of contact for prospective customers, the human voice of your business.
Two way communication must be established to foster the right content creation from the Marketing team to help assist the Sales team in different situations.
Wouldn’t it be amazing to have a blog post that directly addresses a common curiosity or objection to your product or service?
In fact, companies with a strong focus on “smarketing” see 20% annual revenue growth.
At Uberflip, our Sales & Marketing teams huddle for 5 to 15 minutes once a week to discuss opps in the pipeline, conversations with prospects, and content in the works. This is also where some of our best content ideas come from.
Once you’ve ensured your marketing team is churning out content you can work with, it’s time to use it to break the ice…
Breaking the ice with content
This is the top of funnel (TOFU) content that your marketing team pumps out (or curates), and should be used with leads that you haven’t built a relationship or established a touchpoint with.
The purpose should hopefully be to help your prospect with a pressing issue or question they might be pondering (or a question they haven’t realized they need to be asking!).
If this is, say, a cold email or LinkedIn message, your call to action should be soft, even just a simple “Let me know what you think.”
The first goal is to provide value to your prospect with this ice-breaker content, not necessarily book the meeting on your first touch. Although a first touch meeting would be great, you’ll likely need to build your case first.
Content, however, helps you break the ice at least and get your foot in the door of a longer conversation.
Handling objections with content
So you’ve made your discovery call, or the demo’s already booked. You’re good at what you do, you can handle objections like a pro on these calls.
But wouldn’t it be nice to have something to drop in your prospects lap to back you up?
That’s where objection-handling content comes into play, which you’ll have an abundance of if you ensure Marketing knows what obstacles Sales is facing.
I love to use a nice SlideShare, white paper or eBook the Marketing team created (or even better, 3rd party content if you can find it) to squash a prospect’s concerns.
Sometimes I’ll reference the content on a call, (“I’ve got the perfect article I’ll send to you after our call to address this further, but here’s my take on your question…”) or I’ll surprise them with it in a follow up email.
Give it a shot—you’ll be surprised how well it can work in your favor.
Winning over prospects with content
At the end of the day, our job as SDRs is to generate qualified sales opportunities. This is where what I like to call “win you over” content comes in handy.
These are the bottom of the funnel pieces of content that your marketing team should create and that will help you move that prospect from “engaged” to the sought after “qualified opp” status.
“Win you over” content can include:
- In-depth case studies that show off existing customer success stories
- Datasheets that summarize the features and technical characteristics of your product
- White papers that generate demand by covering a pressing industry issue.
Fire these over to a prospect as part of your final play to move them down the funnel.
Integrate content into your selling style
Now that you’ve used content to complete all three of these objectives, go ahead and bump the opp to your AE and do it all over again!
Get marketing and sales on the same page, add new content to your arsenal, use it in your conversations, rinse and repeat!
With the right content to back you up, your life as an SDR will start to get a whole lot easier.
