Chapter 2
Strategic content that boosts buyer enablement
By now you’ve heard enough about how hard it is to be a modern buyer, and it’s already obvious that B2B sales are more challenging as a result. So what are some strategic solutions? More specifically, how can sales teams utilize content to break through the clogged arteries that slow down the buyer enablement process?
It starts with a new approach to content.
Creating content experiences
You can't afford boring content. Buyers are way too sophisticated to spend time with something that’s not interesting to them, especially considering all the factors listed above.
Creating something more means offering customers a content experience rather than solely a piece of content. A content experience is a digital manifestation of your brand's message that’s engaging, visually stimulating, concise, and customized via interactive and multi-platform capabilities.
But beyond individual pieces of digestible content is a bigger objective: building a dynamic continuum of assets that all complement each other in ushering a buyer along the customer journey. The power of the assets also lies in the insights they can provide, arming sales teams with intelligent feedback that can optimize the next steps.
How amazing a content experience is, in the end, comes down to whether or not they help with buyer enablement and close deals. But how are companies building content experiences for customers, and what insights can they gain from them?
How are companies building content experiences for customers, and what insights can they gain from them?
Bridging the gap between content that marketers find useful and what sales believes will help close deals
A first step in building strategic content is getting as much alignment as possible between marketing and sales needs. Research from Forrester shows some significant differences between the impact marketers think they have on driving sales, compared to what sales think.
Folks in sales were 21% less likely than marketers to say that marketing is the key driver of business growth
and 21% of sales reps were less likely than their counterparts in marketing to say that the marketing company generates predictable and measurable buyer acquisition.
This disconnect can be traced to the most fraught, unpredictable, and difficult stage of the buying process: the closing of the deal.
While marketers certainly push the buying journey forward earlier in the process, when it comes to giving sales the best chance at finishing the deal it gets murkier.
It’s in this stressful final push where sales most need the content, data, and insights to help secure the purchase, yet it’s here where many feel there’s not enough help. When asked how often marketing provides outcomes, data, and insights that help them make progress during the closing of a deal, 51% of sales reps answered sometimes, rarely, or never.
When asked what would contribute most to improving marketing’s position today as a key driver of the business, 56% of respondents from the Forrester research answered: providing sales teams better insights to sales qualifications, cross-sale opportunities, and buyer motivation.
The second most common response, at 52%, was generating rich and reliable insights into the company’s prospects and buyers.
56%
respondents would provide sales teams better insights to sales qualifications, cross-sale opportunities and buyer motivation.
Content that helps push a purchase through to completion, and can illuminate the buyers engagement and motivation is one of the key links that can connect sales with better material to close deals and marketers with a stronger claim to being a core driver of business.