experiences, underlying needs, personal desires for promotion – that drive decisions.
Q: How should companies adjust their sales content strategy to support virtual buying? A: In a virtual sales process, the question is: How do you use the right piece of content at the right time? The messages you convey about your product may be similar, but where and how do you convey them? Virtual selling enables you to insert expertise much better than in a traditional sales process. When sellers traveled and sales were live, it was hard to bring the right experts. For example, five years ago, you could not bring an expert from Europe to five places in the U.S. in a day. A virtual environment allows you to do this in a very efficient and effective manner.
Q: What content works best to engage B2B buyers in a virtual sales process? A: It’s important to have a diverse array of content
that can be customized to the audience. In a virtual environment, micro-prompts and micro-learning are important. For example, rather than lead a 60-minute presentation, you can break content down into 30-second bits, delivered at just the right time. Lots of people are visual learners as well, so it’s important they can see the material to understand it. If you sell software, show somebody using it in their daily life. A video of how it works is much more compelling and brings a product or service to life in a way that a PowerPoint® presentation could not replicate. As we look ahead, new and emerging technology such as virtual reality will enable customers to better engage with products and services and create more seamless interactions. We believe that these new technology solutions will play a key role in shaping the future of content in a virtual sales environment.
Q: What are best practices for introducing new content to sellers, training them on new assets, and convincing sellers to use new content? A: Talent development, training, and skill acquisition are critical areas for sales teams today, as organizations continue to invest in hybrid and digital sales roles. Our latest U.S. B2B Pulse shows a net 70% of companies increased hybrid sales team resources in 2021, and a net 64% added to their digital sales teams.
This rapid pace of change means businesses must think about how the salesperson’s experience
has changed and how it continues to change. Simply giving them new tools and content and just saying, “Try it,” is not sufficient. Instead, take a day or week in the salesperson’s life and recraft what that should look like now. For example, where they spend their time has changed, and reps need constant reinforcement and coaching around this area. A key ingredient is the role of the sales manager to reinforce and champion these changes. For the reps to be successful, you first have to win the hearts and minds of managers. For training, you need about 10% classroom training, 70% experiential on-the-job training, and 20% coaching.
Q: What metrics should sales and marketing use to measure the effectiveness of sales content strategy? A: It comes down to sales and marketing return on investment. Look at ROI across channels and across different parts of your marketing budget so you can understand which content is effective for specific audiences. Use KPIs like reach, cost, and quality. How often do customers receive messages? What does this cost to deliver? How effective are they in moving customers to the next stage? Metrics should align with the end ROI. However, if a consistent ROI methodology is proving elusive for a company, then we would recommend at a minimum tracking click rates, time on site for any sales collateral that is digitally accessible to customers, as well as including the impact of information shared when gathering customer feedback through satisfaction and engagement surveys.
Q: What role should technology play in sales content strategy? A: Much of what we talked about is not possible
without technology. The concepts have been around for years, but you can’t do this in a cost- effective or scalable manner without technology. It’s very hard to use old-fashioned spreadsheets to test different go-to-market models at scale. There is no shortage of modern tools. But you must embed tools in end-to-end solutions and integrate them as part of the standard way of working. In fact, companies can get a lot of mileage from optimizing existing tech by rethinking UI/UX for salespeople and having them “in the room” to help ideate, craft, and implement what they want to see and the actions they want to take within the tools they are expected to use. This is a highly collaborative and effective model to leverage existing technology.
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