The LeadG2 Podcast
The LeadG2 Podcast is dedicated to helping sales organizations grow. Each week host Dani Buckley (VP/GM at LeadG2) discusses proven sales enablement strategies and real-life examples with experts and thought leaders from across industries.
The LeadG2 Podcast
Optimizing Sales Performance through Powerful Enablement Content with Phyllis Davidson
In this episode, we’re discussing how to ensure that your salespeople are using the sales content that is provided to them.
Here, we ask questions like: Why is content important to prospects and customers? Does it make a difference? Why does sales content often remain unutilized by salespeople? What elements should be in place in order for sales to make the best use of marking content?
Joining Dani to answer those questions and so many more is Phyllis Davidson, VP/Principal Analyst at Forrester.
Phyllis brings up some great pieces of insight, like:
- Why sales reps who make use of content perform better than their peers who do not.
- How too many sellers are left confused about when to use certain pieces of content and, just as importantly, where to access them.
- And lastly, why strengthening the relationship between marketing and sales can only result in stronger and more helpful content for sellers and prospects alike.
Links:
Phyllis Davidson
The Definition of "More from Less" in B2B Content Strategy and Operations
B2B Content: Experimentation Means Bold Bets and Cold Sweats
Welcome to Sell Smarter, sell Faster, a podcast dedicated to helping sales organizations grow. Each week, we discuss proven sales enablement strategies and real life examples with experts and thought leaders from across industries. I'm your host, Dani Buckley, Vice President and General Manager at LeadG 2, a sales performance agency. In this episode, we're discussing how to ensure your salespeople are actually using the sales content that has been created for them. Here we ask questions like why is content important to prospects and customers? Does it even make a difference? Why does sales content often remain unutilized by salespeople and what can we do about it? And what elements should be in place in order for sales to make the best use of marketing content?
Dani Buckley:Joining me to answer those questions, and so many more, is Phyllis Davidson, VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester. Phyllis brings up some great insights like why sales reps who make use of content perform better than their peers, how too many sellers are left confused about when to use certain pieces of content and, just as importantly, where to access them. And, lastly, why strengthening the relationship between marketing and sales can only result in stronger and more helpful content for sellers and prospects alike. Alright, phyllis, i am so happy you're here with us today. I first came across you when we both spoke at the B2B Marketing Exchange. Yes, so thank you for joining How?
Phyllis Davidson:are you Absolutely Good, good. Thank you so much for having me. This is an important topic and I think, as I mentioned to you, it's something we're going to be talking about. We have a session on basically how sales should use marketing content at our upcoming summit in a couple of weeks in Austin, so yeah, i love it.
Dani Buckley:I know when we were talking about what to talk about, we both were excited because this was just perfect. Perfect for the podcast Timely, something that I know we talk about and teach often at Leegee too. So let's jump in. Absolutely Yeah, we're going to talk about how to really get content used effectively by salespeople, and we're talking about all kinds of content, right, specifically marketing content, but also sales enablement content. Often a lot of overlap there. So, just to start, what is it about this topic that makes it kind of so important to you, and can you give us like just a few examples of the kind of content we might just be talking about, so people are all on the same page, okay?
Phyllis Davidson:So, first of all, when we're talking about business to business sales, which are generally, you know, have a longer, longer lead time you've got to keep somebody engaged with you for a while before you sell to them. You're not selling to one person, right? You're generally selling to a buying group. Sales needs to have a way to keep engaging with people And marketing is certainly in the business of coming up with the story that they're pushing out through marketing channels to keep people engaged. But at some point it makes so much sense for sales to pick up that conversation, insert themselves and be the ones that share that content that marketing has created for the external audience and for sales to share that with appropriate context for that client right. What better reason for a sales rep to reach out than to share something that's come across in content? Yes, and you know, something we did a number of years ago. I keep hoping that our sales enablement team will update this research because, as a person who you know manages content strategy and operations in the forester business, to me this was fascinating And it was basically a what winners do study that we did a number of years ago, in terms of what's the difference between sales reps who share content created by marketing, and sales reps who don't, and I think the other thing that's clustered in here is sales reps who are really tuned into using social effectively to reach their customers and their customers, and what we discovered was some pretty interesting data points about the fact that sales reps who use content perform better than their peers. And there's a logic to this, right, because, again, if you can really connect your conversation to something that you can leave behind with someone and not talking product brochure here I'm talking about audience centric kinds of content. Yeah, and actually, this all becomes very obvious when we get to the bottom of the funnel and you know a customer is actually asking a sales rep for product information. That's low hanging fruit. What I'm talking about, though, is putting out there and sharing it's in the.
Phyllis Davidson:The onus is on marketing, to make sure sure that this kind of external marketing content for our external audiences is effectively shared with sales and that sales is powered to use it. This is what's so important. So you asked what kind of content we're talking about. Yeah, okay so, and I would argue I mean it could be any kind of asset, but when we think about what's inside the content, so, whether it's an ebook or a blog or a thought leadership paper, whatever it is, doesn't matter as much what the asset is. It matters what's in it, and what can be so effective for sales to share is something that combines facts about the industry that demonstrate that the vendor is knowledgeable and can be a trusted supplier of information.
Phyllis Davidson:Right, that's one element in content that's really great for sales to use. So actual data about what's going on in the industry, together with that thought leadership, so content that demonstrates the company's thought leadership, and there's a really opportunity here for sales rep to plug into those thought leadership ideas and again put it in context for the you know, the prospect or customer that they're sharing it with. It provides an opportunity for a conversation, right, customer stories are important as well, so I will often talk about well, this. All of these things could be inside an ebook, an interactive ebook perhaps, that allows a prospect to go in and out of deep dive on different pieces of information. Again, what's critical here, too, is that sales is properly empowered to use the content. So we can talk about that a little bit, too, but let me let you keep asking questions.
Dani Buckley:No, no, it's great, it's great And I love that you touched on, like adding the context. I just think that's such an important piece And we will talk more. So you know, i know, because I hear it all the time I talk to business leaders and sales leaders of all types that sometimes they are skeptical about how much content really matters in the sales process. They're not used to that. They're not used to, they haven't transitioned to the world that we are all expected to be content providers and educators. So how important do you think it actually is? the prospects and customers Does it really make a difference? Like what do you know that we can help maybe convince some of those folks a little more that this matters?
Phyllis Davidson:Okay, so I have a great data point for you. In fact, we need up in front of me so I can grab it. So we do a study every year where we talk to businesses about their consumption of content from the vendors who are trying to sell to them. The vendors are already using, and we ask a set of deep questions about the value of the content, and the responses are actually pretty daunting. I'm going to share one specific data point, but there are many more data points regarding the fact that, overall, folks don't think the content they get from vendors is very good. They get too much It is all looks no meat in there too much of a high level overview that isn't really demonstrating an understanding of customer needs. But here's the most interesting factoid We ask the question of how likely are you to continue to do business with a vendor whose content you don't find valuable, and almost 70% of respondents said that they were unlikely to expand contracts with vendors who simply did not provide good content.
Phyllis Davidson:Also really interesting data point and concerning right So many of us are in businesses where it's not so much about selling the first time, it's about retaining customers right. So that content machine and not only the machine for just getting content to externally out there through a variety of channels to your audiences. But as part of that machine, empowering sales to use that content not just for new business but in their ongoing communications with existing customers. It's so critical. It's something that, as a content expert, i certainly champion, and I do think the initial onus is on marketing to provide those materials that support the content. That makes it easy and possible for sales reps and other customer facing account team members, csms etc. To effectively share the content.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, great, Yes, love it. I love the emphasis on they care about good content. We're not talking about just the content that I think a lot of sales people are used to is explaining your product or service. We're talking about content that's helpful and educational.
Phyllis Davidson:My main goal for our whole team on content strategy and operations in Forrester is trying to help our clients on the business side to develop audience-centric content and absolutely step away from this product promotional type of content that companies have always developed. You'd be surprised as much as we've been talking about being audience-centric for years. it's still really hard for a lot of companies and a lot of companies are just so product driven that it's still an internal struggle. But it's up to the content team to reinterpret the story that needs to be told to make it audience-centric. I say the content team So many people are involved. marketers demand brand ABM.
Phyllis Davidson:There's a lot of discussion about content-based content and content strategy. So in fact that's one of the things or an area of work that content teams have to provide is if I need to understand what the sales plays are and let's say I've developed content that's appropriate for our account-based marketing focus, but also for other focus areas Perhaps that piece is meant to cover a specific geo, etc. So when I provide empowerment materials to sales, i need to segment it to match their sales plays. You could argue that in addition to the external customer content being audience-centric, our enablement to the sales team needs to be audience-centric. I need to give sales what they need in their context.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, so this is a perfect transition, because my next question is why do we think salespeople aren't using the marketing assets and content that we create for them? What are the problems we're facing?
Phyllis Davidson:Okay. So one of the things we see is that sales is confused about what the heck to use and where to find it. So some of our stats and I'm just looking right now at some of the figures that I have from recent studies there's like 1,100 assets available to the average seller to pick from. That's crazy, right. We need to make it easy for them by promoting specific content. They also many sellers say that what they've got in terms of sales tech to help them get to the right content isn't very good. They need easier ways to access the content. They also will find that they just don't think the content fits right, that they feel like they have to rewrite an asset or rewrite the enablement around the asset.
Phyllis Davidson:Let's say the email that marketing provides to go with it, because it doesn't fit what they're going after at all.
Phyllis Davidson:And then too often, you know, marketing might be pushing the same content for too broad a range of deal types or persona types, buying groups, etc. So it's fine tuning and really creating the content for the content. I like they that can be different, different plus the technology. So certainly your audience is familiar with all of the sales content solutions that are out there. Right, it's become over the last 10 years technology and I'm talking about, you know, seismic, big tin can, those kinds of technologies. Marketing is investing in them because it's so critical to their success with sales that, even though I remember when this area of technology came out a dozen years ago or so, i thought isn't it up to sales enablement to actually make this purchase? Doesn't it come out of the sales enablement budget? And what we've seen over time is this is a marketing expenditure too, because it's so critical. So all of the problems I just mentioned can be solved through effective use of a sales content solution. Yeah, because one of the, in fact one of the places where we see modular content and a really powerful recommendation engine really taking hold is within those sales content solutions, because one of the first things we've seen happen is a much more effective use of modules so that, just from a pure enablement standpoint, presentations that sales needs to put together for customers Our capabilities are really strong in this area to provide the different modules that a sales rep can easily pick from. Again, one right. It's not like it's necessarily easy to put this together, but companies that are doing a really great job in utilizing these solutions make it easy for sales reps to pull together their presentations that they need, because they've been basically added to the engine in a modular way And the engine is driven by AI that can help put together and assemble, construct those presentations. I love it, right.
Phyllis Davidson:And in addition to that, what you want to happen is for sales reps to go in and say, okay, i'm looking at this kind of deal. This is essentially where my persona of this type is in the sales cycle. This is the problem they're having What content should I be sending? And they should be able to pull that out of the system. And along with the actual content is again what I call the content. For the content, the email, the social blocks, the call script And those things.
Phyllis Davidson:It shouldn't be just one thing for each asset. The marketing team should have thought through well what are all the use cases for the use of this And make sure that we're providing what's needed. The other thing, too, is that this isn't something that marketing should be doing for every single asset that they're churning out right. Part of the challenge here is saying what is the right content. Again, i mentioned those 1,100 assets. Well, you also can't be recommending 500 assets. You've got to have an engine that is using intelligence to get to the right asset, or at least a shortlist right. You don't want sales to have to spend time to try to choose. You want to try to get them what they need as easily as possible.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, yes, love it, And I think I love that you're mentioning technology Super important, That could be a whole other episode, But also I love you know a lot of what you spoke to is that. I think a lot can be boiled down to are you actually having conversations and understanding the needs of your sales force? right? Because it's like they're don't think it's that valuable, or they're having to edit it too much, or they can't find it, or they don't actually have the things they need, And so I think it's just a great reminder to those listening that this marketing can't just be making these decisions in a silo, right?
Phyllis Davidson:So in the session that I'm doing with my colleague, Peter Ostrow, who is just an expert in sales enablement, And, you know, after we do this session, I'll push out some social linking to his stuff as well and to the session we're presenting. But one of the things we're going to talk about is the feedback loop, And there's a little problem here if marketing doesn't have an open channel with sales. Now, sure, there are in large companies, there are some methodology for getting that feedback in more of a process oriented way, But I'm a big fan of just talking to sales, right? If marketing should have, you know, a sample set of representative, not only account representatives, but basically people in all of the customer facing roles that they're talking to regularly, to keep their pulse on their needs, their issues, what they think is working and what isn't. And then here's the other really important thing. So these systems that we were talking about, the sales content solutions. One of the things they do that's so critical, again, if used properly, is they record and make it possible for marketers to see when an asset has been shared by sales and engaged with both, shared directly through a marketing channel. That is absolutely critical Because at the end of a half year, if you can see that you've got a very specific set of content that sales has shared and, through sales sharing, that's content that's getting engaged with. That is a critical piece of content planning information. In fact, that's actually.
Phyllis Davidson:There's another session I'm doing you'll appreciate this, coming from where you are in all of this stuff. It's called Look Back to See Ahead And it's a session on looking at content engagement from the standpoint of late stage pipeline and closed one deals and tracking back to see what everyone engaged in. And one of the examples I use there in terms of the kind of thing you might find is hey, we put an asset out there that we thought we'd get a lot of pickup in certain channels And guess what we learned? The best pickup was when sales shared the asset. Yes, Right, But we still hear all the time from companies that what sales does is they download the asset and they send it an email And that's a huge loss of a piece of information.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, Right, yep, love it. Okay, yes, i. So I know that you all in this presentation you're doing kind of on this topic. You have some key elements that you put together of kind of what should be in place for sales to make the best use of marketing content. So tell us, walk us through those key elements that people should be thinking about.
Phyllis Davidson:Well, we put together kind of a schema, if you will, of six essential elements, yeah, and we sort of made it simple by just calling it the what, the why, the when, the whom, the how and the ROI And cover this at kind of a high level. So the what is you have to start out with the right set of content And, like I said, it shouldn't be just any old asset and it should by no means be all assets. This should be where the what is chosen based on, you know, it being an area, a current campaign that's strongly connected to current sales plays, where there's a lot of heat and light. You also it's not like you want sales to be a channel that sort of picks up the ability to share content because you don't have enough marketing channels to share it. That's not really the right choice. What you should be doing is giving sales something that you expect to be really popular, even if you're putting it out through multiple marketing channels. Honestly, if an end customer gets something from sales that they've actually seen a banner ad for or whatever, that's good. There's nothing wrong with that. If they get it a second time from sales, there's nothing wrong with that. Yes, it certainly may want to provide certain unique things, but again, it should be the popular content that the heat and light is on. It should be a set of assets.
Phyllis Davidson:Hopefully, one of the big things we talk about is that marketing teams should be using a primary and derivatives content approach. There's a big primary asset that's robust in what's inside of it. Then there are a bunch of derivatives that may be more appropriate for different audience members because of the focus, but they're pulling the content from the bigger piece. The best thing to do in terms of the what is to give sales the full package and be able to give them some instruction on. Hey, if you're talking to this person in the buyer group, you may be better off using the blog as opposed to the white paper or whatever it is. The other thing is the why. Whereas you don't want to be saddling the sales rep with your whole marketing plan around the content, you do need to give them information about why this content is relevant, specific to the personas, to the buying group, to your solutions. You need the short set of messaging and goals with the content that sales can grow quickly again, not some big, long document, but enough so that they understand why this is the right content, then when? When is the right time to share it? It should be clear when something is appropriate for what stage in the buyer journey. By the way, that's also something that's very important from a feedback standpoint, because what if sales disagrees and says you know what I've been sharing this, but it really is more bottom of the funnel, you're telling me it's the first thing to share That right there will help marketing do a better job with this when, in the future, in developing future content.
Phyllis Davidson:Again, for whom? There's two angles on this. For whom? Because, yes, it's make sure you've parsed your personas enough and also provided the appropriate emails, etc. Depending on what persona content is going to. But the other thing is the enablement material. So what? the whom? from the standpoint of your sales team, the way you enable a BDR may be different than the way that you enable an account manager or a CSM. It's important that the marketing team is thinking through that as well.
Phyllis Davidson:Then the how really is what does that full package of supporting materials include? You've got the asset or set of assets itself, which I'll call above the glass. That's what the end customer is going to see. Then you've got all the supporting assets that provide the how, how sales can effectively share the content. We've talked about that, so there's a diverse set of materials. Then the ROI, which is the last of our six essential elements, is being able to follow and see when content has been shared by sales and that's been successful, based on the engagement you see among the audience. So getting that feedback loop is critical as well. I love that we're doing the session on this topic at Summit, as well as my session on the content touch analysis, which is directly related to that ROI. Yeah, so it's like the six elements.
Dani Buckley:No, that's great. Is there anything else we should know about ROI? Anything else that you recommend when it comes to like ensuring it, tracking it?
Phyllis Davidson:Well, i'll tell you something. One of the things about ROI is that ROI on content is about engagement and influence. It is not about creating a lead or closing a piece of business. And I mean certainly salespeople understand that content isn't going to close a piece of business, but we still see a lot of marketing funnels that suggest that there's this moment in time when content opens a door or closes a door. And sure you could set things up that way by gating content and having that content is downloaded and bam, that person gets a call from sales. But that doesn't usually work.
Phyllis Davidson:What we're trying to help marketers do is create a whole schema for engagement where, basically, looking at all of the sensors that are enabled through the whole marketing stack And, by the way, sales sharing is another place where you have a sensor that will pick up a signal from the audience regarding what they're doing and what they want to engage with You want to build content engagement that's based on collecting signals and fine tuning an experience in a personalized way based on those signals. So ROI needs to be about driving engagement that ultimately has a relationship to pipeline and close business. It's not about a one-to-one relationship between content and leads. So I hope that makes sense.
Dani Buckley:It makes total sense, and I think it's probably one of the most important things folks should hear from this, because I think it is often we're looking for that like direct ROI and this thing, and it's just. That's just not how it works And you're gonna lose that battle And then you're gonna give up on doing things that actually really matter and do make an impact.
Phyllis Davidson:Yeah, and unfortunately, you know, we at Forrester we've been talking about the criticality of the buying group and being to be sales for a number of years. But it's a big change from a sales operation standpoint, you know, in terms of the way the waterfall is looked at, measured and, just frankly, the way it works. So we're seeing it slowly really take hold. But it's a hard change. So you know when, if you're in an organization where you know a piece of content is being depended on to equal a lead, that is a single individual And now we're gonna, you know, count that among all of our leads in a given quarter, when in fact, that potential piece of business is actually represented by six individuals for that one piece of business. So those six leads are really one lead And it's not a piece of a single piece of content that's gonna somehow move them from pipeline to closed deal.
Phyllis Davidson:So there's a lot more complexity in the way all of this works. In B2B, i often will say to people hey, we're not selling a pair of pants online where, hey, this person looked at brown pants. Now let's send them ads for blue pants And see what we're talking about. So much more complexity. You know it's hard, but one of the great things that marketing can do is to work closely with sales in this way and make sure that they're creating content that's useful to that sales conversation.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, great, i love this. I love your passion, i love your expertise. That's an important topic But we do have to close out, even though we can sit and chat all day. Any closing thoughts, anything we haven't covered that you wanna be sure our listeners know before we say goodbye.
Phyllis Davidson:Let's see. I would say that you know, be willing and this is to your sales audience Feel like you have an open door, even if you don't know the people in marketing producing content. go figure out who they are, tell them if you think something is good or if you think something's bad. Look at what marketing is putting out and in terms of blogs and on LinkedIn and reshare and get to know your marketers a little bit. you may be able to get more out of them than you realize in ways that are really helpful to your job every day.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, love that Great advice. Well, thank you so much, phyllis. It's so nice to connect with you. I appreciate your time Absolutely And, for those listening, we'll have Phyllis's contact information and the show notes, along with some other links that I know you're gonna share with us to pass along for people to get more information on this topic. And thank you everybody for tuning in. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Sell Smarter, sell Faster, and until then, happy selling. Thanks for joining us on Sell Smarter, sell Faster. If you like what you hear, click that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. Be sure to visit our website, sellsmartersellfastercom, where you can find even more helpful sales enablement and inbound marketing content.
