If you sell through a sales channel and especially if you sell through an independent sales channel, a portion of your marketing effort goes towards enabling their sales effort. That’s old news. Most B2B marketing started by creating sales collateral to put in the hands of the sales staff. Then came the “consumerization” of B2B marketing where marketers connected directly with prospects and customers via digital channels and began building trust and laying the groundwork for preference.
How marketing supports sales channels is changing. This is largely because buyer habits are changing. Three-page sell sheets may still have a role but it’s a smaller one. Buyers are doing their own research online. They (we) look for quick ways to get smart on a subject like retirement, insurance or home buying, that may be complex or jargon-filled and inaccessible. Then we talk to a sales agent.
Think about how investment firms like Blackrock create awareness and demand from investors while helping the financial advisor with content that helps them be smarter or actual content they can pass along to their clients.
Content that respects our time – short explainer videos, “Three Tips…” articles, 1-minute diagnostic quizzes – help us get smarter without having to take a sabbatical from work. Content needs to be designed to be of-use and responsive to whatever decision is likely in front of a buyer. That’s the new interpretation of ‘customer-centered.’
We want it on our phone and on our laptop. We discover it via our social feeds as well as search. We favor content passed along by a connection. Anything like a twelve-page whitepaper feels old-school or, at the very least, requires a time investment we keep putting off into the future. (How many 10-page pdfs sit on my hard drive waiting for that perfect moment when I can actually read or scan them?)
To help the sales staff today, we need to do three things:
- Educate sales about their buyer – how habits are changing, what is different about them today and will likely be different tomorrow. The notion that the sales person has the sacrosanct knowledge of their customer and how to sell to them is just, well, over.
- Give sales digital content that helps them connect with today’s and tomorrow’s buyer – more of that bite-sized, utility content designed around what the buyer needs to get done and native to the many screens they use.
- Train sales to become social sellers – tune-ups on how to connect via LinkedIn and Facebook and even interact digitally (e.g. text & email) with the next generation of buyers who just expect that.
Here are three examples of how brands or technologies are working to enable their sales channel to adapt and succeed.
Freddie Mac and the Borrower of the Future
Freddie Mac wants their lenders to be more familiar with today’s home-maybe-buyer. The core premise of the research and insights-heavy site - The Borrowers of the Future - is summed up, “What's on the mind of future borrowers? It may not be what you think.”
Articles sum up the ‘so what’ for lenders and convert societal trends into very practical terms:
- How Are Home Sharing Platforms Affecting Home Buying?
- Want to Help Millennials Become Homeowners? Try Townhouses
- High Housing Costs Are Root Cause of Low Homeownership Rates Among Young Adults
Experts from academia and Freddie Mac capture ideas in short videos. That places Freddie Mac at the heart of the solution. The whole site demonstrates their expertise vs. claiming it. It positions Freddie Mac as the “guide” not the hero of the story. In this B2B site, the lender is clearly the hero. As Donald Miller outlines in Building a Story Brand, being the guide is a powerful role for any brand to play.
State Street Listens
The investment firm, State Street, wants to help advisors and investors stay abreast of trends that will affect their investment strategies today and tomorrow. As a big firm, they have research budgets and capabilities not everyone would invest in. Their new “Listen” site publishes topical summaries of trends in five categories: Culture, Innovation, Markets, Perspective, Clarity. While these themes may be broad or high-minded, the actual articles get a little more down-to-earth (although not as practically titled as Freddie Mac):
- Building a New Workplace for Generation Z
- Memorize This: Three Tips for Remembering Clients' names, Faces and More
- Overruling the Heart: How Science, Data and Experience Can Curb Lovesick Investing
The articles are by-lined by State Street Advisors thus establishing their expertise. ‘Listen’ articles feature in their LinkedIn channel making them easy for advisors to pass along in their own feeds. State Street is working to give their advisors more that they can use to engage their clients and prospects more often. This goes beyond the robust research reports they are known for into more scannable content with a quick POV.
Sales Content Platforms: Seismic
Seismic is a platform for sharing content with a distributed sales force. There are a few solutions like it out there. Conceptually, I am more than intrigued by the promise of a platform like this. Practically-speaking it does seem like advanced science for most sales people and organizations.
The breakthrough of this type of platform is how it connects marketing with sales via a data-driven solution. Marketing wants to create content that works hard for sales. The performance and sales analytics – what content is being used most, what content is associated with a sales event- remove the guesswork or biased anecdotes from well-intentioned sales leaders. Now we can know what content works hardest.
The platform puts more content in more formats at the fingertips of sales people. They can find it easily. They can sort it and think about how content aligns to wherever a prospect is within their buyer journey. With Seismic securing another $100M in Series E investment and with John W. Thompson, Chairman at Microsoft, joining the board, the VC community is demonstrating belief in their platform.
Marketing and Sales Alignment
Marketing has always supported sales. The change that’s coming is the full instrumentation of the sales and marketing functions and their technology-enabled integration. Business leaders will overcome the tribal conflicts between sales and marketing as each function aligns around common KPIs revealed in a completely transparent dashboard of performance. Marketers can scale the impact of sales and know when they are truly winning. By delivering content that helps people make decisions quickly and easily wherever they are in their day or in the journey of their lives, marketing and sales can be aligned in serving today's customer.
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