Research shows close to 70% of the buyer’s journey is complete before prospects reach out to your business. That means you need to communicate your message before you speak or write a word – a message you communicate through your sales content.
Sales content is a strategic part of any successful development plan. It gives off the first impression of your business and either directs prospects down the sales funnel or turns them away. Using the sales as a service model, you can craft your content to move prospects along in five steps.
What to Communicate
Before reviewing and crafting your sales content, think about the important points to communicate through your pieces. Your content isn’t about selling; it’s about drawing in prospects. With each piece you must:
- Position your organization as experts that care about solutions rather than sales
- Establish credibility by displaying results
- Engage, nurture, and move leads through the sales cycle
Target content to attract new leads, engage those in your pipeline, and nurture current customers to grow.
Five Steps to Strategic Sales Content
The road to strategic content is not as difficult as you imagine, and the impact is more than you think. Start with these five steps:
- Identify the buyer’s journey – Before you can match content to the prospect journey, you need to know the path. From awareness to retention, you need content that speaks to each spot along the way.
- Assess your current content – No need to do work that’s already done. Check out the content you have and decide if it works as is, needs an update, or should be scrapped.
- Map content to the buyer’s journey – Once you have your map and your content, match them up, paying attention to where you see gaps.
- Capture data and assess effectiveness – As with all elements of sales strategy, you must continually monitor what’s working and what needs to change.
- Maintain timeliness – Some content may be “evergreen,” staying relevant through the years. However, most of your content needs an annual upgrade to stay pertinent.
Step Six: Leverage a Sales Partner to Fill in Your Gaps
Though simple, each of these steps takes dedicated resources to execute faithfully – resources your business may not possess. An outsourced sales partner can fill in your resource gaps, providing savings by letting you handle the areas you can and honing in to support problem areas.
NuGrowth Solution’s CRM management assesses content effectiveness and maps data to outline a clear sales journey, and our sales coaches work with teams to develop and leverage content built for success.
Discover more on NuGrowth’s process and results here – and get in touch with us at 614.304.3922 to schedule your meeting today.
Sarah Deak is a veteran copywriter and content strategist with NuGrowth Solutions. She likes to look for the unexpected angle and uses her background in education, business development, and marketing to create interesting and informative pieces to equip readers with actionable data