Being a generic, top-of-funnel salesperson isn’t always a fun job. Oftentimes, when I tell my friends what my job title is, I receive a telltale look of skepticism that says, “Why in the world would you choose to spend most of your waking hours doing THAT!?”
But the truth is I’m lucky to work for a company (Kapost) that doesn’t arm its salespeople with a boiler room-type atmosphere, a phone, and a talk track. Instead, we are armed with content.
Not only do we have an abundant amount of content to choose from, but we are empowered with the right content. Many of the prospects I speak with on the phone tell me their goals include “producing more high-quality content.” This is a perfectly fine goal, but one that has two parts: the “more” part and the “high-quality” part. If producing high-quality content isn’t serving as a marketing org’s true north, the sheer volume of content it’s producing is irrelevant, and might actually be actively working against the marketing org’s goals. SiriusDecisions has found that almost two-thirds of content goes to waste for either being unfindable, off brand, or out-of-date.
Thanks to the Kapost app that lives in my CRM, we have content tagged by persona, asset type, tier (decision-maker, budget holder, doer, technical consultant, etc.), and more. With strategically tagged content, I’m able to easily access and deliver the right content (and more importantly, the messaging contained therein) to the right prospect at the right time, This in turn results in our marketing organization being able to more easily identify gaps that aren’t being filled in our existing strategy, which means even more awesome, buyer-centric content for me. Hello, positive feedback loop!
This helps me as a salesperson immensely; instead of being a “spam-person” (which, unfortunately, we’re probably all familiar with), I can take a more consultative approach. For example, if I’m reaching out to a prospect in an industry that’s heavily regulated, I can send content that speaks to the difficulty of maintaining compliance, and the costs of being out of compliance. This works to establish that:
- I’m not immediately trying to sell something
- I know at least something about my prospect’s industry before beginning to educate my prospect on how Kapost might help solve my prospect’s pain points
Content-centric outreach is particularly helpful as Kapost’s outbound sales organization tackles accounts we’ve identified as having a particular need for our platform. As we tackle this ABM list, having content tailored to each persona and tier that might influence a Kapost buying decision means that the specific leads we are reaching out to are able to receive customized messaging and assets. (The alternative would be 40 prospect employees receiving the exact same message—the type of “sales” that causes my friends to make that aforementioned face of skepticism).
For example, if I’m crafting a first-touch email to a director of product marketing, I can parse the content available to me by those two data points (persona: product marketers, tier: director) to find blog posts, infographics, and other top-of-funnel content that this person would find accessible, relevant, and timely.
Ultimately, while I realize I’m extraordinarily lucky to work for Kapost (which means I am the recipient of state-of-the-art, content-based sales enablement), any sales organization can leverage the above tactics to drive better account-based messaging, more qualified leads, and, of course, more real business conversations!