Q1 • 2021


07


Even if the “old ways” of site visits and conferences return, this new norm we are all experiencing will demand that sales professionals possess better digital selling skills and amplified personal branding.


teams. Moreover, they must keep this content up-to-date and make it readily accessible to their colleagues on the sales side. “Content created for marketing is one to


all,” von Rosen says. “It’s content that can be consumed on your website or on YouTube or in your LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram feeds. That shifts a bit when you’re creating content for sales or sales enablement, which is when your sellers take that content and then hand deliver it directly to the buyer.” According to von Rosen, this could be as simple as your sales rep taking a blog post and sending a LinkedIn message to a client, saying, “Hey, I know you asked this question in the webinar the other day, and I found this blog that we wrote about that topic. I thought you would be interested in it.” Or it could be a salesperson taping a one-to-one video using a tool such as Hippo Video, Videolicious, Loom, or BombBomb and including the assets that marketing has created. Remember, though, that salespeople don’t


always know where to go for that content. For marketers, that means it’s paramount that they develop and organize content for different buyer types and for the different products the company offers and serve it up to their sales teams in an organized and easily accessible way. That might mean delivering testimonials from someone at an insurance agency that your sales reps can take and share privately to a buyer via a platform such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or email. “In many cases, you’ll be able to cross-


reference many of these buyer types by product, industry, region, culture, and even gender in some cases,” von Rosen says. “We use a tool called


EveryoneSocial, but other tools, like Seismic, can also help.” Before your marketers spend time creating up-to-date content that is tagged correctly and that your sellers can find, the first step is relying on your sales team to understand the needs of the buyer and his or her persona. And quite frankly, if you haven’t gone back and revisited your buyers and where they’re at since March, you need to do that. The people and the journey are likely to be different than they were a year ago. It’s not that they’re not trying to buy, but there’s confusion around what to do and you can no longer walk over to somebody’s desk or walk down the hall to a colleague’s office and say, “Hey, how do I get this done?” Now they have to hop on a video call or send an email or maybe engage with a project management platform to read ongoing conversations with the entire team—it’s definitely different now. You need to think about how to equip your sales team to navigate and understand this and that their buyers have experienced as much change as they themselves have. “There needs to be a conversation between


marketing and sales about what the buyer actually now needs and is interested in and what the


buyer’s persona really is—as of today,” von Rosen says. “If it’s a miss, your sellers are never going to provide the marketing content to their buyers, because it’s not going to be relevant.” When you’re structuring your content—your content strategy, your nurture programs, the delivery, the handoff to the sales team—what are the questions and answers that are going on? Every piece of content should answer a question and then raise a new one. Once the buyer has that piece of information, what does he or she need to know next? No piece of content should be a dead end. It should continue the story and the conversation and lead them to what’s next. From there, it’s up to your sales team


members to use that content to cultivate relationships. Unfortunately, too many sales professionals are unaccustomed to social selling and, therefore, are handicapping their own efforts with weak personal branding online. If B2B is your arena, that means sprucing up your LinkedIn game is a must-do, especially in a pandemic-driven, remote-oriented world. And that’s where having great content comes in handy. “Today, virtual selling is how you will likely talk to your buyers—initially, especially B2B buyers,”


“Content created for marketing is one to all,” von Rosen says. “That shifts a bit when you’re creating content for sales or sales enablement, which is when your sellers take that content and then hand deliver it directly to the buyer.”


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