5 Ways Your B2B Sales Team Can Leverage Content to Close Leads

by | Aug 20, 2020 | Blog

Your marketing team creates amazing content to engage your audience, now you just need to teach your sales team how to use it to close deals

Your content marketing should be steady and consistent in today’s online world. Without a constant outflow of information for your desired customers, you are likely to be overlooked in favour of businesses who are trying to answer the questions of leads.

So using your company content to strategically qualify leads and shorten the sales cycle is a masterstroke that many have yet to catch on to. Customers are telling businesses exactly what questions they have each time they perform a search. If your content fits the brief, you can use it to leverage sales.

Your sales team needs to understand how to use the resources they have – your content. It can be used to help them to build meaningful and lucrative relationships, overcome objections, and showcase your company’s expertise to close deals faster.

Here are five ways you can use your evergreen, white pages, research papers and other high-quality content to move the sales process:

  1. Overcoming objections

Use your content to answer questions. It is one of the best ways to help customers get a deeper understanding of what you have to offer. In B2B transactions, sending people information that is well-formatted and easy to digest is a great way to help decisionmakers remember your sales pitch, especially if they can use your content in a presentation without having to change the format, rewrite the content or otherwise justify their choice – you can do that for them with prefilled Q&A content.

  1. Garnering the first click

The first click is always the hardest to get. Your brand awareness campaign needs to be on point. Know your competitors, understand your customer persona, and ensure that for every question on a subject in your industry, your content is the answer that appears in front of the prospect.

  1. Gathering customer insights

Remember that your customers and prospects will tell you what they want to read, you just need to follow the analytics. Look at your content for high hit rates and consider what is offering your audience real value by looking at the journey your website visitors take. If you can see that people gravitate towards an article, or answer or report more than others, ensure that you promote that content and share your insights to secure leads.

  1. Closing the feedback loop

Marketing and sales need to work as a cohesive team. They should be seen as equals and treated as equally valuable to your business in terms. Your sales and marketing teams should be ready to answer customer questions with consistent answers. For example, if a client requests more information about an upcoming seasonal discount, your marketing team should be ready to respond with appropriate materials, such as an email the salesperson can send instantly.

  1. Developing deeper relationships

Create content with strategic partners. This process will help you understand what’s important to them and find ways to add value to the relationship. If you can form part of a chain of suppliers that answers customer pain points with as few contact points as possible, you will become a core part of a logistics chain that can secure your business for years to come.

For your content to be leveraged by sales teams, it is important that it is:

  • Relevant
  • Up to date
  • Informative
  • Easily distributed and read
  • Visually appealing
  • Ready for distribution at any time by salespeople

Encouraging your sales and marketing teams to work closely as a single unit will help you to secure more leads, answer more pain points and exert yourself as an industry leader.