Content for Sales Teams: Create a Strategy and Priortize

Distributing a plentiful supply of highly relevant content for your sales team to share with their target prospects is key. But what if you are an expansion stage business starting from scratch and you don’t have a budget or the resources to create everything at once? FIRST, you need to create an overarching content marketing strategy, and second, you need to prioritize the type of content generation on which you will focus.

While your sales team can’t solely rely on content to close a deal (and sales people are known for putting the blame on marketing’s shortcomings), content is very instrumental as it relates to acquiring a prospect’s positive attention in the early stages of a sales cycle. According to the Content Marketing Institute, buyers only find content relevant 42% of the time. Additionally, the lack of relevant content (as perceived by buyers) is responsible for reducing the vendor’s change of closing a sale by 45%. Scary. Struggling to figure out the best strategy for your content marketing program? Stephanie Tilton of Ten Ton Marketing and Michelle Linn of CMI created an excellent strategy map – check it out.
Based on the OpenView Labs experience of managing the portfolio companies’ lead generation systems and helping to create the best content to support the efforts, here is a list of prioritized content for your marketing team to consider:

1. Sales scripts with a true value proposition defined
2. Email templates that are concise, convincing and effective
3. Quality website and preferably microsite for your target segment
4. Customer testimonials/case studies
5. Customized demo
6. White paper demonstrating your businesses’ value proposition, trends, etc.
7. Videos demoing your product, customer testimonials, management teams, etc.
8. Updated and relevant social media sites
9. Blogs created by your sales team to demonstrate their industry knowledge

What other content might you put on the prioritized list?