Agility of Content Teams Rises to Address Uncertainty for Sales Teams
In my conversation this week with the Head of Field Marketing and Events at an Enterprise AI company, we spoke about the art of generative AI content creation, a compelling subject for content marketers these days.
The importance of the content team being agile rises because marketing, sales, and customer success teams face lots of uncertainty. The C-suite has turned the page from growth at any cost—GAAC, to Profitable Efficient Growth—PEG. Executives are reducing their strategic focus, getting efficient.
Highlighting this dynamic, Forrester writes in their B2B Content Guide: Tech Buyers Need Relevant Vendor Content Pre- And Post-Sales
“When choosing vendors, 89% say it’s very important/important that vendors provide them with relevant content at each stage of the buying process.”
In post-acquisition stages, the Forrester survey says the customer success teams looking for activation, onboarding, expansion, upsell, cross-sell, renewals, content is essential to enhancing customer relationships.
“Sixty-eight percent say they will not expand a contract if they don’t receive helpful content as a customer.”
Here are three top strategies that a field marketer and content strategist should implement in 2024 to help their stakeholders, along with the expected impact or results for customer-facing field teams and their managers.
Personalized Customer Success Stories
One example that can put the aspiring CRO and content marketer on the path to partnering to drive revenue and sales is Mike Adams. He mastered the power of personalized customer success stories from orchestrating enterprise engagements at firms like Schlumberger, Siemens, Nokia, and Halliburton.
He authored a practical book for demand generation, called “7 Stories every Salesperson Must Tell“. It’s genius is its simplicity, which takes a lot of work. He teaches a methodology that demonstrates familiarity with customer-centric approaches and success story promotion. Summary:
Create customer success stories that highlight real-life examples of how your product or service solved specific challenges for your existing customers.
Tailor these stories to showcase the benefits and outcomes that resonate with different customer segments.
Implement personalized email campaigns and targeted social media promotion to share these success stories with potential customers.
Expected Impact:
Improved engagement: Personalized success stories make it easier for frontline teams to connect with potential customers by showcasing relevant solutions.
Increased trust: Sharing real success stories builds trust and credibility with potential customers, making them more likely to engage with sales teams or try the product.
Higher conversion rates: Personalization increases the chances of converting leads into customers, ultimately leading to higher sales and revenue.
Interactive Educational Content
One of my exceptional sales managers, Tom Rudwall amplified the internal communications from corporate and reframed it to educate, inspire, and demonstrate for his field team how to make a compelling offer, leading to durable customer commitments.
With internal announcements newsletters blogs, our regular sprint meetings were like campfire-bootcamps. The salespeople learned about recrafting their pitch, depending on things like the geography, the type of industry vertical, customer segment, customer references, and ICP persona. As a newbie in sales, it helped me uplevel my game.
He would spotlight the greatness of top sales execs, motivating us to want to become successful like them, sparking the fire, and feeling the camaraderie of a company of legends. He’d lead us into role-play situations, as we told personal success stories of what happened on closing the sale.
His campfire sprints let meeting participants learn from experts, ask questions, shorten their learning curve. Making the sale was like collecting logs to bring back to the fire. Top performing field marketers and sales managers serve their customers, build a bonfire like Tom Rudwall served his sales team to become the highest performing revenue office in a company of 100 field offices. Summary:
Develop interactive content such as webinars, workshops, and online courses that educate potential customers about industry trends, challenges, and best practices.
Provide opportunities for participants to engage with your experts, ask questions, and share their insights.
Promote these events through various channels and encourage field teams to invite their leads and prospects.
Expected Impact:
Enhanced thought leadership: Interactive educational content positions your company as an industry leader and trusted advisor.
Lead generation: These events can generate high-quality leads as attendees are often genuinely interested in your industry or solutions.
Strengthened relationships: Field teams can leverage these events to build stronger relationships with potential customers by offering valuable knowledge.
Targeted Product Demos and Trials
Kurt Shintaku’s blog guides Microsoft enterprise customers for 20 years, how to envision and design systems that align with a customer’s digital transformation strategy, specifically leveraging cloud technologies from Microsoft 365, Azure, Dynamics 365, Security, Power Platform, and Fabric.
His blog highlights the importance of product walkthroughs and demos. It suggests that these can help field teams and customers discover new features, architectures, capabilities, and best practices, which could lead to increased product adoption, retention and revenue.
It showcases the value and benefits of a field marketer’s offering to the customer. There’s no doubt that Redmond product marketing and program management has a bevy of content to stir desired customers, and CMO / CRO outcomes; but, Kurt’s point of view makes the firehose of content very consumable. It yields targeted insights in shorter time intervals with his given audience and stakeholders.
By incorporating examples from his curation into your content strategy, you can create outcomes that drive compelling demos, more customer engagement, sustainable and quicker revenue growth. Summary:
Create targeted product demonstrations or trial offers for different customer segments, addressing their specific pain points.
Collaborate closely with the product development team to ensure these demos showcase the latest features and improvements.
Encourage field teams to offer personalized product experiences to potential customers.
Expected Impact:
Increased product adoption: Targeted demos and trials help potential customers experience the value of your product firsthand.
Reduced sales cycles: By addressing specific pain points, you can shorten the time it takes for leads to make a decision.
Adaptive Communication: Providing tailored experiences increases the likelihood of converting trials into paying customers.
The C-suite is looking for content creation strategies that focus on personalization, education, and product engagement. Ultimately, these benefits accrue to customer-facing field teams and show up as improved chances of
Reaching revenue goals.
Increased engagement.
Deeper levels of trust.
New leads generated.
Better thought leadership positioning versus competition.
Higher conversion rate outcomes.
Implementing these strategies this year can help drive traditional marketing outcomes that generate awareness, interest, decisions, and actions among your intended audience.
In summary, demand generation specialists, field marketers, event managers, and the content team can assist frontline sales and customer service to build relationships, strengthen programs, gain ICP understanding, and reach marketing and sales alignment.