Despite what you may have learned from Alec Baldwin, sales teams are not always closing. Prospects can drop out of the sales funnel at any stage, especially in the B2B world. If your team begins to notice any regular sticking points during their sales cycle, it may be a sign that you’re not effectively communicating with prospects.
Are you consistently having trouble setting meetings? Closing deals? Maybe you’re losing people after demos. Luckily your content marketing team is there to help. High-quality marketing materials, such as innovative case studies, can help reduce any friction in your funnel and get your team selling more.
Once you’ve identified the sticking points for your team, test out some of our proven marketing strategies below.
Starting the Conversation
If your sales team doesn’t have a strong conversation opener, your pipeline will quickly run dry. You can attend as many networking events and trade shows as the next guy, but without a compelling story, you’re going nowhere fast.
Tap your marketing partner to help you build out meaningful thought leadership pieces. Together you can evaluate both sides of the client experience– what gets them excited and what causes them undue stress and frustration.
When the story of how you and/ or your product helps clients is carefully crafted, sales will be able to get to the heart of a prospect’s concern and get that qualified conversation rolling.
Take it all a step further and utilize Online PR best practices to get your content picked up and featured in meaningful publications for your industry. Having these proven sources to point to will provide the credibility your sales team desperately needs.
Getting a Meeting
Businesses approach purchases differently than independent consumers. Their sales process is often more cautious because, especially when hiring an agency partner, you’re making a choice that affects your entire team. They have to deal with that extra societal pressure of making the right choice.
After proper rapport has been established and it’s time to progress into formal meetings or demos, sales needs to successfully communicate to prospects that your company is, in fact, the best solution for their unique problem.
In addition to the thought leadership pieces that helped you get noticed in the first place, compelling client testimonies are incredibly valuable at this stage in the sales cycle. Make sure that you have an established reviews strategy in place and work alongside your marketing team to polish client quotes into high quality content. Video marketing is great for this.
No Isn’t the End
Throughout the sales process, you may come across some tire kickers — supervisors, managers, highly-involved C-suite members. Whoever it is, he probably wasn’t in any of the initial demos, and his role is to inevitably find all the ways that your product isn’t the right fit for their business.
It’s best to have some additional marketing content ready to go for these tire kickers that speaks to the versatility of your B2B product or service. Case studies really shine here. Build out an “innovation packet” that highlights some of the more unique ways past clients have modified your solution to fit their specific needs.
With these additional resources, sales will be prepared to counteract any suspicions that your tools won’t work for a prospect’s individual use case and prove the versatility of your solution.
If you are in need of a content marketing team to help bolster and streamline your sales process, reach out to the SEO team at WTM Digital today.