If you are a sales rep or manage a sales team, you need to be acting as a part-time content marketer.
Stop rolling your eyes... We get it.
You want to focus on "selling"; leave the fluff to the marketing team. But here’s the truth. Personal content marketing will increase your sales efficiency and sales volume tenfold.
“Everybody is a content creator today; the market is saturated.”
You’re absolutely right, and 90% of that content is garbage. It’s regurgitated or copied and pasted from AI. If you take the time to have an original thought that is authentic to you and prepare quality content, you will stand out from the pack nine times out of ten. This takes courage, vulnerability (as in ripping off the corporate mask and actually showing personality on LinkedIn for once), and time to develop the skill of content creation. But in the end, by doing the work that most won't, you will eventually develop a path.
“I tried posting content for a month and didn’t see a single lead.”
Don’t get us wrong. We claim content creation is important, but it isn’t a magic pill that you swallow and find new success over night. If it was, we’d be looking like the B2B Pablo Escobar over at Set 2 Close. Sadly, we don’t have any pet tigers in the office or a speed boat outside… yet. Content creation is like any other craft; it takes time to develop the skill to create engaging content. It will take trial and error for you to find your own voice and build an audience. But at the end of the day, just like a good fitness routine, if you start small, stay consistent, and build up over time.
“Fine, I’ll try it, but you haven’t told me what content creation will actually do for me.”
Making the transition to becoming a content creator as you work a job like sales takes the humility of admitting that buyer behaviour has changed drastically in the age of social media. Surely you’ve seen these changes in yourself as well. We no longer want to be at the mercy of a sales rep. We want to do the research in the comfort of our own homes, assess all the options, and then approach a sales rep. Often, the place where we get the most trustworthy content will be the provider that we end up going to first. Secondly, when it’s time to build a partnership with a company, we bet you’ve gone to look at their LinkedIn profile to get an idea of who they are , what they look like, and how they communicate in order to deem them trustworthy or not (a little stalkerish, to be honest). On top of this, we as a society begin to trust the voices of those who have larger followings on social media. We assume the person with 8,000 followers holds more merit than the guy who has 200 (what a shallow society we’ve become).
Creating content can feel tedious and time-consuming in the beginning, but we recommend you and your sales team stick to it consistently for 12 months and see the potential return. A good content strategy has the potential to open your brand up to thousands of people, build trust with prospects in a new way, increase conversions, increase booking speed, and create future opportunities. If you’re curious to learn more about content marketing for sales teams or looking to get an expert look into your current sales program as a whole, we are offering free sales audits at the moment. You can learn more here.
