Sales enablement, meet B2B content marketing: a love story

If your marketing team is producing great content, and your sales team isn’t using it to attract prospects and close deals, it’s a lot like dating in the dark. Similarly, if your sales team isn’t engaging with the marketing crew to create the content necessary for best-selling performance, they are both likely to miss the mark on generating revenue in this dating game. This will likely lead to time being wasted, and much frustration.  
 
But how do we get the sales team and marketing department to team up and fall in love? It starts with making sure the two teams understand each other. This, however, is easier said than done. 

Why B2B content marketing matters 

There are a few fundamental ways that B2B content marketing can assist with sales enablement: 

1. Builds trust and credibility: High-quality content establishes your brand as an industry thought leader and builds trust with potential customers. When sales teams share the right content with the right prospects at the right moments, it can establish credibility and make it easier to close deals.
2. Provides value to prospects: In producing content that addresses common pain points or challenges faced by your ideal target audience, you can get a foot in the door by delivering value to prospects before they even become customers. This makes a good impression and increases the chances of sealing the deal.   
3. Entices sales with content: B2B content marketing can provide sales teams with all the tips, tools, and tricks in a range of content assets, such as white papers, case studies, and product demos, that can be used to educate prospects and to nudge them closer to making a purchasing commitment.  

But what does B2B marketing content alignment DO for sales? 

B2B marketers usually focus on guiding buyers through the early stages of the buyer’s journey in preparation for engagement with sellers later on. Once the sales team takes over a prospect, marketing usually steps down. However, it is at this point that marketing should be stepping up with extra dazzle to assist sales teams to seal the deal, and then take the relationship all the way, by continuing to market to customers with B2B content that solves problems, answers questions, and allows users to gain additional solution value. 

This means that to support sales, B2B marketing must: 

1. Educate buyers (who are looking for solutions). 
2. Cultivate and qualify leads (who are weighing up options). 
3. Provide competitive intel (by gathering smart insight on how content is used). 
4. Influence the market (with content that delivers value people are looking for). 
5. Consistently engage customers (by keeping the conversation going). 

Romancing potential customers is a team effort  

Through such actions, B2B content marketing efforts support sales teams by seeing that sellers have what they need to ensure that potential buyers are educated, interested, and engaged. If their interest is piqued, prospects are more likely to start doing business with you and build deeper, and more long-term relationships that result in upselling and cross-selling opportunities.

B2B content marketing also builds awareness when customers are out-of-market (which to be fair, in B2B, is for long periods of time).  Always-on brand building through meaningful content, means that you're more likely to be on the consideration list when customers enter the market again. 

What does the sales team do for B2B marketing?  

The sales team is naturally responsible for selling. But this isn’t a one-sided relationship. The sales team has a role to play in supporting marketing with B2B content strategy and creation. Sellers are closest to the customers, which gives them the inside scoop on how best to satisfy customers with useful content at the various stages of their relationship.  

Sales teams can provide a wealth of valuable insights into buyer needs, operational efficiency, and product capabilities, which allows everyone to continuously optimise their product and processes. No more dating in the dark.  

A sales team that is tightly aligned with marketing can complete the circle of trust by sharing feedback on the following:   

• How solutions are being applied in the real world. 
• How the market is responding and changing. 
• Customer health and satisfaction. 
• Process efficiency and content validity. 

By providing this insight, sales teams can ensure marketing is both relevant and accurate in meeting buyers’ pain points, solving their problems, and addressing their needs. All of these things contribute to a better B2B content marketing performance, which in turn positively impacts sales.  

Working together: B2B ‘smarketing’ content strategy and creation 

‘Smarketing’ is one of those clever business portmanteaus that indicates how closely marketing and sales should be working together on B2B content. When it comes to romancing customers, sales and marketing need to collaborate. Smarketing requires seamless alignment and collaboration to create a cohesive game plan for generating and closing leads. ‘Woo and win’ is the aim of the game.  

What are the benefits of B2B smarketing?  

• Sales and marketing teams can share information, insights, and feedback more effectively.  
• This can build a deeper bi-directional understanding of customer needs, improved lead quality, and a streamlined sales process.  
• Silos and communication barriers between departments can be eliminated, resulting in a more unified approach to achieving business objectives. 

With these insights, sales and marketing teams can establish a just-in-time sales B2B content management system and organise it by content type, to better facilitate their romancing efforts.  

These B2B content types can be matched to the buyer/customer journey:  

To effectively engage buyers or customers it's important to offer different types of content that cater to their specific needs at different stages. These content types include: 

1. Evaluation content: This is product or technical information that customers require to make an informed decision. Examples include feature comparisons and in-depth analyses of service benefits.
   
2. Insight content: This type of content helps shape the industry vision and provides new knowledge to sellers, which they, in turn, can share with customers. Use-case guides that demonstrate a product's real-world business value are good examples.
   
3. Objection content: This content helps clear hurdles that might prevent customers from committing to your product or service. For instance, objection-and-response FAQs can help address concerns raised by the customer or your competitors.
   
4. Value content: This content showcases the top-line improvements or bottom-line savings that customers can expect from your product or service. Examples include ROI analyses, customer case studies, and use cases or references.
   
5. Customer self-service content: This type of content helps customers get the most out of their investment by offering user-friendly self-service options that bypass the need to ask for human assistance. FAQs, how-to guides, and step-by-step tutorials are useful examples here. That covers the ‘why’ of B2B marketing and sales alignment  

B2B content marketing is the dating app that drives the sales strategy, helping to attract interest, secure engagement and ultimately lead to commitment.  

Content marketing can also shorten the sales cycle by streamlining the decision-making process. Ultimately, smarketing works to present prospects with valuable, insightful information at each stage of the decision-making process. Marketing makes it; sales uses it and customers buy into it.  
 
If it’s that simple, why are so few B2B companies getting it right? To find the answer to this (and to find out how to solve it and achieve it) you’re going to want to read this, next: Sales and marketing soul mates: best practices for effective alignment. Coming soon.  

In the meantime, if we can help align your sales and marketing content plan, get in touch.