For years, sales teams and content writers essentially existed in two completely different worlds.
A marketing content writer would be responsible for producing the blog posts, white papers and other materials designed to attract the attention of a potential customer.
At which point they would be handed off to the sales team to begin their proper customer journey. Rinse, repeat. It seems that for all of us, these days may be at an end.
The silo that exists between the sales team and content creators has long been in the process of breaking down.
2017 is slated to be the year where it’s finally shattered.
For maximum success in both B2B and B2C efforts, you need to hone a perfect marriage where sales team members and content creators exist as two equally integral parts of a much larger whole.
A Perfect Marriage in a Perfect World
For the sake of argument, let’s say you’re an insurance organization looking to increase the total lifetime value of your incoming customers.
When your sales teams members and your content marketers are working together and feeding off one another, this goal becomes an inevitability.
As that customer enters the funnel, the sales team begins to develop a deeper and more organic relationship with them.
That data is then passed to the marketing team, who can begin to produce better, more specific, and valuable insurance content based on where that customer happens to be in the funnel at any given time.
Content is laser focused on the issues a customer is facing and the questions they have at any given moment, strengthening the customer journey as they move farther along towards the sale.
Suddenly both jobs get a whole lot easier, as content creators are no longer “stabbing in the dark” and suddenly sales members have exactly the content they need at just the perfect time. Everyone wins.
Douglas Burdett, owner of Artillery LLC and host of “The Marketing Book Podcast,“ listed this as one of his biggest content marketing predictions for 2017.
He claimed that “the sales world is going to better understand the value of using content during the sales process and is going to be asking marketing for more of it.
What Does the Future Look Like?
Burdett was also very clear that this new approach to the marriage between sales and content would also require a new approach to the content strategy.
He said that “Now that more companies have learned how to start belching out content into the rapidly rising ocean of content, the need for a content strategy is going to be better understood and demanded.”
This is especially true in the B2B space where, according to Forbes:
88% of marketers currently use content marketing but only 32% of them have a documented strategy in place to support it.
61% of those that ARE successful say that they meet with their B2B writer teams daily or, at the very least, weekly.
Above all else, sales and content teams can no longer exist in an environment where they see their roles as “us vs. them.”
These two positions naturally feed off one another and strengthen each other, provided that you don’t throw up the artificial barriers exist in a number of companies.
Without one, the other’s job becomes infinitely harder. Acknowledging and embracing this creates the perfect marriage and it’s one that will benefit your entire organization a great deal.
Stephen L is a talented professional freelancer in the WriterAccess platform. Learn more about how to outsource your content creation needs with an efficient workflow, hand-selected writers, and ongoing support at our Plus Service tier!
