• April 14, 2015
• Content, Sales and Marketing Alignment

3 Reasons Why Marketers Must Market Their Content to Their Sales Teams

Garrett Mann

Vice President, Corporate Communications

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I know what you’re thinking: “Did he just tell me to market content to your own sales teams? Why would I do that? They work for the same company that I do. In fact, most of them sit right across the aisle or down the floor from me.” Also, many of you are thinking that you have enough on your plate trying to market your content to your prospects and customers to waste any time marketing content to your co-workers. Yes, it is is your job to develop content to influence your customers, but that same influence cycle both extends to and from your sales team. In other words, influence your sales teams, influence your customers.

My colleagues have written extensively in this blog about who organizations should be developing content for and how to best distribute that content. But how many of you have considered how to market your content to sales teams? While it understandably may not seem intuitive, there are three compelling reasons why you must do a better job of marketing your content to your own sales teams:

3 Compelling Reasons to Market Your Content to Your Sales Teams

Reason #1 – Sales is your one-way ticket directly to prospects and customers

When you think about the most effective vehicles to distribute content, many marketers forget about their own sales channels. By arming sales with the content you are producing, you can help develop a more direct content pipeline to your prospects and customers. But you can’t arm them if they don’t know where the ammunition is. Stay in front of them to make sure they are keenly aware of what is available and how it needs to be used with customers.

Reason #2 – You can help them crystallize the pitch

According to SiriusDecisions, one of the biggest roadblocks to effective selling is that sales doesn’t always understand your value proposition, which is also the reason why sales sometimes will resort to creating their own content and messaging that reflects their own view of that value prop. Your job as a marketer is to communicate what your company delivers in a way that is crystal clear to customers – regardless of the channel. Depending on your reach within your target accounts, sales is not only a strong distribution channel, but they can also be your strongest communication channel. For sales to pass along your content is one thing, for them to actually consume it so that they are more informed around your value prop and pitch is another. You can help ensure this by marketing your content to sales.

Reason #3 – Establish your value

By helping your sales teams with content not only to use with customers, but also to educate themselves, you also develop more goodwill by demonstrating to your teams that you are there to provide cover, support, and value to their sales efforts. Information, customer outreach, goodwill, and value are all cornerstones of good marketing. Who knew you could effectively apply these principles with your sales teams?

Don’t just market, enable

Make sure your marketing exercise is not a read-only proposition. You can’t just inform sales, you must enable them as well. Don’t just give them the content. Tell them what you want them specifically what to do with it or how they should consume it and follow-up with the tools to make it easy for them share it with their prospects and customers.

Please share how you are leveraging content within your own sales organizations by leaving a comment below. or you can connect with me directly on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Market your content to sales image via Shutterstock

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