Content can help sales in two main ways. First by attracting people to your company, and then by helping them through the sales process. Using content to attract people is the hallmark of an inbound strategy. Here's Doug Davidoff, founder and CEO of imagine business development. [inaudible] says attention is the single most valuable commodity a business can have. The attention of the people that you want. So if I can get your attention, my products are introduced itself. I don't need to tell you about it. I don't need to go out on my way. Because I'm relevant and it's connected to what we talked about and eventually you're going to go. How can you help me with this? Creating content that will help people solve problems that are related to the products you sell is a great use of marketing resources and it's something that your company can do no matter what size it is. Here's Nicole Sahin and describing how she started her company, Globalization Partners. One of the immediate projects that we did was to add a ton of content to our website that would be easily accessible for our clients and useful for them, but also to drive more traffic to the website. For the first couple of years, I'd say the majority of our business came through the website. That company is now one of the fastest growing companies in the United States and that isn't a unique story. If your content is good, it will lead people naturally toward talking to sales. So if you're marketing team is creating educational content that attracts people to your company, then there already helping the sales team to a certain extent. But for a lot of companies, the content they published on their website and elsewhere doesn't actually drive results. Here's Marcus Sheridan of the sales line. So many companies are producing content that doesn't get results. Do you know what you should start with? When you think about what content moves a needle, it's simple. You start with the bottom of the funnel. Most people start with top or outside of the funnel, totally backwards and totally screwed up. The bottom of the funnel represents the people that are ready to buy. They know they want the thing, they know they have a problem. So if you start there and you say, what are the 80 percent of questions we get on every first sales call, sales employment pitch, whatever you call it, whether you're a B-B, B-C, B-G. It doesn't matter. It's the same process. If you can get rid of those 80 percent and you can teach them your philosophy beforehand. You're that much further along in the sales process. Then if you integrate that into the sales process, then it's magic. Some of the questions people ask on sales calls might be uncomfortable for your marketing team to answer and that's okay. Don't shy away from the hard questions. If we really talk about what buyers want to know about, yet, what businesses want to talk about, here's a huge opposition there. Most companies embrace what I call ostrich marketing. They think if they just bury their heads in the sand, the question or the need or the concern that'll just go away. But it doesn't go away. You see people in this day and age, we're so impatient as we're searching online, as we're trying to find answers to our questions. We search until we can find the answer that we were looking for. Generally speaking, whoever gives us the answer we were looking for, they get our business. I'm not our business, at least they get first contact to give an example of this with River Pools, one of the first pieces of content we ever produced was how much does the fiberglass pool will cost? To make a long story very short because we produce that piece of content, that little article that took me 45 minutes to write in my kitchen table. Because we have advanced tracking analytics. I can tell you that that one single article, how much does the fiberglass pool cost has generated over $4.5 million in sales that we otherwise never would have generated. But yet, if I ask the listeners that are out there, why you don't do it? Why you don't talk about costs and price. They're going to give me three reasons. First thing they're going to say is, "Well, every job is different and it depends", which is incredibly explainable. In other words, you could explain to anybody which drives it up, what drives it down, et cetera. The second reason why they don't talk about it is because they say, "Well, it'll scare customers away, especially if we're more expensive". Which again is fundamentally false. Because the thing that we all agree that scares us away is buyers. It's when they don't talk about cost and price. The third reason why we don't talk about costs and price is because of the competition. The competition. When I say cost the price, it's like so many other subjects, but costs and prices the it's the volatile. It's the most curio because so many people, they realized they should be talking about this. But they say, "I don't want to give my competitors my secret source", which we all know as 1000 Island anyway. But we still believe we have a secret source. The majority of companies do not. In fact, if I went to most sales teams and if I said, "Do you as your sales organization, do you have a very good sense as to what your competitors charge?" They would say, "Yes, I've got a very good sense as to what our competitors charge". If you have a good sense of what they charge, it also means therefore, they have a great sense as to what you charge. In other words, it's the big secret, non secret. Everybody acts like nobody knows what everybody's charging when in reality, everybody knows what everybody is charging. If you look at what influence us the most when it comes to content and messaging and how we communicate with the thing, it's almost like an upside down triangle with the biggest section being the top section. What we don't talk about, what influences the most is the competition. We allow them to hinder our ability to engender trust. Then if you go to the next section, which is the next part that influence us the most or the bad fits. In other words, the ones that wouldn't have bought from us anyway. But again, we say things like, I don't want to scare them away. I don't want to talk about the things that we are or are not. The least area of influence on the three-tier triangle is the actual customer. They have the least influence in terms of what we talk about. It's a crying shame. So as you create content to attract people to your company? Be sure to provide answers to the questions they'll be asking. The more education you can provide your prospects before they meet with sales, the more qualified they'll be when they get there. Having leads that are more qualified will make your sales team's job a whole lot easier.
