Salespeople Should Care About Content Marketing, Too—Here’s Why

What is a salesperson’s biggest challenge? If you said finding good leads, dealing with angry customers, or receiving sufficient training, you’d be wrong.

The biggest challenge to a salesperson is indifference. Any sales rep that has been in the field for more than a month knows the old adage is true: The opposite of love is not hate, but rather, indifference.

Nothing is more deflating than when a rep hears the prospect say they’ve never heard of the company. The sales job just became exponentially harder: the rep not only has to sell the product or service, but has to prove that the company behind it is a competent, reliable, and proven commodity.  In today’s world of hyper-competition, overpromising and underdelivering, this is no easy task.

Here is where content marketing comes to the salesperson’s rescue. Unfortunately, even many sales professionals don’t know what content marketing is, let alone how much impact it can have on their success.

Content marketing is the publishing and marketing of onsite and offsite content, with the objectives of generating leads, educating the audience, expanding brand awareness, and improving brand perception. All of these objectives matter dearly to every sales rep on the phone or on the street. Let’s take a closer look:

• Lead Generation. High-quality content such as white papers can make for excellent downloadable assets on a company website, landing page, or marketing email. This can help the sales rep’s company build a mailing list of qualified prospects.

• Education. The more prospects and customers understand a company’s products, services, and industry,  the sales rep can focus less explaining and more on selling. A company’s blog posts, information-rich website content, and educationally focused offsite articles accomplish this, which takes some of the burden off the rep.

• Brand Awareness. A well-executed offsite content marketing campaign can place high-quality content on websites and blogs read by large numbers of a company’s target audience. Furthermore, these readers are likely to share the content on social media, exposing the company to thousands or even millions of new people.

• Brand Perception. Content marketing helps small and midsize companies level the playing field in terms of establishing credibility among prospects and customers. Authoritative content, found online by the target audience, makes an impression in itself, but sales reps can proactively repurpose this content by incorporating it into their sales presentations. Walking into an appointment armed with copies of researched case studies helps the sales cause immeasurably.

Sales professionals should run, not walk, to their marketing directors and make the case for a strong content marketing effort. If the response is favorable, sales reps and sales leadership should stay actively involved in the creative side of the campaign. When content marketing incorporates the language of the customer, and stresses problems and solutions that matter to customers, it reaches the height of its potential. Every company with a sales force should be working overtime to out-content market the competition.