If you’re looking to reduce sales cycles and get your prospects more engaged in a conversation, having the right content is key. Marketing Sherpa just published a preview of a new joint study with Knowledge Storm. They recently surveyed over 3,000 end users registered in KnowledgeStorm’s database to find out how they feel about content avaialble for researching IT purchases. Top suggestions from the study:
– On timing of when to produce content. The article recommends, “Stick to a regular schedule to build a relationship with customers and prospects. Provide new or updated content once a quarter, for example, or at certain points along the each prospect’s sales cycle.”
– Create content for each person involved in the purchase and time it for each stage of the sales process. For example, they say “a general-interest white paper for the early stages of the process, a techy feature about product compatibility aimed at IT executives and a white paper for financial executives detailing savings or revenue increase potential of your product or service.”
– End-users preferred these 4 types of content: 1) case studies, 2) industry research, 3) how-to guides and 4) top-10 lists for improving their business.
The complete Marketing Sherpa article is here, New Research Data: What Content do B-to-B Customers Prospects Want to Read? (Available without fee until March 15, 2007.)
Make Me Smarter!
Your goal with any content you produce is to help your prospects make purchases and customers solve problems. Bottom line, your customers would put it this way if they were being totally honest about what content they’d like to see—“Make me smarter!” My ideas for making prospects and customers smarter:
– Ask your customers what helped them the most when they selected your company. A piece of content? A demonstration? Talking with a reference/testimonial customer (evangelist)?
– Create content on evangelists’ favorite topics. Be sure to have content that talks about what your evangelists say. They know what’s important when buying.
– Ask recent buyers, what specific type of information they would have liked to see. What content would have made their decision easier or faster? Case studies? Topics for white papers? How to guides? Checklists for what to look for in a solution? Archived Podcasts with company experts explaining how to solve problems with your products/services? (Here is my earlier post on Recording a White Paper.)
– Find out from your sales channel or sales team—what are the most frequently asked questions. That will give you topic ideas, and tell you the best content format—guides, white papers, etc.
– Create a content list according to your sales cycle. Plug in each piece of current content in its place. See if any points along the sales cycle do not have specific content and create documents to fill those in.
Does anyone have other suggestions for killer content that shortens the sales cycle? Is anyone using Podcasts in the place of how-to guides or white papers?
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