How to Leverage Personalized Content to Win the Deal: Part 5

In part 5 of the Digitally Enabled Sales Rep series, we’re discussing what has become the new currency in sales: content. Buyers are using content to support their decision making and to understand their options. In fact, 67% of the buying journey is complete before engaging with sales. Sales reps who can get ahead of this new behavior have the opportunity to drive significantly more opportunities into their pipeline. The key is understanding which content or offer will really move the needle at a given point in the buyer’s journey.

How to use Personalized Content to Connect with Buyers

The average sales rep today has a pretty complex set of decisions to make. Even if they are targeting the right prospects, these customers have a new expectation around content and insight. With all of the collateral pieces, brochures, blogs posts, 3rd party case studies, whitepapers, etc, etc, etc., how does the average sales person figure out what to send to engage any individual prospect.

What if there was a tool which used predictive data to understand the prospect’s company, role, interests, and buying stage to recommend the right content to deliver? That would really save some time, right?

Well – these tools exist. The basic concept is pretty straight forward but really difficult to execute. Build a customer database by bringing together data from a variety of sources (CRM, Marketing Automation, Transaction History/ERP, Social, Buyer Intent, etc.) and use the data to not only predict the high value customers, but to predict what content will move them along the buying process. And all personalized at the individual level.

What is interesting is that this approach has been used in the consumer space for years and increasingly is moving into B2B marketing. But, arguably, the real value is in applying it to B2B sales where large teams are spending inordinate amounts of time figuring this out individually.

Think about this – the average sales person spends 20% of their time researching the customer and figuring out what to send them to get them to engage. That is 1/5th of a sales team. If you have a 100 person sales team, that is 20 reps worth of time on this activity. It really adds up.

What if you could take that off your reps’ plate entirely? What if you could put that time back in their hands to spend selling? Huge impact, right?

Well, sales teams can realize this impact today. Personalized Content Recommendations are unique to each prospect or customer, based on their interests, stage of the buying cycle, and buyer profile. Machine learning is applied to notify sales reps of the content most likely to move the prospect or customer to the next stage of the buying journey. Reps can spend their time selling. Sales leaders can have 20% more sales time in the field, as opposed to employing 20% of their teams as market researchers.

Check out the final post in this series!