How Your Marketing Content Can Inform Your Sales Team

Marketing’s role in business development isn’t just to build brand awareness and generate leads. It can also be used to improve your sales team’s performance. 

If you’re a manufacturer and you’re considering a digital marketing approach, you’ve probably heard that content can help improve your overall web presence and help you produce quality leads. 

That’s true, but one overlooked by-product of digital marketing is that you can also generate data on what messaging drives customers to act. You can then use these insights to inform your sales team on how to tailor their approach to generate more sales. 

In the end, you create a situation where sales and marketing are both sharing insights and improving how they work together to serve the customer. But this type of sales and marketing alignment is only possible if you start with the right digital marketing approach.

Your customers are now in the “Digital Territory”

Sales has long been the sole source of business development in the manufacturing space. Due to the technical nature of manufacturing products and services, the modus operandi has always been to bypass marketing altogether. 

Instead, you take an engineer or technician with good communication skills and shift them into a sales role. Then you send them to trade shows and the golf courses, and tell them to build relationships. 

The formula worked, and still does to a degree, but B2B buyers are changing the way they buy products and services. For example, up to 58% of the customer journey is completed without a meaningful interaction with the sales team. They’re not at trade shows or golf courses looking for info -- they’re online. 

With so many people on the Internet searching for products and services, you need to treat the online world just like a sales territory. You have to send a sales representative into the Digital Territory. But that rep is no longer a who but a what: It’s your digital content. 

Make content a “Digital Twin” of your sales team

Your prospects are looking online for content that will help them make an informed buying decision. You can create this content, and if you structure it correctly, it can act like a Digital Twin of the sales team. 

This isn’t a literal digital twin, like some sort of AI chat bot. Instead, it’s strategic content that’s essentially acting like your sales team. It can take the form of blog posts, videos, social media posts -- any type of content your marketing team can produce. 

Following the tried and true maxim that people will only do business with you if they Know You, Like You, and Trust You, this content has to deliver messaging specific to the stages a customer is at in the sales funnel:

Know You - Pain. People will get to know you if you talk about their pain points when you first meet them, instead of pushing your products. So, at this early stage, content such as ads and social media posts should focus on the pain points of the customer. 

Like You - Insights. Once customers know who you are, they’ll start to like you if you deliver insights on how you can improve their business -- especially if it’s something they didn’t know. Create content such as white papers and online tools to provide those insights. 

Trust You - Proof. Finally, you need content that builds trust by proving that your products and services can deliver on the insights you are proposing. These can include case studies, testimonials, and data that shows your success.

The Digital Twin is the conduit between customers and your company

So how do you create the content that will become your company’s Digital Twin?

It starts by asking the sales team about their customers. What are their paint points? What do they want to achieve? What are their objections? You should also obtain input from operations, management, HR, engineering -- anyone and everyone who touches the customer.  

All of this input helps create the content, which is then promoted through various marketing channels to the customer. You can see in the graphic below that the Digital Twin sits between your company and your customer.  

But a true Digital Twin is not meant to be a one-way street. It’s really a conduit, and it can inform your company too. 

Once the content has been distributed through marketing channels, we can measure the results. We can start to see how customers are reacting, and then report back our findings to the organization.  

This back-and-forth flow follows the principles of Continuous Improvement. It:

• Is data-driven

• Focuses on the customer

• Relies on employees’ ideas

• Applies incremental changes

Your content is constantly being modified and verified. It’s not just content for content’s sake -- it becomes proven to deliver results. 

Translating the concept into action

Ok, so how does this look when it’s put into action? 

We at Winbound ran a series of ads for a client on LinkedIn testing various pain points for a customer. You can see below a breakdown of the click-through rates, one of our barometers for success with Know You content. 

The top ads, centered around Tight Deadlines and Facing Difficult Projects, outperformed the other ads by nearly a 2:1 margin.  

With these findings, we can now improve our combined sales and marketing effort, producing: 

• Better marketing content. We adjust our content calendar to create more content around meeting tight deadlines and handling difficult projects. 

• Better website content. We tweak the website to feature these pain points more prominently on key selling pages. 

• Better sales messaging. We inform the sales team so they can improve their sales collateral and presentations. 

Why this sales and marketing alignment is crucial for future growth

The Digital Twin approach doesn’t just align sales and marketing. It integrates the two teams. Marketing relies on sales to build the content, and sales relies on marketing to determine what drives the optimal customer response in the Digital Territory. 

If your organization fails to achieve this type of integration and alignment, it can actually result in a loss of revenue. 

An Aberdeen study found that sales and marketing teams that were aligned produced a 20% increase in revenue. Those that weren’t were creating a 4% decrease in revenue -- due primarily to marketing generating leads that sales didn’t want. 

When marketing and sales have a mechanism that not only generates quality leads but also informs you when you’re misaligned, then you’ve moved into a realm beyond the trade shows and golf courses of old. 

You’ve officially arrived in the Digital Territory, and your prospects will be happy to see you.