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The buyer’s journey is a key framework for strategic content management, particularly for fast-growing sales teams. By leveraging the buyer’s journey as the decision point for future content, sales organizations are able to create a much more effective, streamlined process for both the creation and use of content assets throughout the buying cycle. As your sales team continues to grow rapidly, well-aligned strategic content management scales seamlessly with the growth of your company.
The buyer’s journey generally has three stages:
Creating content aligned to each of these three stages in the buyer’s journey ensures that your marketing and sales teams have valuable knowledge and information to share with prospects and leads that’s relevant to their personal experiences and needs. Modern companies are already acutely aware of the need to tailor sales content to the needs of buyers. In fact, according to MediaPost, companies are now spending 16 percent of their total marketing budget on content creation.
Of course, when your organization’s content is high-quality and well-targeted to the needs of your prospects, your marketing team delivers better leads to your sales team, making it that much easier to convert leads to customers. But as leads navigate through the sales cycle, targeted content can help overcome objections and nurture leads to the point of decision-making.
Content creators, working in collaboration with marketing, sales, and other departments, can easily enough create content that’s well-suited for leads at various stages in the buyer’s journey. Through proper analysis of the sales process, common customer objections, frequently asked questions, and other evaluation, content may be structured to attract prospects as well as to address the common roadblocks and obstacles that cause leads to fall out of the sales funnel.
But equipping your marketing and sales reps with the knowledge to choose the right content and identify which prospects and leads are at which stage in the buyer’s journey isn’t always a cut-and-dry process. Effective alignment of content to the buyer’s journey relies on lead nurturing and scoring and a careful analysis of lead behavior in the marketing funnel.
MarketingSherpa says that 79 percent of marketing leads never convert to sales. What’s more, 61 percent of B2B marketers send leads directly to sales, while only 27 percent of those leads are qualified.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to lead management, but companies can – and should – implement a lead management system that’s suitable for their team’s workflows and the company’s sales process.
By defining what qualifies as a marketing qualified lead (MQL), sales accepted lead (SAL), and a sales qualified lead (SQL), not only will your teams know precisely when to hand off a lead from marketing to sales, but it also becomes simpler to identify the right content to properly nurture leads through the next stage of the buyer’s journey.
A simple score for an individual lead doesn’t tell the whole story, however, as leads tend to behave differently in the marketing funnel. The way leads behave individually is a major influencer over how your sales reps should engage with them.
When marketing passes a lead to sales, the transition should also include the following information:
This information helps your sales team determine buyer readiness, aiding them in planning calls, sending more personalized messages addressing the individual’s needs, and selecting the most appropriate content to share with leads.
By creating content assets with the buyer’s journey in mind, implementing a clearly defined lead management process, scoring and nurturing leads, and analyzing lead behavior, fast-growing sales teams are equipped with the knowledge and information needed to effectively convert leads to customers. Strategic content management aligned with the buyer’s journey provides a more personal experience for every prospect that engages with your organization, prepping the sale with the exceptional experiences that drive sales for modern organizations.
Fergal Glynn is Docurated’s VP of Marketing. Docurated accelerates sales in companies looking for fast growth by making the best marketing content readily available to Sales teams. Fergal helped produce Docurated's State of Sales Productivity Report, which examines key sales productivity trends and challenges facing sales and marketing executives. Fergal grew up in Ireland and now lives in Arlington, MA. To learn more about Docurated check out their Sales Enablement Tool on the AppExchange.
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