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In the NFL, a key part of any head coach’s job is to design strategies that enable their players to succeed on the field.
As a team captain and the most prominent player on the field, it’s the Quarterback’s job to put those offensive strategies to the test, report on their effectiveness, and help the head coach adapt those strategies to the realities of a game.
When you think about it, it’s a relationship that’s very similar to that of most modern marketing and sales teams. If the marketing team is Bill Belichick shaping the game from the sidelines, the sales team is Tom Brady calling plays in the huddle.
The marketing team is charged with setting the game plan. This involves carefully researching the prospect, defining buyer personas, creating, distributing, and refining great content for each stage of the buyer journey, and ultimately preparing the rest of the team to be successful. It’s the sales team’s job to execute that game plan by calling plays on the fly. This involves connecting with prospects, understanding their unique needs, and nurturing them through the buying process with educational content.
But in order for sales teams to be effective in managing the game from under center, they need the marketing team to lay out a well developed playbook — or what most marketers would call a content library.
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, a content library is a place to store, organize, and manage your content to make it easily accessible for segments of your audience, leads, customers, and internal teams.
It contains the collective wisdom of your organization, including blog posts, webinars, helpful videos, e-books, whitepapers, and more that showcase your organization’s expertise and understanding in alignment with each stage of the sales process.
When used correctly, a content library can be a phenomenal sales enablement tool; one that can be leveraged to create the kind of contextual, one-to-one content experiences that really resonate with prospects.
Just as a playbook requires constant communication between coaches and players, a content library is a living resource that requires close collaboration between marketing and sales teams.
Building one comes down to three key areas of focus:
The average playbook contains upwards of 1,000 plays that use a handful of different offensive formations. Between the T, the I and V-formations, the veer, and Shotgun alone, it’s enough to make your head spin.
But there’s method in the madness.
Great coaches recognize that no two defenses are the same from play to play (let alone from game to game), just as great marketers and salespeople recognize that no two sales prospects are the same. Every lead has unique needs, challenges, and pain points that need to be addressed with content at each point in the sales process.
Start by clearly mapping out your buyer personas and understanding how each differs in how they move through the stages of the buyer journey.
Quarterbacks have only 40 seconds between plays to get their team to the line, read the defense, and call a play. Every second counts.
In an age where the common goldfish has a longer attention span than most of us, the ability to surface the right content at exactly the right time is key. Whether a content library is being accessed by prospects directly or by salespeople, marketing must ensure that it’s easily navigable by type, interest, industry, and persona.
When it comes down to it, serving up the wrong piece of content at the wrong point in the buying process is a bit like calling the wrong play at the 1-yard line with the Super Bowl on the line.
Sorry Seahawks fans, I just couldn’t resist.
Today, most NFL Quarterbacks wear some version of a wristband that contains the core elements of their playbook. Not because they don’t know their playbook by heart or aren’t able to recognize patterns in opposing defenses, but because it just makes sense to have that information handy so they can make the right decision when calling a play.
To make sure that sales teams feel just as comfortable “calling plays”, marketing has to ensure that content libraries are accessible, flexible, scalable, and optimized for lead generation and engagement at every touchpoint. It’s been estimated that 60-70% of marketing-created content goes unused by the sales team, mostly because it’s hard to find or hard to package.
Marketing teams need to employ tools that make it easy to personalize content for each prospect at every stage of the buying process. Above all, it means empowering salespeople to create customized content experiences for every lead.
In the NFL, a team’s playbook is sacred. It typically contains decades worth of knowledge, vital insights, and detailed strategies the coach has designed to ensure success on the field from one week to the next.
A content library (or content playbook) is no different.
It’s the marketing team’s job to create, refine, and optimize the content playbook. It’s the sales team’s job to commit it to memory, call the plays that move the chains, and convert more opportunities into happy customers.
As the leader of Uberflip's Customer Success team, Sam Brennard is focused on helping every Uberflipper create the kind of amazing content experiences that drive engagement and generate more leads. Before joining Uberflip, Sam worked in marketing and sales roles at Microsoft Canada, TELUS Communications, and Venture Accelerator Partners. A graduate of Wilfrid Laurier University's Honours BBA program, he has a specialization in Marketing and Brand Communications and a passion for Golden Hawk Football.
