Content marketing for sales people

This is a short blog post as I think there is an excellent article covering this from Scott Barker a while ago at Sales Hacker - link below.

In this article Scott talk about the following:

1. Learning copywriting skills

2. Contributing to online communities

3. Building a personal social media brand

4. Owning the whole sales funnel

1. Learning copywriting skills

If you ask a marketer about a value proposition you generally get a very short concise answer. If you ask a sales person you can often get a list of features and benefits or a sales pitch. The idea is to make it simple, a short two sentence content piece that anyone can understand. He says that is why beginner sales people are actually relatively successful because they do not know all the "patter " or "sales speak" yet, they just keep communication simple.

2. Contributing to online communities

Create your own demand by contributing, via joining groups on LinkedIn, there are groups that cater for every kind of buyer. Take part, participate by providing meaningful content. To be honest this is something I have not done enough of and need to do more, I think it best be purposeful and only join one or two groups initially and try and make yourself known as a genuine provider of ideas and content. And I think its not enough to look the part (People can see through that and see you are just doing the LinkedIn group "thing" of commenting on other posts, you really have to be thoughtful about contributing something of value.

3. Building a personal social media brand

This always sounds pretty daunting, it does to me! It does not necessarily mean putting your self out there as a celebrity, or as an ego driven influencer, it simply means giving, being helpful, offering value...and being authentic to the audience that matters most to you. There are enough people out there that mean even if you have a similar message to others, there will be people that relate more to you than others. The world is big enough, you do

not need to be a superstar to build a brand - be unique, by being yourself.

4. Owning the whole sales funnel

Scott Barker makes a great point in talking about the influence of AI. While he does not think AI will replace salespeople he does think it will slowly start taking over menial, repeatable tasks and sellers who act like order-takers will no longer have a place at the table. The future of sales will demand creativity, humanity, and authenticity, because AI cannot do those things. Deep role specialization in sales has become the norm, but he suggests that AI and new tech will bring back the “generalist” who has a wide variety of skills in sales, marketing and operations. So generalists can use tools all the way from lead gen to close, and spend their time optimizing the whole funnel, all the way to close. So rather than specialize the key will be able to work on all parts of the sales funnel and make it yours. And it makes sense if you have invested time in making your own content and developing content relationships via online communities/branding (as above) it makes sense to deploy them within your own sales funnel, at the stages and timing you desire.

The full article can be found here and I would recommend reading Scott's work. Continue reading at https://www.saleshacker.com/marketing-tactics-salespeople/