Report: 7-Steps To High-Converting B2B Content

The highest converting content is always accepted by and used as sales enablement tools by sellers.

According to McKinsey, in B2B sales, content outweighs both sales presentation and timeliness as customer-buying factors. However, 57% of sellers say they don’t pay much attention to content produced by their marketing teams, feeling it is generic and unresponsive.

This may be why 31% of reps’ time is spent searching for or creating content.

Read on for the seven steps to creating the highest converting content that is accepted by and used as sales enablement tools by sellers.”

Personalizing Content with Pain Points

The only role of B2B content is to enable sales, focusing on the customers’ needs, and solving the problems they face. In fact, B2B marketers said that the most important part of marketing and sales messaging is speaking to buyers’ pain points.

Personalization increases market share. - McKinsey

Since selling really comes down to crafting solutions to problems, the more insights into prospect’s point points and how to uniquely solve them the better — and now we know personalization actually leads to proven performance in increased market share as shown below by McKinsey.

Personalized solution selling relies on insights. In fact, Forbes put it this way: “While sales enablement can be defined as providing the tools sellers need to produce their best results, what underpins it all is insight.”

Forbes goes on to say in the same article, “Organizations must have the capability to provide their sellers with the insight that brings a true understanding of the needs, challenges, and aspirations of key accounts — including competitor analysis.”

However, really solid competitive information can be elusive — yet sellers need this information to make sure they are solving the problems faced by their prospects in a way that eclipses the competition. The degree of difficulty in getting good competitive content to arm sellers is so high that the top consulting firms have devoted significant amounts of time and employees to providing competitive intelligence as a service.

How to Create Content Rich with Competitive Insights

Before embarking on your own quest for insights derived from competitive analysis, you need to set the foundation properly for gathering the correct information. Here are four steps to properly frame your research:

Step 1: Talk to your sellers and identify the top problems they are addressing, by persona.
Step 2: What are other thought leaders in the industry touting and saying about these same problems?
Step 3: What are the trends in the industry around these challenges?
Step 4: What are your perceived greatest advantages to check against the competition?

How to Collect Your Competitive Insights

There are obvious answers to collecting competitive insights that include looking at competitors’ websites, advertising, webinars, and social posts, to name a few. As much as these research methods are important, they lack the depth of insight that you could receive if you were a prospect going through a demo, inside a sales pitch, or in a one-to-one meeting where you could ask all of your own questions.

To get this level of competitive insights, we recommend these four strategies that go directly to the source:

Step 5: Interviewing ex-employees who have recently left the competition
Step 6: Hiring people that have been at the competition recently
Step 7: Consulting with ex-employees from the competition

The goal is to get an insider’s perspective of not only features and benefits, but the mindset of the competition and their vision of the future.

Sellers too often gain this kind of information over time, in bits and pieces as they get feedback from prospects that are also talking with competitors. This is a very inefficient way to ensure that a true and complete competitive analysis and selling strategy can be well crafted.

The highest converting content gets into the mindset of the competition.

Conclusion

Sellers are expected to be highly informed consultants, clearly understanding the industry, trends, and competition at a level deeper than ever before.

Can you afford to have a sales team that isn’t well informed and lacks the confidence to clearly understand and sell your competitive advantages — with the content and sales enablement materials to properly back them up?

To learn more about the in-depth competitive analysis and sales enablement solutions from Content Strategies, please CLICK HERE to schedule a 20-minute strategy session.

ELEVATING CONTENT MARKETING STANDARDS RAISES A CRUCIAL QUESTION:
Why shouldn’t the very act of creating thought leadership content also spark new conversations with in-pipeline deals, top prospects, and high-priority customers for revenue expansion? Or serve as the cornerstone for learning and applying voice-of-customer strategies? That’s the power of ABM Podcasting—engaging B2B buyers and customers in meaningful conversations that uncover essential go-to-market insights, support long sales cycles, reinforce your market perspective, build peer-level trust, and dismantle objections that kill deals.

Steven MacDonald

Steven MacDonald is the founder of Content Strategies, CEO of a MarTech SaaS Company, fractional CMO consulting with leading B2B companies and former Director of Strategy and Client Service at top ten digital marketing agencies.

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.

Steven MacDonald

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.