Michael Spicer

Background

About Michael Spicer

We use content to acquire, grow, and maintain the prospect’s attention for the purpose of populating and perpetuating the pipeline. Content marketing is the process that gives organizations the ability to extend their sales-reach—to keep in touch (i.e. network, email, tweet, or just plain interact) with more prospects than ever before. Content-marketing helps to develop, maintain and move relationships forward until they are primed for a conversation with a sales rep. Content-marketing is lead development not selling. You need salespeople to sell. And salespeople need their own content designed to support their selling process. They need content for sales call follow-up and for leaving voice-mail messages. They need customized presentations in various formats. And, they need content that makes their proposals stand out from the competition’s. Content that is designed to convert opportunities into deals i.e. ‘Content-Selling.’ The need for content selling is particularly evident in complex B2B sales where sales cycles are longer and decisions are rarely made by one person. Long sales cycles consist of long stretches of follow-up and information-sharing, intermixed with relatively fewer occurrences of live conversations. In other words, a large percentage of a rep’scommunication is done through content. Most organizations leave it entirely up to sales reps to produce the sales content they need. Studies have shown that the typical percentage of time a sales rep spends with a prospect is 35% The remaining 65% of their time is spent strategizing, developing, and distributing content of their own making. We can find these opportunities at many points through-out the sales cycle. Creating templated sales emails is a great example of where content-selling. Best-practice emails that can be shared across the team to be used at a moment’s notice. Think about the opportunities to create targeted content to address client value.