4 Ways to Understand your Audience – and create the content they want

Posted by Kelly Montgomery on Wed, Mar 05, 2014 @ 12:03 PM Tweet

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Do you really know your audience? With the intense content needs that all marketers face, it’s easy to jump right to creating content and pushing it out before figuring out exactly who you want to read that blog entry, white paper, or social media post. We know all too well that creating or curating enough content to keep up with the competition often outweighs other priorities, but it will pay off down the road to stop for a few minutes and learn about your audience. Once you’ve figured out who your audience is, it’s a lot easier to determine what they need and want. Creating content is one thing, but creating content that resonates with your audience — making them want to come back to you or buy your product — takes a little more finesse.

So, before you panic about how many blog posts or white papers you have to write this week, stop and consider the points below. Try to develop buyer and reader personas, either in your head or on paper, and look back to those every time you create a new piece of content.

1. Define your ideal target audience – for both buying your product and consuming content.

While the buyer persona is probably the most important audience to define, you may also want to think about a reader persona. Some people in your industry will be interested in purchasing your product (buyer persona), while others may be engaged members of your industry who are interested in what you do and may read or share your content, but are not likely to buy (reader persona). Both of these can be valuable for creating leads and brand awareness. Maybe your buyer persona is a CMO of a Fortune 500 company, but your reader persona is the social media specialist at a smaller company in your industry. Both are valid. When defining each one, think about what their job may entail, why they would come to you, and how you can best reach them.

2. Think about what their pain points and challenges are on a daily basis.

Now that you’ve created a general outline of your audience, or audiences (job title, duties, industry, etc.), you need to learn more about what challenges they face – so that you can then present them with thoughtful information about or solutions to those problems. Don’t just think about what your product or company does, but think about that person and what kind of problems they face day in and day out. Are they a marketer who is stressed about creating enough content each week? Are they in charge of helping their company stand out on social? Are they an apparel brand trying to engage their audience in new ways online? Try to make a long list of problems you think they might face, or even reach out on social media to find ou moret. From that list will emerge themes that you can create content around – content that will provide value to your audience, because you know them and their struggles.

3. Find out where they are online, and when.

The most engaging content will be content that is presented to your audience in a space they know and like, and in a format they understand. Because you’ve already created your buyer and reader personas, you’re halfway there. Think about your personas, and think about where they consume the most content. What are they doing while they consume the content? How much time do they spend? Are they engaging or just perusing? All of these small questions will have an effect on your content strategy. If you’re dealing with C-level executives, you might want to focus on content for LinkedIn or high-quality white papers for your website. If your audience is younger online professionals, Twitter and Facebook might be the right space for your content. And if you’re going for the teens and tweens, look to the latest popular social media apps like Vine and Snapchat.

Think about what mindset they might be in when they see your content. Are they lounging at home with their iPad, ready to read a thoughtful long-form article? Or are they trying to keep up with the latest news at work, with only enough time for a quick tip-sheet? Adjust the time you post your content based on whether you want to reach them at work, at rest, or somewhere in between.

4. What do they need to know about you and your product?

Now that you have a better grasp on what kind of content your audience or audiences may want in general, and when and where to give it to them, it’s also important to think about what information they need from you about your company and your product. While “sell, sell, sell” is not exactly a recommended motto in the blogging world, your audience does need to be informed about you and your company. What are your most frequently asked questions? What are the most common gripes or suggestions you hear? What might they be thinking if they are comparing you against a competitor? Content on your website, blog, or social media can be a great way to answer these questions and show your audience exactly who you are and what you offer them. Now that you’ve discovered their pain points, you can use thoughtful content to gently show them that you and your company may offer a solution.

– KellyTags: audience

Connect with buyers and drive revenue – those are the ultimate goals of sales professionals. Unfortunately, those tasks may seem easier said than done.

These days, there are dozens of channels and modes of communication available to buyers and sales reps. There are hundreds of tools that salespeople can use to connect with buyers. And there are myriad articles about sales best practices.

How do you make sense of it all? Here are 4 research-backed ways to improve your sales team’s performance in 2016.

1. Empower Your Sales Reps to Use Social Networks

The CEB surveyed over 1,000 sales reps to discover how they “got in early” with their customers. Specifically, they wanted to know what separated high performers from average performers. Here’s what they found:

Social selling is the single most powerful behavior separating high performers from core performers.

As you look at the chart, keep in mind that high performers don’t simply have accounts on LinkedIn and Twitter. According to the CEB’s research, the best sales reps use social media to:

• Connect with potential customers
• Share points of view valuable to customers
• Generate leads

In other words, social sellers aren’t just chatting with friends on Facebook or posting hilarious animated gifs from BuzzFeed. Instead, they are actively positioning themselves as resources of information on social media.

2. Help Your Sales Reps Understand Their Buyers

The best sales reps are inquisitive. They want to know more about their buyers’ world. Then, they use their knowledge to gain trust with buyers and to shape their customers’ attitudes.

Unfortunately, few sales reps truly understand their buyer’s world, which makes it difficult for them to lead with insights (see chart above). Here’s what Forrester found when they surveyed executive-level buyers:

For sales reps to be effective in 2016, the knowledge gap has to close. Sales reps need to better understand their buyers.

That’s where sales enablement teams enter into the picture.

Not only can sales enablement teams educate their sales reps on their buyers’ industries and companies; they can show salespeople how to use that knowledge to have more productive conversations. That way, sales reps can offer more personalized insights to their buyers.

3. Take a Multi-Channel Approach to Sales Enablement

Your buyers have their preferred communication channels, and so do your sales reps.

After all, sales reps are busy people. They are juggling the needs of 40 to 50 prospects. They are generating their own leads, answering emails, making phone calls, and setting appointments.

Learning has to be convenient for your sales reps, which requires you to share information across multiple channels. I’d recommend starting with these:

• Email newsletters – Send information directly into the inboxes of your sales reps, indicating when there’s new content to share and telling them why those assets are important
• Mobile devices – Choose a sales enablement platform that allows you to reach your salespeople – on any device
• CRM – Your salespeople live in your CRM; consider using your CRM as another point of contact with your sales rep

A good sales enablement tool will help you build a multi-channel strategy.

4. Don’t Rely Solely on Company-Created Content

Your marketing assets are awesome, I’m sure. But to validate your sales messages, your sales reps need someone else’s perspective.

If your sales reps disseminate only company-created content, their information looks one-sided. As a result, your salespeople can appear biased. By sharing other people’s content, not only are your sales reps following best practices; they are lending themselves more credibility.

As Maribeth Ross of the Aberdeen Group has noted:

Intuitively, your company’s employees know this. Earlier this year, we surveyed 400 employees about their content preferences on social media. The majority of them (55.0%) are inclined to share a mixture of company-created content and third-party content:

How Are You Going to Improve Your Sales Team in 2016?

2016 will be here before you know it. Now’s the time to start planning for the future.

It’s time to think about how your sales reps can leverage networks like LinkedIn and Twitter. It’s time to revise your sales enablement program. More precisely, it’s time to create a multi-channel sales enablement strategy – one that supplies sales reps with content, both company-created and third-party, across multiple channels.

What ways will your sales team improve in 2016? Leave a comment below. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Looking to Launch Your Social Selling Program?

Flip through this workbook and learn how to successfully plan your program:

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Coming from an agency background, the bread and butter was always around original content creation. Well, I’m here to say that I still think compelling creative and content is a key component to a marketer’s success, but just because it is original, doesn’t mean it is good or has the desired effect.

For example, I was scrolling through my Facebook feed for the first time this morning and I saw an urgent post from a family member: “If you use a cell phone regularly, you really must get this information”. So I clicked and read the article where I was led to the end and found it was really a lead generation tactic for a doctor. I am not saying that cell phones don’t cause health issues, and who knows, we all might be dinosaurs in billions of years because of it, but this approach to drive new patient leads for this doctor is probably a good example of attracting some and alienating others, or having it backfire all together.

I am not sure if Good Content means anything. Good Content is closely linked to a good, centralized Content Strategy and that obviously involves a deliberate consideration of your targeted audiences, what end result you desire, and where to find them.

This sounds simple, but many Fortune 500 companies aren’t organized to consider a centralized content strategy. Marketing departments can be segmented – you will see separations between corporate communications and brands – which is obviously appropriate. But, within each marketing campaign effort, you unfortunately still see fragmentation of approach within social media, web properties, mobile and email efforts. There is a large opportunity to centralize around content and simply consider the channel as the publishing vehicle vs. having a separate content strategy because of the channel. To test this kind of centralized approach, you need to start with some basic blocking and tackling principles.

1. Audience and Campaign First: Consider your audience, then even further segment and think through desired outcomes. What is the desired end goal? Sales leads? Influencing around thought leadership, reputation or market reach? Then, what will the best content approach be to gain the desired effect? Sales leads can be driven by compelling original content if you are a brand marketer, but if you are B2B, perhaps 3rd party curated content can provide more credibility and allow you to market at a higher frequency.

2. Identify your Channel/Tactics: Where can you find your audience? Do you have web properties where you can market to this audience, or do you need to create one? Are you better off reaching your targets on social media networks or using a paid content model on a conglomerate of media properties? The answer is probably a blend, but you probably want to have a different voice and approach depending on the medium.

3. Sequencing and Testing: Once you have identified your audience segments, campaign and distribution channels, you should minimize content creation efforts by testing curated or smaller-effort messages in social streams or via blogs, before investing a ton of time on large scale, original creation efforts. Quicker testing strategies can give you insights into what is resonating with what audience segment allowing you to optimize your marketing team’s efforts and results throughout the campaign.

4. Cross Channel Analytics: Having content in the center of your strategy means that you need to have a centralized analytics engine in place that tracks what content is trending across all audience segments and delivery channels. Marketers who are moving in this direction seem to be using Omniture and Google Analytics.

If you do it right, you’ll consider your audiences across social, web, mobile, and email and do some testing, so they can let you know what they think of your content by their reposting, re-tweeting, and commenting behavior. If you can think through your approach with the end in mind, test tidbits of concepts, before sinking a ton of time and resources into something, you’ll find a winning end game. But let’s face it – ‘good content’ will always be in the eyes of the beholder.

-Bethany

When you read the title of this blog, you may have scratched your head and thought, “Aren’t all deals account-based by definition?” That’s a mighty fine question. Sure, all deals are account-based, in that reps close accounts; they don’t close leads. However, not every sales organization takes an account-based approach to sales.

In traditional demand generation, marketers try to engage the largest number of potential buyers as possible. Marketers nurture those leads and pass them over to the sales reps, who try to close as many of those leads as possible. In an account-based approach to pipeline generation, that paradigm is inverted. Sales and marketing have a list of target accounts, and all their actions are focused on engaging stakeholders at those target accounts.

As you read this, account-based tactics are taking over sales and marketing. This is likely due to four emerging trends. Let’s take a look at them, shall we?

Trend #1: Diminishing Returns on Traditional Demand Generation

Traditional “inbound” demand generation works well if you have a large customer pool to choose from. You can afford to cast a wide net.

But for some companies, traditional demand generation is coming up short, especially when sales and marketing teams are working on large enterprise deals. Bigger deals require deeper knowledge of an account, buy-in from multiple stakeholders, and more personalized outreach. In short, with big accounts, you don’t have the time or energy to wait for the big fish to wander into your nets. You have to be more proactive.

Trend #2: The Expanding Buyer Committee

In every complex B2B deal, there are many stakeholders. You have the researcher, the decision-maker, the CFO, the procurement department, and so on, and so forth. According to the CEB, 5.4 decision-makers are involved in the average sales deal. (According to IDG, up to 17 people influence the typical enterprise purchase decision!) Each of these people has different motivations, different attitudes towards change, and different pain points.

To close these complex B2B deals, sales reps need great research skills and high levels of emotional intelligence. Reps need to understand the company and the relationships within the account. They need to research each stakeholder and understand how they are connected to the other stakeholders. Furthermore, they need to help build consensus among the stakeholders by sharing relevant content and having strategic conversations.

With that many stakeholders, sales reps can’t sit and pray that the stakeholders come to their website and fill out a form. They have to be more proactive.

Trend #3: Larger Deal Sizes with Account-Based Approaches

An account-based approach to sales, marketing, and sales enablement can deliver bigger deals. Demandbase found that the average contract value of targeted accounts was 40% higher for mid-market accounts and 35% higher for enterprise accounts.

In part, larger deals stem from a more focused and efficient approach to sales. But it’s also because sales reps are engaging more stakeholders and getting buy-in from a larger team. As a result, reps have the opportunity to deploy to more areas of the company. What’s more, when sales reps use account-based tactics, they tend to engage stakeholders who are higher up in the company and who have more buying influence, which leads to bigger deal sizes.

In a world where buyers actively try to avoid sales pitches, reps have had to change their approach to sales. Salespeople need to act like consultants who can add value and share expertise. And it’s hard to be a dedicated consultant to hundreds of pipeline opportunities at one time. That’s why many sales organizations are turning to account-based sales tactics.

If your organization is taking a more consultative approach to selling, keep in mind that your team needs a unique technology set to do its job effectively. For starters, account-based sales tools should provide reps with the latest insights about the target companies and stakeholders. For example, the platform should constantly search the web for insights about their target companies, and it should enable reps to track what their key stakeholders are saying on social media. On top of that, reps need access to insightful content, which will allow them to add value, share insights, and build consensus within the target organization.

Side note: To help sales reps embrace their new roles, we recently announced an account-based offering. You can see a feature list here.

Given these trends, it’s no surprise that account-based sales enablement has become a “must-have” in enterprise sales organizations. As the customers’ habits continually evolve, the sales organization needs to evolve, as well, and an account-based approach is the most obvious next step.

Sometimes, things just don’t work out. In spite of our best efforts to make a product work for us, we have to ditch it.

In this post, we’ll look at the telltale signs that your current employee advocacy solution is not meeting your needs. See if the problems below sound familiar.

1. Your program is scaling at a snail’s pace.

You bought your employee advocacy platform in January with the hope of launching 2,000 employees. It’s almost August, and so far, you’ve only launched 200 employees. In other words, you launched roughly one advocate a day. Oofta.

What’s slowing you down? It could be…

• A confusing or difficult on-boarding process
• A slow customer service team
• A user interface that your advocates don’t like

The solution: When evaluating software vendors, look for a team that has quickly deployed large numbers of advocates. Ask your sales representative for deployment time lines for current clients.

2. Your company is not able to create enough content for your employees.

If your employees don’t have ample amounts of content, what are they going to share on social media? And if they have nothing to share, why would they use your employee advocacy solution?

If you’re having trouble producing enough content for your advocacy program, don’t beat yourself up about it. It’s a common problem. The Aberdeen Group has found that only 32% of marketers are able to create enough content to meet their needs.

The solution: Find a solution that offers a built-in content library. You can use this library to supplement your branded content, educate your employees, and provide your employees with content they are eager to share.

3. You can’t report on your program’s progress.

Before you chose your employee advocacy software, you defined your objectives. Now, you’re several months in. Are you able to measure whether you’re achieving those objectives?

Or perhaps, your objectives have changed over time. That happens. Are you able to measure your advocates’ performance against your new objectives?

The Solution: When you’re choosing an employee advocacy technology, it’s important to find a platform with robust reporting features. Choose a solution that helps you track…

• Who your top advocates are
• Which teams are performing better
• Which pieces of content are resonating with your advocates and their audiences
• Tactical metrics like clicks and likes and retweets
• Revenue metrics like leads and opportunities and closed deals

4. Your employees don’t think the technology is easy to use.

For employees to adopt enterprise software, they need to believe that the technology is easy to use. In academic study after academic study, perceived ease of use is one of the strongest predictors of software adoption.

The Solution: Take into consideration the following items when you’re choosing a platform:

1. Simple: How many steps do the advocates and content curators need to go through?

2. Workflow Compatibility: The solution must fit into the employee’s professional life. Do you have a mobile app? Can the employees receive e-mail notifications?

3. Reliable: Users need to think that the app is reliable. Only 16% of users will give a bad application a second look.

4. Intuitive: Does the workflow make sense?

Do these problems sound familiar?

Some problems with technology are just nuisances. You can deal with them. Others, like a lack of scalability, greatly prevent you from achieving your goals. When you can’t meet your goals, you know it’s time to ditch your solution.

By identifying your current technological problems, you’ll be better equipped for finding the right solution in the future. Good luck!

-Mark

Looking for an employee advocacy solution?

We can help. Our technology empowers your employees on social with content that is proven to spark engagement and drive sales.

74% of buyers choose the sales representative who first adds value during the buying process.

Let that stat sink in.

The statistic is not: 74% of buyers choose the sales representative who sells first. Nor is it 74% of buyers choose the sales rep who introduces the product first. Nor is it 74% of buyers choose the sales rep who demos first.

The winners are the salespeople who add value.

And one of the easiest ways to improve your buyer’s life is through strategic content curation. Let’s take a look at what I mean by that.

What Is Content Curation?

Before we look at four ways to use content curation, let’s define what curation is.

Content curation is the process of finding content online and sharing it with your audience. Most Internet users curate content in some way, shape, or form.

Frequently, we select links to share with our friends, co-workers, and prospects, and we add our own commentary. Just think about all those links that your high school and college friends share on Facebook. That’s content curation.

But the big difference is that your Facebook friends aren’t using content curation for business purposes. They’re doing it for personal reasons.

When you’re sharing content for social selling, you have to have business objectives in mind. Below, you’ll find some tips for using content curation to warm up your leads, build trust, and educate your sales team.

1. Use Content to Start Conversations.

If you’ve done social selling, ask yourself, How do you currently break the ice with your buyers on social?

If you haven’t done social selling, ask yourself, How would you break the ice with your buyers on social media?

As a salesperson, your first instinct is to sell the product. That’s because you’re accustomed to working with people at the bottom of the sales funnel, when they’re reaching a decision.

When you’re trying to break the ice with a potential buyer, you need to fight those instincts. Think less about your product and more about each individual buyer’s needs:

• How can you help challenge the individual buyer’s current perceptions?
• How can you challenge the status quo in your industry?

By sending a potential buyer a blog post, an infographic, or a video dedicated to their industry, you can help your buyer understand her problems and identify her need for change.

Moreover, you set yourself apart. When you share content with your buyer, she doesn’t see you as a pushy salesperson, but rather, as a helpful salesperson – one who will be able to answer her questions.

When starting conversations, don’t just blast content across your social networks. Share helpful content picked especially for individual buyers. The personalized messages will help.

Looking for tips on breaking the ice?Check out these templates.

2. Use Content to Maintain Your Buyer’s Attention.

All right, you have a buyer’s attention. Perhaps he responded to your message or liked your post. Now what?

You should immediately go for the demo request, right?

Wrong.

You need to continue to add value. Before you can pitch your product, ask yourself where the buyer is in the sales cycle.

• Does the buyer know he has a problem?
• Is the buyer seeking information related to his problem?
• Does the buyer understand how to solve his problem?
• Is the buyer identifying and reviewing vendors?

See that last question? That’s when you should start introducing your product. Before then, focus on developing conversations. Use content related to your subject matter, your buyer’s industry, and your buyer’s job position.

And truly think of your curation as a conversation. If you are simply broadcasting links and not starting individual conversations, you’re not taking full advantage of social media’s socialness.

Are you skeptical that content matters? Think about your offline conversations. Think about how many times someone has asked you, “Did you see that video on YouTube?” Or, “Did you read that article on Topic XYZ?” Our lives – even offline – revolve around content on the internet.

So, why not give it a try online?

Need help matching content to the sales funnel? Here’s a post for you: What Your Sales Team Needs to Know about Content Marketing

3. Use Content to Educate Your Sales Team.

Thanks to the advent of Google and social media, your buyers are more informed than ever. But are your salespeople?

Your salespeople need to be subject matter experts for your buyers, which means that they need to stay on top of the latest trends.

As a sales leader, you have a couple options when it comes to your sales team’s education. You can entrust the learning process to your sales team, or you can take it upon yourself to educate your sales representatives.

The best sales enablement teams do the latter. They curate content internally for their sales force. They’ll provide articles on the following:

1. Competitors. Your sales team needs to know what your competitors are doing, and they need to know how they can position your company against your competitors. Supply them with, for example, your competitor’s press releases and indicate how that impacts them.

2. The latest trends in your industry. Industries are always changing, and there are always new research reports being produced. Supply these resources to your sales team. Indicate to them

• Why they need to read these articles.
• How these articles will help their buyers.

4. Use Content to Build Credibility Online.

Do you search for your buyers on social media? If so, have you ever thought that your customers might do the same and search for you?

For social selling to work, you must have a smart, informative presence on social media. When someone looks at your profile and timeline, you want them to perceive you as someone who is trustworthy and who is up on the latest trends in your industry.

Curating content is one of the best ways to bolster your professional brand online. If you’d like more tips on how to use content to build your professional brand, check out these resources:

To Sum Things up…

Without content, your sales team will be boring on social media, if not annoying and ineffective. Curating content is the key to starting and maintaining conversations, as well as educating your sales team and building credibility online.

Now that you understand content’s importance, it’s time to understand how to build the right content mix for your social selling program.

Good luck!

-Mark

Let’s face it, it is pretty difficult to stand out from the pack when you are at a large conference like #CMWorld.

All exhibitors have their pitches, you’re in close proximity to your competitors, and you’re fighting against the doughnuts for your audience’s attention. Therefore, it is important to have a strong set of tools to see success.

Here are a few tricks that we have found to be helpful.

1. Swag Matters

If you have the opportunity for a bag drop, take it. Offering something creative or useful to the attendees is a great way for them to know your name. Even those who miss your booth will become familiar with your company. Hopefully, they will keep your gift and use it after the conference.

Furthermore, if you can pick something that’s different, it is even better. This year, we offered a computer cleaner to the attendees at Content Marketing World. It came in a sliver tube and you needed to twist the ends to uncover the brushes and reveal the treat. Folks were confused by the mysterious sliver tube they found in their bags and started to tweet us for pointers.

What a great way to create buzz around your company! Any time you get your company tweeted at with the conference hashtag, you have amped up your exposure, making your trip to the conference even better.

2. Be Organized

When exhibiting at a conference, you will receive tons of emails about “to dos” and deadlines. Remember this!

Seriously, don’t forget it!

All the deadlines can be confusing. Therefore, it is imperative to be organized. I like to take some time and put every single date on my calendar when I receive the exhibitor package. This helps me feel better about knowing I won’t miss a thing.

In addition to doing all of the necessary registering and ordering, I think it is a great idea to delegate roles for your team members who will attend the conference. You only have a short amount of time to make a big impact. So, if your team does not know what to do, you will waste time.

Having a schedule will help to maximize your impact. Have one sales guy running demos, another one out in the field attracting people to your booth. Having everyone working together, with a positive attitude will really help amplify your conference experience. Especially since, as we all know, people buy from people. So, get out there!

3. Do Something Interactive

There are a lot of booths to stop by. So how do you get people coming to you?

By doing something interactive, you can drive traffic to your booth. Think about what people like: games, selfies, contests. Things that are entertaining and fun. The more creative, the better. And let people know early. Posting your ideas on social media will create buzz around your company.

For example, at Content Marketing World, Trapit played BINGO. We turned to Twitter a few days before the event and let people know our plan. We created BINGO cards with popular content marketing phrases. When players heard a word or phrase on their card, they marked it off. 5 in a row and BINGO! Folks then headed over to the Trapit booth to collect a prize. How fun!

4. Be Ready to Follow up

So, you did all of this wonderful preparation. You were organized, had great giveaways, had a fun interactive game. Don’t lose all of the excitement you created. Having a follow-up email ready to go the day after the conference is a life saver for your marketing team.

Make this a part of your pre-conference “to do” list. We like to mention something to jog the recipient’s memory about your company. Something like, “We hope you enjoy your computer cleaner and headphones” is a good way to help people to connect the dots.

A short and sweet email is the perfect way to end your conference outreach.

Conferences are a wonderful way to gain exposure for your company. By following these few tips, hopefully you can get the most you can out of your conference experience.

-Maura

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Sales enablement has become an indispensable part of enterprise organizations. As buyers have become more digitally savvy, sales teams have had to adapt, relying on new processes and people.

Thanks to technology – especially social sales enablement platforms – sales teams are ready to engage with their buyers on digital channels. But sales reps need a framework in place. This post will help marketing and sales leaders identify the key criteria for their sales enablement efforts.

Let’s get started…

A Brief Overview of Sales Enablement

Sales enablement straddles the worlds of marketing and sales. When sales enablement is done correctly, both departments offer input on how to equip salespeople to have the right conversations with the right people at the right time on the right channels.

Traditionally, support for sales teams has focused on the end of the buyer’s journey, when customers are actively evaluating solutions. But today, sales reps need to hold conversations throughout the entire buyer’s journey – even before customers are aware that they have a problem to solve. (Let’s face it. Not every person at a conference or on LinkedIn is ready to buy.)

As Bob Dylan sang, “Times, they are a changin'” and the sales team is changing with it. Here are four key criteria for developing sales enablement targeted at the digitally and socially savvy buyer.

The 4 Criteria for a Modern Sales Enablement Framework

1. Agree upon a set of goals and responsibilities for aligning sales and marketing efforts

In the digital world, the line between sales and marketing is blurring, which can create confusion between the two organizations. To maintain order, it’s critical that sales and marketing teams need to agree upon goals and responsibilities.

Creating service level agreements (SLAs) between marketing and sales is the best way to achieve alignment. By putting SLAs in place, you set clear expectations. Sales leaders understand how the marketing team will support sales, and vice versa. Moreover, you ensure consistency as both marketing and sales interact with customers across the customer’s journey.

Consistency will help you assess the health of your business, identify problem areas, fix them, and achieve your business objectives. As your sales enablement processes mature and as you continue to learn about your customer, your SLAs will change. Consider your SLAs to be living documents, and never stop iterating on them.

For more information, see How to Write a Social Selling SLA.

2. Understand how content fits into your sales enablement strategy

Content is a “must-have” for sales professionals. And by content, I don’t mean product fact sheets and pitch decks. While those are important, you need more than that.

Blog posts, infographics, ebooks, and research reports are good ways to start conversations with customers. Additionally, content can be useful when you’re following up with customers after a meeting.

To make content count during the sales process, salespeople need to understand when to use each type of content and how to position it with their buyers. So, take the time to build a content plan for your sales enablement team. Determine:

• What technology you will use to supply content to your team
• How you will store content
• Who will supply content content to your team
• How you will train your team to use content effectively (it’s not intuitive!)
• What’s the right mix of company-created and third-party content
• How you will divide your team

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Once you answer those questions, you’ll be able to supply your salespeople with content that will spark engagement. If you’re stuck, you may want to consult The Essential Guide to Social Selling Content or How to Successfully Launch Your Social Selling Program.

3. Be data-driven and measure your efforts

As the modern adage goes, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Unfortunately, it feels like you can measure far too much online. So, it is important to keep your focus on a small set of key performance indicators.

It might be helpful to divide your sales enablement metrics into two camps:

1. Performance metrics – How did we do?For example, how much content did our salespeople share this month? How much engagement did that spark?
2. Diagnostic metrics – What’s working? What needs to be improved? For example, what types of content are our salespeople sharing most often?

Don’t measure things just to measure them. Instead, choose metrics that will help you make important decisions – decisions that will help your customers and increase your company’s profitability.

4. Put Your Customer at the Heart of Sales Enablement

Some companies have their priorities wrong. They focus solely on their company, their product, their messaging, their key differentiators, etc. They make it all about THEM, and they forget entirely about their customers and their customers’ needs.

Their poor focus impacts their sales enablement efforts. Instead of helping their sales teams understand their buyers, they focus entirely on helping their sales team understand their product.

According to Forrester’s research, product-focused knowledge isn’t what most salespeople are lacking. By and large, salespeople don’t understand their buyers.

Helping your customers should be at the heart of all your efforts sales enablement – from awareness to retention.

And that means using the channels that your customers use. Sure, your customers use phone and email, but statistics show that many of them are using social networks, as well.

Bottom Line: Sales Enablement Has Changed

Today’s sales enablement has fundamentally shifted. It is no longer about explaining your companies’ products and helping customers evaluate vendors. It is about helping your buyers. It is about enabling your salespeople to engage throughout the entire lifecycle of a buyer, on the channels that they use.

With this shift come new criteria. By focusing on the four criteria above, sales enablement teams will set themselves up for success. They will be able to empower salespeople to help customers, drive revenue, and show their impact across the buyer’s journey.

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It’s tempting to build an employee advocacy program on the shifting sand of assumptions. As marketers, we can fall prey to the belief that employees are just another marketing channel. Like email or social, our employees will simply deliver our message to their friends and colleagues – whenever and wherever we want them to.

Bad news: Employees don’t operate like email or social. If we want employees to adopt our advocacy programs, we need to consult them and find out what our employees want. Here are four questions that you should ask your employees.

Question #1: What Type of Content Do You Want to Share?

We, marketers, spend a lot of time creating content. So, of course, we want our employees to share it. But is that what your advocates want?

When our customers ask their employees that question, they’re often surprised. While their advocates enjoy sharing the company’s content, they are also looking to educate themselves and their followers by sharing third-party content like industry news.

As a starting point for this question, you may want to consult our survey on employees’ content preferences.

Question #2: How Do You Want to Receive Content?

The more content delivery channels, the better, right? Not always.

For instance, one of our customers was distributing content to advocates across as many channels as possible, including email, mobile, intranet, etc. And what our customer found was surprising.

“Be where your customers are.” That’s the marketing proverb in vogue right now. However, the same is not always true for employee advocates. When our customer asked their employees about their delivery preferences, they found that their employees were overwhelmed. Content suggestions were everywhere – on every possible channel. So, our customer wisely cut back on delivery channels, which, in turn, freed up time for the marketing team because they no longer had to be everywhere.

Question #3: What Topics Do You Want to Cover in Social Media Training?

Social media training can’t be “one size fits all.” Employees are at different stages of their personal journey with social. Some will be experts at social media, while others will be setting up profiles for the first time. To reflect those differences, Sarah Goodall developed this maturity model:

With so many skill levels, training employees can be difficult. So, how do you figure out what to include in your training sessions? Simply put, you ask your employees. Making assumptions will get you nowhere. Once you’ve asked your employees, then, you can build a training curriculum for the different skill levels of your advocates.

To help you get started, we put together this training needs assessment.

Question #4: What Do You Want to Accomplish on Social Media?

Being an employee advocate is fun. Promoting your company is nifty. Helping the marketing team create brand awareness is groovy. But there comes a time when employees want more. They will want a compelling answer to the question, “What’s in it for me (WIIFM)?”

Good employee advocacy programs don’t just serve marketing; they serve employees, as well. They help employees use social to achieve their business objectives. They help salespeople sell more. They help recruiters recruit more. The help communications teams communicate better.

If your advocacy program doesn’t answer the WIIFM question, you’ll watch your number of advocates dwindle.

Making assumptions about our advocates’ needs only gets us into trouble. What is good for the goose (i.e. the marketing department) is not always good for the gander (i.e. your employees). That’s why it’s worth your time to ask your employees what they want.

What have you asked your employees? Feel free to share your questions in the comments section below.

In the pre-internet days, sales departments were in charge of the customer relationship. Potential customers had limited information, so they had to interact with sales professionals to find out more about products and services.

But the digital age has remixed that formula, thrusting buyers into the position of power. As a result, a dramatic transition is afoot, and it is altering the way sales leaders manage their organizations and interact with their customers. At the same time that sales leaders need to stay ahead of the breakneck changes within their markets, they must educate their management on the seller’s role in the digital era.

The research makes it clear that it’s both an exciting and challenging time to be a VP of Sales. Here are four of the emerging trends that will affect the future success of every VP of Sales.

The Digital Customer Who’s Hesitant to Engage with Sales Reps

The majority of buyers would rather research products and solutions on their own. For many sales leaders, this is disheartening. They want their sales reps to speak with buyers early in the buying cycle. They want to shape buyer’s solution criteria as soon as possible so that they don’t have to compete on price. But buyers are reluctant to oblige.

Why are so many buyers trying to avoid sales reps? One reason is that sellers have not adapted to the new buying dynamic. Sales reps continue to pounce and pitch and push, which annoys buyers. Instead, sales reps should be helping buyers do their research.

In many ways, today’s sales reps need to act more like librarians who help their buyers research their problems, who share their buyers’ quest for more information, and who actively share great resources with their buyers – without making it feel like a proposal is always around the corner.

Until sales reps become better research partners, we will continue to see buyers avoid sales reps, and sales teams will continue to struggle to attain quotas.

The Explosion of Sales Technology

Over the last decade, marketers have had to navigate the rising tide of marketing technology solutions. Now, the tide is turning, and it’s heading for the sales department.

Sales leaders, be prepared to be inundated by sales technology options. To succeed, you’ll have to be judicious about your sales technology stack.

Every shiny, new technology is tempting. But sales leaders need to keep two things in mind. First, if you ask your sales reps to use too many applications, it will be hard to scale best practices across your team. So, watch out for point solutions that help your team do one thing and one thing only.

Second, your overall objective shouldn’t be to find a solution with as many bells and whistles as possible – just in case you might use them one day down the road. Rather, your goal should be to purchase solutions that let your team quickly achieve mastery over the actions that will have the biggest impact.

Finding the Right Hires

To adapt to the digitally savvy buyers, sales leaders need to change their hiring mentality. Selling to the modern buyer isn’t just about quota crushing and expert negotiating. Modern selling requires a different set of skills. For example:

1. The modern sales candidate knows how to build relationships where buyers hang out. Those places include social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter. 84% of C-level/VP executives use social networks to support purchase decisions.

2. The modern sales candidate knows how to educate buyers and act as a consultant. If sales reps don’t undergo this mindset change, buyers will avoid them at all costs, which makes it much harder to attain quota. (See the charts above!)

3. The modern sales candidate has a noticeable digital footprint. As Mark Roberge, the CRO of HubSpot, writes in The Sales Acceleration Formula:

The Rise of Sales Enablement

Sales enablement is one of the hottest topics in sales right now. In 2014, 25.5% of companies had staff dedicated to sales enablement – with more companies planning to build enablement initiatives in the upcoming years.

Given that sales enablement is an emerging role, its primary responsibilities vary widely. As a sales leader, you have to decide how enablement professionals can best serve your team.

Here are a few areas where sales enablement can help: The vast majority of sales enablement teams (74.7%) focus on training the sales team on things like social selling or using content to engage buyers. Others (59.6%) help maintain the sales tech infrastructure, while still others (51.5%) maintain a content library and work to provide sales with top-notch content – both from the company and from around the web.

Whatever you do, choose your team wisely. The best sales teams are the ones that execute flawlessly on their strategies, and it’s the responsibility of your sales enablement staff to help your sales managers execute their visions.

The Challenges of Digital Transformation

Here’s the bottom line: Don’t cross your fingers and hope that buyers will miraculously change. Buyers are in the driver’s seat for the foreseeable future, and your sales team will need to adapt accordingly.

For many of your sales reps, this will not come as a surprise. 69% of sales reps believe that the buying process is changing faster than sales organizations are responding. So, don’t hold your team back. Lead the digital transformation from the top.

No one said that digital transformation would be easy. It requires your team to think of new go-to-market strategies and new sales tactics. But in the end, it will pay off with more sales opporunities, more revenue, and a more effective sales process.

Leading Digital Transformation from the Top

If you want to transform your sales team, check out the Executive Guide to Social Selling.