Five Types of Content that Salespeople Will Actually Use.

Dynamic PDF:-

One type of content that we see working well across industries is a dynamic PDF that can be customized easily by the salespeople.

It took us a little while to understand why the PDFs needed to be dynamic, however. At one of our auto industry clients, marketing created these nice one-page PDFs describing how great doing business with them can be. The salespeople had said it was just the sort of thing they needed.

But when marketing sent out the PDFs, no one in sales used them. Through a little bit of analysis, we discovered that it was because the one-pager directed the prospects to call the company’s 1-800 number. That meant that the seller who dropped off the one-pager with the prospect didn’t get quota credit. So there you go—the things were never used. By quickly understanding that simple dynamic, we created a customizable version of the exact same PDF that allowed the seller to drop his or her contact info in there. The salesperson got the call (and the quota), and adoption went through the roof. Also, about 10% of the space on the PDF was targeted to the local region. So by pulling in our customer’s own data, Boston got a slightly different version than San Francisco. It was really easy to automate that small amount of customization with some basic demographic information from each city.

Industry updates:-

Salespeople don’t want a deck with 100 slides, they want one page with everything they need to know. One of our customers sells business process outsourcing, but their processes cut across 18 different industry verticals. Plus, they have 20% turnover per year in the sales force. They needed a way to ramp up new salespeople quickly so that they could have intelligent conversations with high-level people in those different industries.

So they went out and aggregated data from sites like Hoover's First Research to determine the three most important things on the minds of the top decision makers in, for example, the banking industry. Those turned out to be three things: control costs, maintain profitability, and reduce risk for the customer and the institution.

Then our client created a slide containing ways to talk about its value proposition in the context of those three top issues. And it included three open-ended questions to ask, along with things to listen for in the response. This is what salespeople want.

Competitive intelligence documents:-

Most companies’ competitive intelligence lies in the brains of the product experts. We need to be able to get that to salespeople when they need it. Here it is definitely not about quantity but about quality, and it doesn’t have to be beautiful, either. Salespeople need to quickly know, “What do we know about these guys, why do we beat them, and why do we lose to them?” All marketers and salespeople need to be able to deliver the elevator pitch about all their competitors.

Solution brief:-

If you want a solution sell, you need materials to support the solution sell. One pharmaceutical company we work with whittled down the list of things their drugstore customers care about to five. One of them is growing market share in their pharmacies. So the pharmaceutical company developed a one-page solutions brief that talks about everything the company does to help pharmacies grow market share. On the brief is a coaching tool link that includes a conversation prompter, a diagnostic questionnaire, and links to correspondence templates such as an intro email follow-up letter and status email to support further conversation.

Objection-handling sheets:-

Buyers always have objections to your products and services, such as the price being too high or the installation being too difficult. You should have a sheet that talks about each objection and offers tips on how to resolve them along with content necessary to answer the questions or problems.