These particular posts didn’t have many social shares and yet the analytics demonstrated someone had been looking at them. The traffic was noticeable.
Generally I’ve found – both on personal professional sites – that for every social share, there are three visitors. So why were there so many page views on these particular posts?
With just a little more thought, the catalyst became obvious. The sales team had found these posts and were emailing them to customers and prospects as a touch point.
The Content Struggles of a Sales Team
A professor once told my class, you don’t have to know all the answers, but you’d better know where to find them. That’s proven to be useful advice.
If over the course of my career, I had a nickel for every time a sales person, in the middle of a negotiation, sent me a desperate email looking for a specific piece of content, I’d have retired long ago. As one former employer used to say to me – marketing exists to eliminate sales excuses.
Still there’s some validity to the sales plight. If marketers think they are overwhelmed by content, then it’s easy to imagine how sales feels, since marketing adds to the content. That’s one of the concepts that leaped out at me in this infographic, which I first spotted on Pinterest, and was posted by Doug Karr on the Marketing Tech Blog
40% of marketing content goes unused by sales because they don’t know where to find it or feel overwhelmed by the deluge.
More Content, More Problems
For a PR or marketing professional, I’ve found it usually takes between three and six months before they really begin to understand the nuances of a new market, business or product. The infographic, which was originally developed by sales software company Qvidian, say it can take about twice as long for a B2B sales professional to become proficient.
This is why experience is so valued in business – and it’s also why employee turnover is more expensive than just salary figures. A few other points that stood out for me – remember this is B2B – include:
- Sales people spend just 40% of their time actually selling
- 40% of marketing content goes unused by sales because
1) They don’t know where to find it or 2) Feel overwhelmed by the deluge
- 88% of sales people say they’ve missed opportunities as a result
Here’s the complete infographic:
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Infographic: Content Marketing Strategy Conundrum
