In this part of the book, we analyze how the principles found in They Ask, You Answer go well beyond your marketing department, permeating your entire sales team and organization when done properly. We show you its impact on sales teams, their culture, their ability to close, and exactly how you can better use content to dramatically increase your sales numbers.
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How Great Content Is a Total Game-Changer for Sales Teams
Let’s assume for a minute that you’re committed to making content marketing and the principles of They Ask, You Answer work within your organization.
In order to make this happen, not only do the leadership and marketing teams have to be aligned in their vision, but the sales team must immediately get involved in the process.
In order to do this, they must understand the what, how, and why of this important business strategy. Additionally, they must realize that there are multiple reasons why embracing this way of selling will affect not just the organization, but each sales person individually as well.
Listed next are seven benefits that sales teams need to understand will occur if they’re properly integrating They Ask, You Answer into the sales process.
Seven Major Benefits of Sales Teams Embracing They Ask, You Answer
1. Producing Content Forces Us to Understand the Buyers and the Way They Think
If you’re going to be good at content marketing as an organization, you better be great at understanding exactly what prospects and customers are saying, thinking, feeling, and searching. You must know their pains, worries, issues, and desires. Simply put, you must be dialed in.
In the marketing space, one might call this “buyer persona.” But regardless of what it’s called, many organizations and sales teams never quite reach a point where they are completely in tune with the way their customers and prospects think before, during, and after the buying process.
But when companies are forced to think about these things while they’re attempting to produce educational and helpful content aligned to each phase of the buyer’s journey, the ability of the sales team to put themselves in the shoes of their prospects and customers will never be higher.
In sales, empathy is everything. When someone doesn’t have it, they generally aren’t very successful. And when they don’t have it with their content, it generally doesn’t work either.
2. Producing Content Is Magical Practice for Sales Messaging
The best sales professionals have not only heard most questions a prospect could ask, they tend to answer them the same way each time. Furthermore, their answers are clearly stated and communicated in such a way that the prospect understands what was said, and their concern has now been resolved.
This type of effective communication is needed for every great sales pro, but it doesn’t happen immediately, and it certainly takes practice. It is for this reason that content marketing can be so powerful: It helps the sales pro (as they produce the content) learn how to better answer the question, explain it in an intelligible way, and get the desired results they’re looking for.
Here at the Sales Lion, we’ve heard time and time again how our clients improved overall sales communication after their sales team became involved in the content production process.
3. Company Content Acts as the Guide for All Training, Messaging, and So On
Even though sales departments have always been considered the financial heartbeat of most organizations, and even though their ability to have uniformity in what they communicate and teach to clients has always been extremely important, most companies have never taken the time to write out their “sales doctrine” for all their employees and sales pros.
As you might imagine, this is where content marketing and They Ask, You Answer come into play. Through in-house articles, videos, and so on, current and future employees have a database of training content that will help them to learn the company doctrines and philosophies faster and more effectively, affecting the human resources side of the organization for years to come.
4. Assignment Selling
It’s a crying shame just how silo-driven many organizations are. Marketing sticks with marketing, and sales sticks with sales. But the fact is, the most successful companies understand that not only should the two be aligned, but sales should be using the content produced by marketing in their entire sales process. The concept of using content intentionally to educate the consumer and push them further down (or out of) the sales funnel is what we at the Sales Lion call “assignment selling.” We discuss assignment selling in more detail later in this section.
5. Sales Teams Can Learn What Prospects and Customers Truly Care about . . . Before They Even Enter the Sales Funnel
With the plethora of advanced analytics and other tools that are available to sales teams today, there is absolutely no reason not to take advantage of deeper lead intelligence. For example, assuming a lead has filled out a contact form on your website, advanced analytics allow you to see every page that person has viewed on the site. It allows you to know how many times they’ve visited. It can also notify you every time they return to the company website in the future.
By looking at these analytics, a sales pro can start to piece together the “story” of the prospect long before the initial contact or phone conversation. This reality can be an absolute game-changer for a sales team.
6. With Content, the Relationship of Trust Can Be Built with the Sales Person (and Company) Long Before the First Sales Meeting
Every sales pro wants better leads. They also want to go on better sales calls. Unfortunately, many sales calls and presentations are focused—at least for the first part of the meeting—on building relationships of trust (instead of the “selling” part). But with the digital consumer of today, it’s possible to build that trust (much more, in fact, than in a twenty-minute conversation) long before the initial sales meeting. This allows a sales pro to do what they do best: sell.
7. Great Content Means More Trust, More Trust Means Shorter Sales Cycles, Shorter Sales Cycles Equals Happier Sales Teams
Not only does every sales pro want more (good) leads, but they also want more time. Time to spend on more qualified opportunities. Time to spend with their families and loved ones. Time to do the things they enjoy most.
Fact is, great teaching (content marketing) can be the ultimate “time giver” to a sales department.
In the following chapters, you’ll see some astounding examples of how using content in the sales process can not only save time, but it can have a tremendous impact on sales cycles and closing rates in general.
This is the essence to understanding just how much impact content marketing can have on a sales team and organization. And once companies start to understand these definitive benefits while engaging their sales team in the content production process, magic will assuredly happen.
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A Dramatic Discovery
Let me start by asking you a very important question:
On average, how many pages of your website do you think someone would be willing to read before they do business with you?
This is a question I’ve asked audiences all over the world. And in every industry and every country, I get pretty much the same answer: “Two or three pages.”
Let’s look at that figure. How long do you suppose it would take someone to read two or three pages of your site?
Conservatively, let’s assume the length is about five minutes.
What you’re really saying when you say that you can only envision a prospective customer reading (on average) two or three pages of your site is this: “Marcus, doing business with us is worth about five minutes of someone’s time.”
But do you really think the process of deciding to do business with you is worth only five minutes of someone’s time? I’d certainly hope this isn’t the case.
Fact is, as businesses, we grossly underestimate people’s willingness to consider information in their quest to become informed and comfort
able with a buying decision. To help you understand this point further, let me tell you about a dramatic discovery I made in 2012 related to my swimming pool company—one that has since affected many, many other businesses with its universal effectiveness.
At the beginning of 2012, I was comparing two groups of people who had filled out the “I want to get a quote” form on my swimming pool website.
By doing this, both groups of people had shown they’d gained enough trust to potentially want to do business with us. But here was the difference between the two:
The first group filled out a form but ended up not buying from us.
The second group filled out a form and did end up buying from us.
As I was looking at these two groups of people, I kept asking myself again and again:
What was the differentiator? What makes some buy but others not? What was the key indicator that would lead someone to say “Yes”?
As I was using HubSpot (more about them later) to look at the analytics on our site, I discovered something interesting about the number thirty related to the second group—the one that had bought swimming pools from us.
Can you guess what the number thirty represented?
If you guessed, “total pages viewed,” you hit the nail on the head.
Now you may be thinking, “Wow, thirty pages is a lot!” That’s certainly what I though when I discovered this anomaly.
Specifically, here is where it got interesting:
We discovered that if someone read thirty or more pages of the website before the initial sales appointment, they would buy from us 80 percent of the time.
By contrast, if they didn’t read thirty or more pages, the average closing rate in terms of appointment-to-sale was only 20 percent
This was a phenomenal discovery. For me, in that moment, my entire relationship with this thing we call “content” reached a much deeper understanding and appreciation. It also made me rethink our entire sales process.
Such a stat begs the following questions:
What is happening over the course of a prospect reading thirty pages that caused such a dramatic increase in terms of their closing rates? And why is there such a big difference between the prospects who didn’t read thirty pages of our site and those who did?
You have to look at it like this:
Every time someone consumes a piece of your content (video, article, podcast, and so on), the trust factor continues to rise. Throughout that entire process, they are essentially “self-qualifying.”
Every piece of content that someone reads or watches becomes the equivalent of another meeting—or “date” —with that person.
If you go on enough dates with someone, eventually, you’ll get “married.”
Or you will break up.
One way or another, over the course of thirty dates, you’re going to clearly discover whether or not you’re a good fit, and whether you want to continue forward with each other. The same thing is true with great content.
That being said, let’s say that you found out that all you had to do was get a prospect to consume thirty pieces of your content (articles, videos, and so on) and they would buy from you 80 percent of the time. If that were true, what would you do differently? How would you handle that information? And how would that change your sales numbers?
The answer to these questions is what comes next: assignment selling.
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Assignment Selling
Often, when businesses embrace content marketing and They Ask, You Answer, the tendency is to think, Okay, I’m just going to post this on my site and great things are going to happen!
Unfortunately, publishing content on your site simply is not enough. You can’t just passively post content on your website or social media channels and expect it to work its magic. You must find ways to actively help your prospects and customers read and view your content if you’re going to truly move the needle. Furthermore, you cannot be passive about this, and you can’t just leave it up to chance.
The process of actively using your content in the sales process is what I’ve dubbed “assignment selling.”
To help you catch the vision that is assignment selling, we’ll again use swimming pools as an example. But before we go any further, let me explain what I’m talking about when I use the phrase “assignment selling.”
I define assignment selling as the process of intentionally using information:
That you have created via text, video, or audio
That is educational about your products and/or services
With the purpose of resolving the major concerns and question of the prospect so they are dramatically more prepared for a sales appointment (or multiple sales appointments)
I reference this as something to do before and during the sales process.
An Example of Assignment Selling in Action
As you read the following, I don’t want you to think you necessarily have to apply this to your business in the exact same way that I show here. The key here is the principle that relates to the way information or content is used to help your prospects either move down the sales funnel and advance, or become disqualified because they discover they’re not a good fit for you.
Here is how it works: It used to be that someone would call my swimming pool company and say something like, “Hey, Marcus, I’m checking out your site and I think I’d like to get a quote for a swimming pool. Can you come out to my house this Friday and give me a quote?”
After asking them a couple of qualifying questions, I would say, “Sure, I’ll be right out.” I did that because that’s what I thought sales people were supposed to do. If I was asked to go out and sell, I wanted to immediately go out and sell. Simply put, I didn’t know any better.
This occurred because I wasn’t truly thinking about the readiness of the prospect. I wasn’t asking myself, Well, wait a minute here. How much does this person really understand about the world of swimming pools?
When I responded immediately to their request for a swimming pool quote, I had no way of knowing how educated they were with respect to buying a swimming pool. A person might be very informed and educated regarding our products and services, or they might be totally ignorant and aloof. I really knew nothing about my prospects and customers, and for all I knew, they knew absolutely nothing about that thing I was trying to sell them.
But I was not alone in my struggles. Many sales professionals are experiencing this very thing to some degree or another.
So, how does one overcome this? How does a sales professional take a prospect from “uninformed” to “extremely educated?”
At River Pools, we changed our entire sales conversations, starting with the first call. This is how it now sounded:
POOL SHOPPER: Hey Marcus, I’ve been checking out your site and I think I’d like to get a quote for a swimming pool. Can you come out to my house this Friday and give me a quote?
ME: Of course, I would love to come out to your house this Friday and give you a quote. However, you’re getting ready to spend a lot of money on a swimming pool, and I know you don’t want to make any mistakes with a project of this magnitude. So as to ensure you don’t make any mistakes, we’re going to help you become well educated.
In order to do this, I’m going to send you an e-mail. In this e-mail, you’re going to see two main things. First, you’re going to see a video of a fiberglass swimming pool installation. This will let you know how the swimming pool is going to show up to your house; it will show you the excavation and shell going in the ground; and it will also allow you to see the final grade-work and cleanup. In other words, you’ll observe the whole process so that, when I come out to your house, you won’t have to ask me, “So, Marcus, what does this process look like?” You will already know. That will save us both a lot of time.
The second thing I’m going to do is attach an e-book to this e-mail; it’s essentially a buying guide. You will find this literature extremely helpful as well, a
s it will answer many of the questions you have right now. For example, it will address questions about what would be the best cover for your swimming pool: solid, mesh, or maybe even an automatic cover. The guide will also go over subjects like pool heaters and address questions of whether gas or electric is better, or whether you even need a heater at all. It’s a little bit long—about thirty pages—but I promise you, it will be well worth your time.
Then I close by saying, “So, Mr./Mrs. Jones, would you take the time to review this e-book before our appointment on Friday?”
Having had this exact conversation with hundreds of swimming pool shoppers, I can tell you that 90 percent of the time, the simple response is “Sure.”
At this point in the conversation, I would respond by saying, “That’s great. Friday morning I will give you a call just to confirm our appointment as well as make sure you took the time to do those two things.”
The Special Rights of the Teacher
You may think, upon reading such a statement, that asking a person to do this type of “homework” beforehand, and then letting them know you’ll confirm whether they did said homework or not, is audacious.
I understand why you would say that. It is bold. It is audacious.
But it’s also incredibly effective.
And the reason we have such an approach to selling is because our focus on teaching gives us the right to make such commitments with prospects.
First of all, in this case, I have taken the time to give this prospect tremendous value by producing a video that is going to walk them through the process of buying a fiberglass swimming pool. Second, we’ve created a guide that is going to answer the majority of their other pool-related questions.
They Ask You Answer Page 11
