In my last article, I talked about how my own marketing content enabled me to have one of the easiest sales conversations I’ve ever had.
Compare that to the dreaded sales call where the prospect isn’t sure they should invest.
- Is this right for me?
- Maybe later.
- This sounds great, but I don’t have time to devote to it.
- How can I be sure this will get results?
- Is it worth the investment?
- Is your company the right company for the job?
These conversations take so much longer and can feel like pulling teeth. You know you can help this person if they would just let you, but how can you get them to see it?
The path most salespeople take is to talk the prospect through it. Depending on how cold the prospect is and the level of investment required to work with you, that might require several conversations, sometimes with different people in the organization.
That’s a lot of time and effort devoted to getting one new client. And when you don’t have a content funnel that nurtures and educates prospects, you have to do it over and over again with each prospect.
But that’s just the way it goes in sales, right? Nothing to be done about it.
Not necessarily. Yes, there are prospects that might come to you through other channels that you then have to work to convince them they’ll benefit from your services.
But when those inbound leads start coming in already understanding the value of what you provide and how it can help them, it’s a beautiful thing!
So let’s talk about how you can get easier sales calls without objections (or at least fewer objections).
Table of Contents
- It Starts with Sales
- Create the Content They’re Consuming
- Categorize Objections
- Modify Positioning
- You Have the Content: Now What?
- When Sales & Marketing Make Friends
It Starts With Sales
As counterintuitive as it is to tell you to start with Sales (shouldn’t the process end with Sales?) the truth is Sales and Marketing, when done right, should be more of a circle than a line.
When Sales gets a question or objection on a sales call, they need to let Marketing know that’s something they’ve heard, especially if it’s not the first time they’ve heard it.
If your company records sales calls (which we recommend) an easy way to do this is to give Marketing access to those recordings so Marketing knows what Sales is hearing.
If Sales raises their hand to let Marketing know they’re hearing an objection and Marketing has already created content to overcome that objections, they can let Sales know about the material so they can use it in future Sales calls. That said, Marketing also needs to be proactive in letting Sales know when they have new marketing materials, which I’ll talk about in a little more detail later on in this article.
Create the Content They’re Consuming
You can write all the articles in the world, but it won’t matter if your audience prefers to watch videos or listen to podcasts. So, before you start creating any content, you need to make sure you’re creating content in the formats your audience actually consumes.
Data can get you a long way towards figuring that out, but again, it can be helpful to talk to Sales to make sure your marketing personas are one point. If Sales is hearing prospects talk about something they heard on a podcast or saw on YouTube, that’s an indication that your company should be on those channels.
Categorize Objections
Certain objections tend to come up at certain points in the buyer journey and at certain points in the sales conversations, so grouping objections into categories such as pricing, urgency, trust, etc. can make it easy for Sales to reference and use those materials as they come up in conversation.
Modify Positioning
If certain objections keep coming up again and again in sales calls, that might indicate a flaw in your positioning, in which case it’s time to take a look at your overall messaging and see if there’s something missing. Sometimes all it takes is a tweak to your content strategy to change how people look at you.
You Have the Content: Now What?
Publishing content that overcomes objections and hoping prospects find their way to it sounds great in theory but it rarely works out so well in practice. Here’s what you need to do instead.
Email It To Them
Embed your objection-overcoming content in email nurturing campaigns. If someone subscribes to your newsletter, make sure they receive relevant updates that educate them, not just on who you are, what you do, and the value you provide, but answers the questions they have and proactively addresses their objections.
Make Promotion a Team Sport
Once a piece is published, it usually falls to the Marketing team to distribute it on their channels and the company channels and that’s it, but that strategy leaves a lot on the table.
If Sales sees it as part of their job to attract and convert leads, why aren’t they sharing Marketing’s content on their channels?
If Leadership wants their company to be viewed a certain way by the world, why are they not sharing the content that talks up their company on their own channels?
Not only does this team approach to promoting new content help to organically spread the reach of the content, but the algorithms notice. When a new piece of content is getting shared by multiple people and driving traffic to that piece, the algorithms tend to assume there must be something worthwhile in that piece, prompting them to boost it in their rankings.
Make It Part of the Sales Process
When Sales knows there’s content readily available that helps overcome objections, they can use it in the conversations they’re having with prospects.
Got an email or a DM with an objection?
Instead of spending time writing out the answer, you can respond with, “You know, we just published an article/video/podcast episode about that. Here’s the link.”
Now you save yourself time by avoiding writing out the same answer you’ve given a hundred times. As a bonus, you make the company look like a thought leader because you have a piece of content that proactively answers their question.
When Sales & Marketing Make Friends
Content can make the sales process so much smoother and easier, but it requires Sales & Marketing to work together. Each has to share information with the other so everyone can do their jobs better and with less stress. It’s more fun and the company makes more money without spending more money.
This is exactly why I created my Sales & Marketing Alignment Workshop. Because too often Sales & Marketing act like they’re playing on opposing teams instead of working together to achieve the same goal.
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