How to Effectively Create & Distribute Content that Enables the Pipeline

Last year, I led a fireside chat at Bregal Sagemount's conference, The Big Exit, where I discussed enabling your pipeline with demand generation. Let’s start with a quick self-assessment to see where you're at. If all four of the below are true, this blog isn’t for you—congratulations on having an operationally aligned sales and marketing team!

1. You’re operating a full funnel (not just top funnel) content nurture program that enables your sales reps.
2. Your marketing and sales have aligned on content topics.
3. Your teams are measuring which pieces of content are accelerating pipeline conversions (and which are not).
4. You execute quarterly data and strategy reviews with marketing and sales.

In most companies, all four are rarely true because of the infamous beef between marketing and sales. When marketing touches sales leads, their campaigns can be disconnected, distracting, or, even worse, contradictory to the path the reps are leading the leads down. 

This results in no trust between the two departments, a divide in the strategy, and completely separate goals. If marketing's leading KPI was a “marketing enabled pipeline”—knowing exactly which content piece engaged a prospect before the initial meeting or during the sales process—we’d be in a perfect world. 

Well, that is exactly what AK Operations does: align everything, and I mean everything, to the deal pipeline!

Creating Top of the Funnel Content

Before planning any content strategy or topics, I like to ask sales leaders or teams their top 5 reasons for both winning and losing deals. Eventually, this will turn into the content used to prospect the top of the funnel, the large pool of potential customers you want to become more aware of your product or service. 

Notice I’m asking sales, not marketing, because the feedback loop is important. As with the flywheel model, marketing publishes topics that support sales, sales delivers feedback on what’s helping and what’s not, marketing pivots based on the feedback, and so on. By tracking which content sparks engagement, you can then take a data driven approach to see what’s working, while also incorporating some subjective sales team feedback (there are some things we just can’t measure).

You see, content is a powerful, diplomatic way to preemptively overcome prospecting challenges. Think of this like a date-you’re way more likely to commit to a future one after you’ve scoped them out on social media. Content, when used right, can break the ice more effectively than even the best BDRs.

Below is an example of the content engagement pieces that can come out of the top reasons you win or lose deals. The company in this example provides professional coaching and training for employees. 

Top Reasons You Win

1. Extremely easy implementation process
2. Big logo customers
3. Stellar support
4. Drastically increase employee retention
5. Massive ROI for 100+ Employee organizations

Top Reasons You Lose

1. Price
2. Competitor contracts
3. Bad timing
4. Status quo
5. Think they can do it in-house

5 Content Engagement Pieces:

• The Essentials to Building Your Employee Retention Program (5 reasons you win)
• 3 Costly Reasons You Cannot Ignore Employee Satisfaction in 2023 (ROI, status quo)
• 4 SMB Businesses with Massive Return on Employee Retention Programs (big logo clients, FOMO, price)
• The New Era of Solving Employee Retention (status quo and in-house)
• 5 Signs It’s Time for a New Partner (competitor contracts)

See how each of these content pieces supports a top reason you win or overcomes a top reason you lose? Now, you can leverage that content at the top of the funnel because of two straightforward reasons. 

1. Engagement-driven prospect lists make for more at-bats

Simply put, BDRs are more effective and have improved connect rates when they prospect engagement-driven lists. This doesn’t mean they shouldn’t hunt their own cold prospects, but they absolutely should prioritize these engaged contacts, or even the whole account first. If your reps have time to make 20 dials, let’s make it 20 dials to the most engaged prospects. This is where AK Operations still sees 10+% connect rates!

2. Meeting conversions are higher due to pre-meeting consultative nurture

If marketing operations can log the engagement pieces on the contact and roll it up onto the account or deal when the meeting is booked, the rep has insight into the prospect’s motivations for meeting. Now, the rep is in a position to overcome early objections and build a use case right out the gate—ultimately shortening the discovery period, personalizing the meeting, and improving the overall continuity of “us” as a resource to “them.”

Ongoing Content Collaboration and Measurement

Let’s think back to the flywheel model: marketing enables sales, sales provides feedback on the content that helped convert prospects, marketing makes tweaks, measures the performance again 30-60 days later, and repeats forever. This requires:

1. Measurement
2. Campaign Operations
3. Controlling Property 

Oh shit, measurement means data… new data means some operational changes… and we need these operational changes to have zero effect on the reps day to day, so it’s gotta be automated. We can do that!

You have to build the flywheel model internally—from a strategic, cultural, and operational standpoint—to see the payoffs and eliminate friction in your processes. Capturing this engagement data in the pipeline or CRM is a foundational requirement to effective content distribution. The most foundational but least sexy thing about sales is and will always be the CRM. Fundamentally, no nurture campaigns will ever be effective if your pipeline setup and database is messy or inaccurate.

Recommendations for Setup: 

1. To track the content pieces that engage leads, create a multipick data property on the contact that marketing will manage and update with each new piece of content. The options should all include abbreviated versions of the content’s title.
2. Write automation that every time corresponding content is read (we trip this by a CTA view at the bottom of the blog so we only capture those who read the full piece), that property has an appended value. 
3. Then when a deal is associated with the contact and there’s been a modification to the contact property, re-copy that property to the deal or opportunity. 
4. If the content was read just prior to the first meeting getting booked, the deal source on that deal will be Demand Gen, or signaled in another property illustrating the content’s contribution to the infancy of the opportunity. 
5. Build contact and deal reports to measure the impact of each content piece, the number of (or value of) opportunities for each content piece. If this sounds like Spanglish to you, email us. It’s easier to set that up than what it sounds like in written text. Or if you don't have someone you can pass this blog to on your team, you should probably be an AK Ops’ client.

Content Strategy: Key Takeaways for Marketing and Sales

Reminders for Marketers:

1. Marketing should own content creation and distribution.
2. Marketing needs to build out a Content Roadmap for the Pipeline —they own the flywheel collaboration.
3. Marketing owns all alignment:
   • Alignment of strategy (fields within the data).
   • Alignment of metrics (content is working or not).
   • Alignment of campaign placement (what content goes where).
4. Marketing should build up the account engagement outside of the buying team, especially in enterprise sales. Think multiple channels for all qualified opportunities.
   • Pull supporting members outside of the buying team from ZoomInfo when a rep converts the opportunity. Make this a weekly expectation of your marketing ops.
   • Retarget key titles at the company on LinkedIn with ungated demo videos, case studies, guidebooks, and webinars.

Reminders for Sales:

1. If you’re feeling unsure, remember: 
• These emails come from marketing senders, not your reps. The sender of these emails is never someone who would have a sales conversation. This is a good thing—it adds depth to your organization and establishes the company, rather than just you, as a resource to the partnership.
• These emails are HTML emails that never ask for a meeting.
• Aligning on content with marketing can only help your results.
2. People still buy from people. The power of the content is to serve your contacts, not sell to them. Use it as a tool to saturate key accounts and tee up at bats for your reps and improve conversions, ultimately allowing your reps to spend more time building relationships and establishing themselves as the solution partner to the right folks.

Operationalize Your Content Strategy with AK Operations

The strategy we’ve outlined above is the exact one we use to serve our clients. With this program, we see a 30% increase in new meetings booked because BDRs are enabled with demand generation and their target lists are prioritized by engagement. Plus, there’s a massive drop in ghosted deals! Building relevance is key to staying top of mind with your prospects and content is the most consultative way to do this. 

Contact us if you need help operationalizing this strategy within your organization!