Hidden Gems In Your Content Marketing Calendar

Fortify Your Marketing Calendar To Play Two Valuable Roles

• New Content Keeps Existing Followers Interested
• Drip Market Older Content To New Followers

Do you typically plan the release of new content without considering new followers who join your community after this content is published?  Schedule your marketing calendar to get new followers caught up in a reasonable amount of time.  "Drip market" older relevant content in bite size chunks.

Here's an example marketing calendar that schedules a weekly educational tip and blog post; a monthly press release and success story; and a quarterly newsletter:

Weekly Educational Tip

• Every Tuesday
• Repeat 4 weeks later to new followers

Weekly Blog Post

• Every Thursday
• Blogs reference past posts, so no need to republish them

Monthly Press Release

• First Wednesday of the month
• Repeat 4 weeks later to new followers

Monthly Success Story

• First Friday of the month
• Repeat 4 weeks later to new followers

Quarterly Newsletter

• First Monday of the quarter to existing followers
• First Monday of each month to new followers

Your website and social media outlets should have archive links to all historical content for followers who want to proactively search your libraries.
 
Refresh your content annually and try delivering it via different channels such as video.

When you run lead generation campaigns, avoid information overload on a given day by using the Monday, Wednesday and Friday open slots in your marketing calendar for these communications.

By John Bernardi

Create Easy Paths For Risk Averse Sales Reps

Top tier sales reps continually stretch their comfort zones.  They gain confidence by enhancing their professional and technical skills.  They focus on expanding their horizontal and vertical contacts within their accounts.  They smartly approach new prospects in unfamiliar industries and territories. They represent their entire product line and are always searching for new applications. They create and tell Success Stories that prove how customers enjoy significant results by overcoming challenges through the solutions they provide. 

Mid-tier reps risk daily disappointment from their status quo strategy.  Instead, they should expand their comfort zones to smoothly navigate an uncontrollable sea of customers, competition, economy and their own companies.

An integrated sales and marketing leadership team can make it emotionally easier for these safety seekers by cuing them into areas where top performers have blazed a path for them.  They can tailor these ideas to their own style, which enables originality and authenticity.

At a minimum, mid-tier reps should retell success stories of top performers as they develop confidence and skills to develop their own.  This content will expand their horizons and they will find it less risky to look for similar opportunities and apply similar solutions because others have blazed the path for them.

Build a portfolio of online press releases and success stories fit for the moment.  Make this part of ongoing sales training and an agenda item during all sales meetings.  Online Press Releases reveal why a customer or partner has selected your company.  Success Stories prove that you delivered on your promise. Video Testimonials make the story real.  

Teach New Customers How To Benefit From Your Relationship

 Manage Expectations With A New Customer Welcome Package

An excellent way to begin each new business relationship

• Welcome letter from a company officer reinforces the sales proposal's promise
• Contact information - customer, company, channel partners
• Date for kick-off meeting to review timelines, responsibilities, potential pitfalls and status meeting schedule
• Warranties and how to request maintenance services
• Invoice and A/R process
• How to request a proposal for future services
• How to place a purchase order

An Important Synergy - Your Employees Will Benefit

If you teach new customers how to do business with your company, your people will be more efficient and better able to leverage their competencies for serving customers and finding new ones. They will be more effective in creating logical next step opportunities with each customer. They will help your company to learn from customer feedback. They will introduce referrals early in the relationship.

A totally satisfied customer will strengthen the company’s portfolio of success stories. So, start the relationship on a positive note.

Marketing-Assisted-Selling For B2B Companies

Apply Marketing Assisted Selling To Boost Your Sales Process To The Next Level

To me, a B2B sales professional is a high value company asset who leads and executes a tailored selling process while also being an adept marketer and customer experience expert.  Their primary accountability includes:

1. Closing profitable sales opportunities
2. Managing a healthy sales funnel enables continuous goal attainment
3. Creating golden spike sales opportunities
4. Converting customers to clients
5. Facilitating company-to-company and peer-to-peer relationships
6. Feedback to company leaders contributes to effective decision making

Marketing Assisted Selling Enables Optimal ROI From Your Sales Assets

1. Help customers determine if they have a problem worth solving.
2. Success stories about challenges, solutions and results are a wonderful resource for situations where risk reduction is more important than price reduction.
3. Pricing tools show the value of each trade-off during negotiations.
4. Complementary vendors who have relationships with people that can benefit from your company's solutions are a great lead source.  These relationships enable "whole product" solutions.
5. Self-service content and assessments for each stage of the buying process must be intuitive for general awareness and more in-depth for educated buyers.
6. The field marketing (FM) process is involved in each stage of the buying cycle:

• Awareness Stage: approach suspects to gain permission to send relevant, timely and expected information.  For each account that appears in the CRM database, FM reps search for additional contacts where cross-selling makes sense.  FM reps schedule sales interviews for sales reps and are a consistent backup when sales reps are unavailable.

• Pre-Purchase Stage: Nurture early stage leads. FM reps assign sales ready leads and work with sales reps to ensure that leads are reviewed and acted upon in a timely manner.  FM Associates stay in touch by distributing relevant articles, company information and videos and conducting theme webinars.
• Purchase Stage: FM reps assist in presentations, proposals, site visits, etc.
• Post-Purchase Stage: Sales reps and FM reps co-author programs to retain, cross-sell and up-sell second-tier customers (STCs) and develop STCs into key accounts. A welcome package for new customers teaches them how to do business with your company and creates a positive first impression.