In too many offices, sales and marketing teams are seated nowhere near each other. In addition, the PR department, even if it reports to marketing, may be located far from sales.
On the surface, this makes sense: PR is the top-of-the-top of the funnel, promoting brand awareness or thought leadership. Sales teams deal with those who already have indicated interest in purchasing from you, and are therefore positioned firmly toward the bottom of the funnel.
As we know, however, the chasm between PR efforts and sales initiatives is outdated. In fact, by viewing their job as a part of the sales engine, PR pros can equip sales reps with valuable content that will accelerate sales. PR-provided content also can provide salespeople with the knowledge they need for important selling conversations. In addition, having this material will boost the confidence of salespeople, allowing them to feel secure during any interaction with buyers.
Here’s how:
1) Media coverage and analyst reports shouldn’t just be used for awareness.
Research firm SiriusDecisions analyzed which pieces of content had the greatest influence in the B2B buying decision phase. It looked at basically every type of content produced by a marketing team, many of which are considered traditional sales enablement content, such as white papers and brochures.
Here are the top five pieces of content in order of their importance in the B2B buying decision phase:
1) Analyst reports
2) Articles/publications
3) Blog posts
4) Case studies
5) E-books
Notice anything interesting? Public relations efforts produce the top two most impactful pieces of content for helping progress sales. These types of content, pulled together by reputable third parties, are the exact type of validation sales teams need to back the claims they make in interactions with buyers.
One of the first things PR teams need to do if they want to have their influence felt on the bottom line is get those dynamite pieces of media coverage and positive analyst reports into the hands of the sales team.
Delivery Methods
One way to do so is the tried-and-true email method. For each piece of coverage or analyst report, send an email to your sales team, providing guidance on which buyers to share it with and why. For example, “This should be shared with prospects in the medical device industry, because it clearly conveys the misalignment between field sales and marketing teams which our product helps solve.”
Along with the above provide specific tweets that the sales staff can quickly copy and paste into its Twitter account.
Also, by placing all such coverage on your company’s LinkedIn profile, you can make it easy for sales reps to find and share the content they need on the platform they use most often for prospecting.
2) PR pros study and scan the news every day. Share the information you learn with sales.
Many PR pros at brands and agencies scan the news several times daily for brand and competitor coverage and industry trends. One practice is to send a daily report to the company’s leadership team and/or clients. A beneficial practice, no doubt, but one that is only scratching the surface of its effectiveness and value.
Considering only 23% of executive buyers say they encounter salespeople they consider to be knowledgeable about their business and industry, this information also needs to be communicated to sales as soon as possible so that members of its team are aware of the changing tides of industry and news before they enter conversations with buyers.
Second, industry articles help sales reps convey their position as experts in their field. Sales reps at my company consistently share articles I have shared with them from our daily news report on their LinkedIn and Twitter profiles. In addition they often send relevant articles to sales prospects. This helps raise their profile as a valuable resource for buyers and gives them further reason to engage with prospects.
Getting started with an industry news snapshot for your sales team is easy. Every morning, pull links into an email to competitor/major partner announcements for their intelligence, along with links to industry trend pieces and provide a quick one-to-two-sentence summary of the article/press release for easy consumption.
Again, chances are you already are collecting important articles on a daily basis. Now, take the next step and begin sharing it in a format that can be quickly consumed and understood by the sales team.
3) PR is the company confidence generator. Make sure sales thrives on that confidence.
Award submissions are a major part of any PR initiative. But while a high-profile product award or landing on a Fastest-Growing Company list helps attract potential customers, these hard-won honors should also serve another purpose: adding confidence to the sales team.
Sales is a confidence game. Any seasoned sales veteran will tell you that there is a strong correlation between a rep’s confidence in the messaging, product and company he or she represents and the deals he or she is going to close. Getting market recognition in the form of a prestigious honor for the company, a product or service can be a huge confidence booster.
The Rewards of Awards
Product and executive awards and best-of lists provide additional evidence that the company the salesperson works for is exceptional. It also is additional assurance that he or she is going into meetings as a conduit of something truly valuable for the prospective buyer.
Like great coverage, awards and everything that comes with them (award logos, press releases, landing pages, etc.) need to be front and center on the sales floor the moment they are secured. As a communicator make it your mission to ensure that news of awards is spread far beyond the trophy case in the front lobby. As we said earlier, information about awards can be sent to the sales team via email, LinkedIn or Twitter.
In addition it is critical to take into consideration where your sales team lives before you decide which platform is the best one to convey this information.
Conclusion
These are only three examples of how PR teams can start better enabling their sales colleagues with the content, knowledge and confidence required to do their jobs and attain their highest potential as salespeople.
And in case you are wondering, yes, our marketing team at Seismic is seated within ten feet of our inside communication and enterprise sales teams. Their proximity allows us to have ongoing conversations about what is working and what type of press coverage they need more of, which helps me to direct my own PR efforts to best serve them. This aligns with how we view marketing in general at Seismic, as a revenue-generating team whose main goal is to boost sales.
Seismic recently published research (see chart above) that found the top objectives for content marketing were: 1) Generate leads; 2) Support the sales team; and 3) Establish thought leadership. When brought to its full potential, great PR results in content that meets all of these objectives. But to reach that full potential, PR pros who are serious about their role in helping their company’s bottom line need to change a fundamental viewpoint of their job’s value: You are not just on the payroll to raise brand awareness; you are on the payroll to create some of the most valuable content, which will help sell your company’s products or services.
CONTACT: [email protected]