Successful selling no longer follows the playbook that worked even just a few years ago. The rules have changed here, too, yet most organizations and the salespeople they employ haven’t made the transition.

Because of the wealth of information on the web, the salesperson no longer controls the relationship between buyer and seller. Now, buyers are in charge. They can see what your CEO is saying on Twitter and LinkedIn. They can check out independent blogs to learn what it’s really like to be a customer. Buyers actively go around salespeople, gathering information themselves and engaging a company representative only at the last possible moment. By then, they are armed with tons of information. In the old days, salespeople controlled the information. Now it’s the buyers who have the leverage.

It gets worse. As you probably know, salespeople have a bad reputation in the marketplace. Except for salespeople themselves, almost everyone I talk to associates sales with being hustled and taken advantage of. They think of dealing with a salesperson as a purely adversarial relationship. The very word sales summons sleazy connotations, so people get defensive immediately to protect themselves.

It’s Time for a Sales Transformation

After the first edition of this book was released in 2007, hundreds of people asked me to extend the ideas in this book to the area of sales. I frequently heard from people who had transformed their organizations’ marketing and public relations functions and are now ready to do the same with their sales departments. Like anyone following the new rules, I listened. Soon I began research on how the ideas in this book apply to sales. I found incredible examples of how content also influences sales, so I wrote a follow-on book to the one you’re reading. Originally released in 2014 and with a newly revised paperback edition in 2016, it’s titled The New Rules of Sales and Service: How to Use Agile Selling, Real-Time Customer Engagement, Big Data, Content, and Storytelling to Grow Your Business. This chapter explains the basics of how to apply the ideas from the Sales and Service book. If you work in a larger organization, you’ll learn how to work with your sales colleagues. If you’re an entrepreneur, business owner, or employee of a smaller organization, you’ll see how to integrate marketing and sales to grow your business.

Before we dig in, let’s take a moment to look at how these two disciplines differ. By making certain we understand the difference, we can then close the gap between marketing and sales and grow business faster.

Reaching many people: The job of marketers is to understand buyer personas and communicate with these groups in a one-to-many approach. That’s what most of this book is all about. Web content as a marketing asset captures the attention of a group of buyers and drives those people into and through the sales process. The content marketers create—blogs, YouTube videos, infographics, e-books, webinars, and the like—can influence large numbers of people. Done well, with a research-based understanding of buyer personas, this content generates sales leads.

Influencing one person at a time: The role of sales is completely different. The goal of a salesperson is to influence one buyer at a time, typically when the buyer is already close to making a purchase decision. While marketers need to be experts in persuading an audience of many, salespeople excel in persuading the individual buyer. They add context to the company’s expertise, products, and services. Through them, the marketers’ content fulfills its potential by connecting buyer to salesperson when the buyer is interested.

If, like me, you run a small business, you’re probably playing both roles—communicating to your wider marketplace and engaging with one interested buyer at a time.

In this chapter, we’re going to build on some of the ideas and concepts I’ve already introduced. In Chapter 3, we talked about reaching buyers directly with your organization’s online content, and Chapter 10 was where we put together a detailed plan to identify and target buyer personas with individualized approaches. But to extend these ideas to sales, we’re also going to talk about some new concepts, particularly how content influences individual buyers when they close in on a purchase decision.

Let’s start the chapter with some ideas for how you can build a website that walks buyers through the research process as they consider doing business with your organization and moves them toward the place where they are ready to buy (or donate, or join, or subscribe). Remember, that’s the goal of all web content! We’ll also spend some time discussing how you can work directly with the salespeople in your organization.

How Web Content Influences the Buying Process

As I’ve said many times in these pages, when people want to buy something, the web is almost always the first stop on their shopping trip. In any market category, potential customers head online to conduct research. The moment of truth is when they reach your site: Will you draw them into your sales process, or allow them to click away?

While many marketers now understand that content drives action, and quite a few have embraced the ideas in this book, the vast majority focus their content effort only at the very top of the sales consideration process. In other words, they create content to attract buyers but none to support the salespeople. That’s a big mistake!

When buyers arrive at your site, you have an opportunity to deliver targeted information at the precise moment when they are looking for what you have to offer. By providing information when they need it, you can begin a long and profitable relationship with them. Editors and publishers obsess over maintaining readership. So should you.

To best leverage the power of content, you first need to help your site’s visitors find what they need. When someone arrives for the first time, he or she receives a series of messages—whether you realize it or not. These messages are answering the questions that matter to the visitor.

• Does this organization care about me?
• Does it focus on the problems I face?
• Does it share my perspective or push its own on me?

You need to start with site navigation that is designed and organized with your buyers in mind. Don’t simply mimic the way your company or group is organized (e.g., by product, geography, or governmental structure), because the way your audience uses websites rarely coincides with your company’s internal priorities. Organizing based on your needs leaves site visitors confused about how to find what they really need.

You should learn as much as possible about your buyers’ process, focusing on issues such as how they find your site or how long they consider a purchase. Consider what happens offline in parallel with online interactions. The two should complement each other. For example, if you have an e-commerce site and a printed catalog, coordinate the content so that both efforts support and reinforce the buying process: Include URLs for your online buying guide in the catalog, and use the same product descriptions online, so people don’t get confused. In the business-to-business (B2B) world, trade shows should work together with Internet initiatives. For instance, you might collect email addresses at the booth and then send a follow-up email pointing to a show-specific landing page.

For most B2B products and services, as well as higher-priced consumer goods, your buyers will at some point need to reach out to engage with a representative of your company. In that moment, you’ve gone from marketing to your buyers as a group to selling to your buyer as an individual person. While this process may happen via email, the phone, social networking, or an in-person visit, content still plays a vital role in getting the buyer ready to buy. But you have to understand the process to help shape it.

Tips for Creating a Buyer-Centric Website

The online relationship begins the second a potential customer hits your homepage. The first thing he or she needs to find is a self-reflection. That’s why you must organize your site with content for each of your distinct buyer personas. How do your potential customers self-select? Is it based on their job function, on geography, or on the industry they work in? It’s important to create a set of appropriate links based on a clear understanding of your buyers, so you can quickly move them from your homepage to pages built specifically for them.

One way many organizations approach navigation is to link to landing pages based on the problems your product or service solves. Start by identifying the situations in which each target audience may find itself. If you are in the supply chain management business, you might have a drop-down menu on the homepage with links that say, “I need to get product to customers faster” or “I want to move products internationally.” Each path leads to landing pages built for buyer segments, with content targeted to their problems. Once buyers reach those pages, you have the opportunity to communicate your expertise in solving these problems—building some empathy in the process. Then you can move customers further along the buying cycle, handing them off to a salesperson when appropriate.

As you build a site that focuses on your buyers and their purchasing process, here are some tips to consider.

Step 1: Sales Begin with Informational Content

The most successful sites draw buyers directly into the sales cycle. To see how, we need to remember that people considering a purchase go through a fairly predictable thought process. In the case of something simple and low cost (say, a song download from iTunes), the process may take only seconds. But for a major decision such as buying a new car, sending a child to university, or accepting a job offer, the process may take weeks or months. For many B2B sales, the cycle may involve many steps and involvement from representatives of multiple buyer personas (a business buyer and an IT buyer, perhaps). The process may take months or even years to complete.

Effective web marketers take website visitors’ buying process into account when writing content and organizing it on the site. The early stages involve gathering basic information about their problems and learning how your organization solves them. Those further along in the process want to compare products and services, so they need detailed information about the benefits of your offerings. And when buyers are ready to whip out their credit cards, they need easy-to-use mechanisms linked directly from the content so they can quickly finish the purchase (or donation, or subscription, or the like).

For an example of a very long sales cycle, consider our university example from earlier chapters. High school students in the United States apply to university in the fall of their final year and typically make a decision in the spring about which school to attend. But having gone through the process with my daughter, I know the sales cycle starts much earlier. Students tend to visit universities in person when they are juniors in high school (third-year secondary school students). And when they first visit university websites, they are probably freshmen or sophomores (first- and second-year high school students). The university website is often the first place that a student comes into contact with the school, and the site must cater to an audience of young teenagers (and their parents) who won’t be ready to apply for two or three years. Creating appropriate content to develop a lasting relationship over a long sales cycle is possible only when an organization knows the buyer personas well and understands the sales process in detail. The university must provide high school students with appropriate content so they get a sense of what university life would be like if they were to attend and what the admission process entails.

Based on my years of research, the vast majority of sites are little more than online brochures, vast one-way advertising vehicles. These sites are almost wholly ineffective at shaping and supporting the buying process. To be successful, you must focus on your buyers and understand their buying process.

Step 2: A Friendly Nudge

After you’ve demonstrated expertise in the market category and knowledge about solving potential customers’ problems, you can introduce your product or service. When creating content about your offerings, remain focused on the buyer and the buyer’s problems, rather than elaborating on distinctions between products. As people interact with your content at this middle stage in the buying process, it is appropriate to suggest subscriptions to related content—perhaps an email newsletter, webinar (web-based seminar), or podcast. But remember, if you’re asking for someone’s email address (or other contact details), you must provide something valuable in return.

People want to poke, prod, and test your company to learn what sort of organization you are. They also have questions. That’s why well-designed sites include a mechanism for people to inquire about products or services. Be flexible but also consistent; offer them a variety of ways to interact with your company, and make contact information readily available from any page on the site (one click away is best). Also keep in mind that, particularly with expensive products, buyers will test you to see how responsive you are, so you must make responding to these inquiries a priority. Do you respond to email requests in real time? At this stage, you want people to think: “This is an organization I can do business with. They have happy customers, and they are responsive to me and my needs.”

As the customer approaches the end of the buying process, you must provide tools that facilitate the decision. Buyers may be unsure which of your products is appropriate for them, so you may need to provide online demonstrations or a tool that allows them to enter specific details about their requirements and then suggests the appropriate product.

Step 3: Closing the Deal

If your product or service is an e-commerce offering, you will need to make it very easy for people to make a purchase when they are ready. Have a “buy now” button on all of the pages at the end of the sales cycle and make sure that the e-commerce engine makes it simple for people to make selections.

For products and services that require interaction with a salesperson, this is the point where you need to have multiple ways for buyers to express interest. You might include a simple “contact us” and “have a salesperson call me” link. But you might also include a way that buyers can preconfigure their order so the salesperson has a great deal of information before the sales call. Auto dealers often have an online tool for buyers to express interest in the make and model of car plus desired features, which serves as a way to show the salesperson that the buyer is ready.

You must respond quickly to any inquiry! When a buyer submits a form, you should respond within minutes. Don’t wait until after lunch or the next day.

Now that we’ve walked through the sales cycle in its totality, and seen how content is vital not just at the beginning but throughout the process, let’s look at a few examples of content in action to drive sales.

Triathlon Coach Delivers Content for All Ability Levels

Rebekah Keat enjoyed tremendous success as a professional triathlete. She raced at the elite level for 15 years and is a two-time Junior World Champion, three-time Australian Ironman Distance Champion, and six-time Iron Distance Champion. When a 2016 injury forced her to retire and dried up her sponsorship revenue and prize money, she decided to become a Triathlon coach. She started with just four clients, but that wasn’t nearly enough to pay her bills.

Soon after, Keat founded Team Sirius Tri Club to conduct virtual coaching services and began to create content to attract people interested in her sport. Specifically, Keat realized that most other Triathlon clubs focused on elite-level athletes, ignoring the many beginner and weekend warrior triathletes who need basic information. This was an ideal opportunity for Keat to create content, deliver it via social media, and reach the beginner triathlete buyer persona.

Keat worked hard to create a profile for the beginner triathlete. She used that as her guide. For example, her research showed that people new to triathlon had very basic questions about the sport, training, and gear but were often embarrassed to ask. So she started creating content about how to sight in open water so you can swim straight, or how to mount your bike quickly in race conditions.

“I always want my content to add value,” Keat says. “I’m not asking people to join my club. Instead I’m just giving away content, and some of them will become interested. Every day I make sure to post at least two times to social media, and it’s always adding value, something about training or a workout.”

Keat’s Team Sirius Tri Club Facebook page has 50,000 likes, her @rebekahkeat Twitter account, over 10,000 followers, and she hosts a members-only group on Facebook. She also shares personal information and snapshots, including her passion for rescuing horses and the beautiful location in Boulder, Colorado, where she trains elite triathletes. This glimpse into Keat’s personal life helps people understand more about her and what it might be like to work with her as a coach. (Most people separate business and personal on social media, and I think that’s a mistake. A fun aspect of social media is getting to know a bit about the personal lives of those we do business with. You will read more about this idea when I introduce Dr. Jon Marashi in Chapter 23.)

When Keat conducts in-person coaching, she always films the session. “I have a library of thousands of videos now, and I release those on my social channels,” she says. “I’ve learned that a specific workout tends to get much more interest than when I just post a tip. I put [the workouts] out on Twitter or Instagram, and people really like them and learn about me that way.”

Once people follow a link to the Team Sirius Tri Club website, they can sign up for a free email newsletter. Keat’s email list now includes over 5,000 triathletes and fans. “You have to build a relationship with people first,” she says. “Build a following and develop a rapport with your audience, and then you can offer something.”

The three club membership levels Keat offers include the Tri Club at $37 per month (a virtual place to interact with Keat and other athletes), Gold level at $199 per month (which includes a personal training plan), and Platinum level at $300 and up per month (which includes personal feedback and customized coaching).

The approach of targeting a specific buyer persona has led to Team Sirius Tri Club growing from those original four clients to 250 members in just three years. The club is now ranked as the #2 Tri Club in the United States, the #5 Tri Club overall, and the #1 female-coached Tri Club out of over 2,000 clubs worldwide. Keat’s strategy of using content creation to drive membership is just as responsible for this growth as are her athletic prowess and coaching skill.

The focus on all levels of triathletes has been especially important for driving Keat’s business. One club member commented, “Being a rookie to the sport of triathlon I was nervous to join any club, let alone Team Sirius. I had never competed in a single race in my life and the team made me feel like I was a world champion.”

Salespeople as Content Curators

When a salesperson is engaged with a potential customer, it’s a great time to deliver content and a perfect reason for a salesperson to send an email. A YouTube video, blog post, e-book, or whatever can be precisely what a buyer needs. It’s so much more friendly to send a buyer a link to appropriate content than to do the typical “Are you ready to buy now?” email. A focus on understanding the buying process and developing appropriate content that links visitors through the cycle to the point of purchase is essential. And the salespeople, who manage one deal at a time, are the perfect ambassadors to share the content.

Recently I was researching bamboo flooring. It’s time to update some of the floors in our home, and I was considering bamboo. When I started my research, I knew absolutely nothing about it. So I began my journey on Google by searching on the phrase “bamboo floors” and checking out the first few pages of results.

There were a number of websites that helped me, but the one I found to be the most valuable was BuildDirect’s. The site has excellent product pages for the company’s bamboo flooring, and they offer free samples.

The BuildDirect Learning Center⁵ offered valuable text-based information: “The Durability of Bamboo Flooring” and “The Sustainability of Bamboo Flooring.” The site’s YouTube channel included the video “How Hard Is Bamboo Flooring?,” which features BuildDirect co-founder Rob Banks. It has been viewed more than 60,000 times.

There were many more videos and reports that I didn’t check out. In other words, BuildDirect has a lot of content to share! That’s great. All this excellent information led me to request five free samples from BuildDirect. I also ordered samples from two other suppliers.

For many companies, this is the place where marketing’s job has finished and sales’ job has just begun. But a much better approach is for sales and marketing to work together to provide ideal content to buyers as they continue their journey through the buying process.

After I placed my free sample order with BuildDirect, I received an email confirmation that looked like a basic order form: just the facts. This was a missed opportunity. BuildDirect could have pointed me to some content designed to help at this stage: “How to Evaluate Your Bamboo Floor Samples,” or something like that.

The BuildDirect samples arrived very quickly, and I enjoyed imagining my floors with each of the options. Interestingly, the samples I ordered from the other bamboo flooring suppliers never appeared. A few days after the BuildDirect samples arrived, I got a nice follow-up email from my salesperson at BuildDirect. It was to confirm that the samples had arrived and to offer to answer any questions I had. This was standard sales stuff handled well. But again, there was a missed opportunity to share content that people in my stage of the process might be interested in. Imagine the power of an extra paragraph like this: “By now you’ve likely compared the samples we sent. At this stage, many of my customers want to learn about installing bamboo flooring, so I am attaching a report that might interest you: ‘How to Install a Bamboo Floor.’ And here’s a link to a video made by our co-founder that explains how bamboo flooring is graded.”

BuildDirect had excellent online content, and I liked the samples. But I could have used some nudging to get me to the point where I’d be ready to pull out my credit card. In the end, I purchased my flooring from another supplier.

Your Company’s Salesperson-in-Chief

Speaking of salespeople, the person at the top of your organization—your CEO or equivalent—should be your best salesperson. When I speak with CEOs about generating attention for their businesses through real-time marketing and sales, most ask me how to staff for success in their companies. Very few ask the right question: How do they become a social CEO and support the sales cycle?

Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and Arianna Huffington all have something in common. Not only are they CEOs of large organizations, but they are also top executives on social media. In fact, they have a combined 42 million Twitter followers. I have had the social CEO discussion with leaders of smaller organizations. When the best ones do it right, they engage directly with customers whenever possible. And that connection helps drive business.

Another connected CEO is Gerard Vroomen of Open Cycle, whom we met in Chapter 2. Vroomen blogs and tweets and answers emails from interested people, and he has quickly built several businesses based on his open philosophy. Larry Janesky is an inventor with 29 patents and the founder and CEO of Basement Systems and its sister companies. He runs a successful-in-every-way enterprise that is number one in the dry basement industry, with 345 dealers in six countries. But that doesn’t keep Janesky from writing a short “Think Daily” blog post for his customers and friends every single day.

An important consideration for the CEO is his or her corporate bio page. That’s the place to showcase the content the CEO generates. You can post things like a YouTube video of a recent speech, links to his or her social feeds, and important posts from the CEO blog.

As people consider doing business with your company, they’re also evaluating your executive team, especially the CEO. By showing that she is engaged, you help push people along the buying process. Don’t let her be reduced to a boring resume of the dusty old degrees she earned decades ago.

For example, when people go to the bio page of HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan, they find valuable information that Brian has generated. How valuable? HubSpot marketers learned that 20 percent of new HubSpot customers in the past three years viewed Brian’s bio page on the company website. This is clear evidence that the CEO’s bio page is an important aspect in many buyers’ journeys, as they evaluate the company and its management. Because HubSpot measures for this phenomenon, the company understands that Brian’s bio page is important content to help to drive HubSpot’s growth. Your CEO is an important part of your content effort and helps to drive sales—just by being visible and active online.

Educating Your Salespeople about the New Buying Process

Back in the 1990s, there was little love lost between marketing and sales. At many companies, the relationship was downright adversarial. The tension often extended all the way up to senior management. It stemmed from the sales process involving a handoff. Marketing generated leads and then handed them over to sales. Then the sales team owned them until close.

Like a marriage gone bad, the dialogue circa 1995 was an endless tape loop:

Sales said, “Get us some good leads! These leads stink! Our people can’t sell.”

Marketing responded, “You’ve got good leads! Your people just stink at closing!”

I’ve been in the middle of these discussions at several companies. They are so 20 years ago. And if you’ve made it this far in the chapter, you understand why.

Marketers and salespeople alike need to understand that we’re all in this together. We are no longer in a world where marketing hands off to sales. Marketing needs to create content for each step in the process. And salespeople, if they are active in social media, can drive people into the beginning of the sales process just like marketers can.

As a marketer, it is important that you make sure the sales and management teams understand this point—“sales leads” are no longer the primary metric of success. Explain that registration requirements just don’t work in an environment where Google delivers the best content. Free content is what drives action today. And the most successful companies are those where salespeople and marketers work together to move people through the sales process.

You want your buyers to consume your content, not be forced to register for it! It’s important to measure total exposure to your ideas (e-book downloads, blog post views, and so on) rather than the number of people willing to hand over their private information. But you’ll need to make sure that the others in your organization, especially the salespeople, understand this new approach.

Registration or Not? Data from an E-Book Offer

I’ve looked into the differences in download frequency for content such as e-books when they are made completely free versus when they require registration. My research suggests that you will generate between 10 and 50 times more downloads when you do not require registration. That’s right—based on data from companies that have tested offers with and without registration, it’s a good guess that if you’re getting 100 downloads per month with registration, you might get as many as 5,000 downloads per month without registration.

Think about your own behavior for a moment. When you’re interested in a free white paper, do you eagerly give up your email address to get it? Or are you reluctant, and do you sometimes refuse? Now if the paper were completely free, how would you feel? And what’s even more interesting, ask yourself if you’d be willing to share a link to the white paper with your followers on Twitter or with your friends and colleagues via email if there were no registration. You’d be much more willing to share, right? Because you’d have nothing to lose. But if there were a registration requirement, would you share the link? The vast majority of people tell me they wouldn’t, because they fear that their contacts might get put on a sales list and then receive unwanted emails and phone calls. This is exactly why free e-books with no registration have so many more inbound links and much higher search engine rankings.

I’m always interested in new metrics that help inform this debate. John Mancini, president of the nonprofit Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), agreed to share his experience. AIIM represents the users and suppliers of document, content, and record management technologies and publishes content on this subject as part of its marketing program.

Mancini released the organization’s first e-book, 8 Reasons You Need a Strategy for Managing Information—Before It’s Too Late,⁶ as a totally free download, with no registration required. In just the first month, the e-book was downloaded 5,138 times. AIIM also created a presentation version of the book and posted it, also with no registration requirement, on SlideShare. This version had 3,353 downloads. That makes for a total of 8,491 downloads that month.

“Making the e-book available for free and totally without registration was a new approach for us,” Mancini says. “These results for unfettered access are particularly impressive when considered against a couple of more traditional examples (i.e., content requiring a registration on our website).”

As a case in point, Mancini compares the e-book to one of his organization’s most popular pieces of content, AIIM Industry Watch research papers. “We require registration for these papers because they are also used as a lead generation program for the sponsors,” he says. “During roughly the same period as the e-book, there were [only] 513 actual downloads. I am convinced that open access is best for content like my e-books.”

Although it’s impossible to know for sure, since we’re comparing two different pieces of content, AIIM’s data suggest that there is a significant advantage in not requiring registration. Specifically, unlocking content at AIIM seems to have meant more than a 16-fold increase in the number of downloads. Mancini is convinced that the more forward-looking of AIIM’s sponsors will start to realize that the future lies in creating as much visibility as possible for their content—rather than viewing this marketing problem solely through the prism of name acquisition and lead generation.

Still not convinced about the power of free? Starting to be, but wanting to hedge your bets? When asked about this debate in my live presentations, I also offer a third option, which is a hybrid. I suggest the first offer be totally free, such as a totally free e-book with no registration requirement. Then, within the e-book, I suggest including a secondary offer that requires a registration that you can use to capture leads. This secondary offer might be access to a webinar or similar premium content. This way, you can spread your ideas yet still collect contact information.

Close the Sale—Continue the Conversation

I talked previously about three steps in the sales process. But there really are four. Once the deal is closed, you must continue the online dialogue with your new customer. Add her to your customer email newsletter or customer-only community site, where she can interact with experts in your organization and other like-minded customers. You should also provide ample opportunities for her to give you feedback on how to make the products (and sales process) better.

The manner in which salespeople engage potential new customers when trying to win new business is often light-years removed from how these same customers are treated by the company only months later.

Focusing a great deal of attention on the buying process and then relegating buyers to poor postsale service means customers are far more likely to leave. This can lead to a churn cycle in which companies add more sales resources to replace the customers who abandoned them, and around and around it goes.

You keep customers happy not by doing something different from how you won them in the first place but by doing exactly the same things that won them in the first place. Shifting strategy doesn’t work.

Measure and Improve

There’s one more point for you to consider as you attend to every stage of the sales process: Effective marketers constantly measure and improve.

Because it is so easy to modify web content at any time, you should be measuring what people are doing on your site. Benchmarking elements such as the self-select links and testing different landing page content can help. If you have two offers on a landing page (a free white paper and a free demonstration, say), you might measure which one works to get more clicks but also measure how many people who responded to each offer actually bought something. This way you will know not just numbers of clicks, but revenue by offer type, and you can use that in future landing page decisions. Armed with real data, you make valuable modifications. You might want to see what happens if you change the order of the links on the homepage. Sometimes people just click the thing at the top of a list. What happens if something else is at the top? Don’t be afraid to experiment—as long as you’re committed to acting on what you learn.

Let’s close this chapter by meeting someone who has put all the ideas of this chapter to work: built an online content strategy, measured the results, and achieved impressive business growth.

How a Content Strategy Grew Business by 50 Percent in One Year

Sales Benchmark Index⁷ is a professional services firm focused exclusively on B2B sales force effectiveness. Before making the switch to a content marketing strategy, the company used classic old-rules marketing to try to reach customers. “We hired telemarketing firms to cold call,” says CEO Greg Alexander. “We did batch and blast email. We did interruption-based marketing tactics of all kinds, and for a period of time, that approach met our needs. And our needs are really well defined: We know how many inquiries we need to generate all the way through to paying customers. Then the effectiveness of the outbound channels just stopped. It was like somebody slammed the doors shut.”

Alexander thinks that his interruption-based strategies stopped working because his target audience was incredibly busy. “I wasn’t competing against other companies,” he says. “I was competing for buyers’ attention.” Alexander did a great deal of research on how his buyer personas solve problems, and that was the starting point for his efforts to reach buyers with online content.

“When our target customer, the head of sales or the head of marketing in a B2B organization, has a problem or needs in their business, the very first thing they do—and we’ve done a lot of research to support this—is start searching the web and reading and educating themselves,” Alexander says. “They typically don’t want to engage with a service provider, us or anybody else for that matter, for a long time. Through education on the web, they develop a crisp, well-articulated problem statement. Then they reach out to a small number of people to ask for their assistance in how they might approach solving that problem. It’s similar to the way somebody would hire a law firm or a strategy consulting firm or an advertising agency.”

Once Alexander and his team understood how their buyers solved problems, the next step was to develop buyer persona profiles. “We wanted to understand the key business objectives of each target audience,” Alexander says. “What was standing in the way of them accomplishing those objectives? What were the things that were important to them when they made a decision to hire a service provider? How were they measured? What would the definition of success be? Once we understood that, we mapped the buying process for each persona. We identified when information requests were happening in the buying process, for example, and what those information requests were.”

Alexander quickly realized that he had to develop a large number of new content channels, but outside firms couldn’t provide writers, editors, and designers who understood well enough what his firm actually does. So he chose to create what he calls an “internal content marketing agency” using his company’s smart subject matter experts. To do so, they needed to create an infrastructure to channel their expertise into the creation of blog posts, videos, and longer-form content like e-books.

Alexander’s “internal agency” includes three staff members: a full-time editor, who manages an editorial calendar, production schedule, and set of media channels; a search engine optimization (SEO) expert, who increases the likelihood of the content getting found in search; and a copywriter, who works with subject matter experts inside the firm.

“But the actual writers, the contributors of all the content, are the subject matter experts in our company who are working with our clients,” Alexander says.

Interestingly, the subject matter experts at Sales Benchmark Index are organized by buyer persona. I always recommend this buyer-centric approach, yet most companies focus on the product lines they offer rather than the personas they sell to. “It was a difficult transition for us,” Alexander admits. “We used to be service offering focused. I had to break that. It was a painful transition, and it took us some time to get there.”

Another of Alexander’s smart strategies that comes straight out of this book is that he named his buyer personas. At Sales Benchmark Index there are nine of them, and there are two people from the firm assigned to work with each persona and to create content for them. “For example, we have a persona called ‘Big Company Mark,’” Alexander says. “Big Company Mark is the chief marketing officer or the VP of marketing. We have two individuals in our firm who have been serving the chief marketing officer in the B2B environment for many years, even prior to joining our company. They were the ones who actually constructed the buyer persona, so they understand what their needs and challenges are.”

When it came time to start writing, the team started with a blog. They worked with HubSpot to deploy the HubSpot marketing platform⁸ for hosting the content. “It started slowly,” Alexander says. “Our early blog posts probably weren’t our proudest moments. But then we started to build interest and get subscribers. Soon everybody in the company saw the success and wanted to participate, so we began posting to our blog every day.”

The team at Sales Benchmark Index also creates long-form content, including a recent e-book targeted to newly promoted VPs of sales. “It was a heavy lift for us to put it together,” Alexander says. “But it has created over 4,000 leads for us so far this year.”

Alexander knows from his buyer persona research that 75 percent of his potential U.S. clients are on a calendar-based planning cycle. “July through October is when they go through their annual operating plan,” he says. This is the time when buyers are most receptive to Sales Benchmark Index services and when the majority of sales take place. “They are trying to figure out things like ‘How many salespeople do I need?’ ‘How should I place the territories?’ ‘What should the quotas be?’ ‘How should I pay them?’ A lot of their research is centered around those issues, and we can help them with that.”

Because most of Alexander’s sales happen from July through October, he has a calendar-based approach to content creation. “From November through June, the approach is to give away lots and lots of intellectual property to build up the subscriber base,” Alexander says. “We believe that permission to have a conversation with buyers is a valuable asset. Within the blog, we will write about a problem. We’ll offer up a tool that we used with one of our clients to solve that specific problem. All we ask is that they click on the link. We put it behind a form, and then they get the tool for free. During this quiet period, we don’t bombard them with follow-up marketing activity.” This is classic “step 1” stuff.

Alexander’s team shifts focus during the selling season, when buyers have a greater need for information because they are planning next year’s budgets. “During that time period, we shift the focus of the blog to having subscribers participate in our annual research tour, which we call ‘Make the Number: How Your Peers Plan on Allocating People, Money and Time for the Upcoming Year.’”

“Make the Number” gives potential clients access to a personal review of benchmarking data and research. “This is an onsite seminar,” Alexander says. “If you want access to all these tools, and you’ve been a subscriber of ours for months and sometimes years, one of our experts will come and give you a presentation for 90 minutes on a set of best practices heading into the New Year.” This is “step 2” content, nudging potential buyers toward the Sales Benchmark Index products.

Alexander has had tremendous success with the calendar-based approach to content creation. “In prior years, we might do between 50 and 100 visits during the July to October period,” he says. “But this year, we’ll have done over 220 of them. We know that about half of those sites eventually, inside of six quarters, become clients of ours. When people prepare to buy a professional service like ours, the product is intangible. So we use the ‘Make the Number’ meetings to turn what we do into a tangible. It makes it easier for the buyer to buy.”

Alexander’s team measures every aspect of his content efforts. After all, this is a company that helps sales and marketing executives be more effective through measurement! In fact, they measure down to the blog-post level. “We grade posts based on things like how closely each is related to the problems of our buyer personas,” he says. “We count the number of words in sentences, targeting between six and 14 words per sentence. And we grade the effectiveness of the title. Then there are the hard metrics like the number of comments, social shares, links generated, and view counts.”

Alexander also analyzes what he calls “branded versus nonbranded keywords” to understand how many people come to the blog on a monthly basis for each. He tallies a branded keyword hit when somebody arrives at the blog via a term like “sales benchmark index” (which means that person entered the company name into a search engine). A nonbranded word is subject-specific but not company-specific, like “sales territory design.”

HubSpot’s analytics tools are important in Alexander’s efforts. “We’re looking at the number of incoming links, and we use the HubSpot Link Grader Search Engine Optimization Tool. This year we’ve generated 579 new domains linking to us, with 27,780 individual links coming from those domains. The thing that I’m probably the happiest about is that the quality of the links has gone up. HubSpot graded the links earlier in the year at 47 on a scale of 0 to 100. Now the average link rating is 82.”

The ultimate measure of success for a business is revenue growth, and the strategies Alexander has implemented have contributed greatly to his company’s success. “We’re up a little over 50 percent this year,” he told me. “That’s our revenue number and our head count, which in professional services is a key metric. I can directly attribute much of that gain to content marketing. This is a mental shift to realize that you’re really in the publishing business. If you embrace publishing, then the transformation will happen.”

Yes, product superiority, advertising, the media, and branding remain important to the marketing mix. But on the web, smart marketers like Greg Alexander understand that an effective content strategy, tightly integrated to the buying process, is critical to success.