Getting better leads and getting better leads faster has always been part of sales strategy. It is easy to predict that it will always be part of sales strategy anyway the internet and communications change through the years.
The core of sales is getting the best leads, with the highest opportunity for a close. We have all heard it said to get the
The Right Message to
The Right Person at
The Right Time in
The Right Channel
Content for sales and digital relationship building are key activity pillars to maximize your companies brand, reach and ultimately filling up your funnel with the best quality leads. This is where are ContentHubs serve customers well.
LinkedIn promotes their Social Selling Index as a tool to help sales leader gain insights into their team members online influence. Well, at least influence within LinkedIn. The theory around the SSI is sound. The more active you are in LInkedIn, the more influence you have with your online community. They use the SSI as a key indicator to help motivate team members to share more content, engage with more content and build online relationships. That is why we prefer the term digital relationship building to social selling.
LinkedIn is an established social network for business. But, if you want to Reveal Your Hidden Funnel, then we need to share content with the goal of leading readers to personal ContentHubs and seeing sellers as trusted advisors. In order for a seller to be seen as a trusted advisor, they need to provide trusted advice. Sales organizations can provide brand content and curated industry content at scale through ContentHubs for their team members.
Here are 5 Key Reasons ContentHubs are the most powerful tool for revealing your hidden funnel and amplify your lead generation and sales conversions.
1. Personal Brand Building. Buyers want to connect with value adding sellers. The key here is value adding. In a 2018 CSO Insights Report, they found that 90% of buyers wanted to engage early in their buying journey with sellers who added value and helped them solve their business challenges. Buyers are not anti-sellers. They are just anti-sellers who don’t add value to their journey.
In 2018, a group of sales enablement leaders from SAP shared their internal results on digital relationship building activities at the Sales Enablement Society Conference. They found sellers who actively used digital relationship building strategies and providing trusted advice via social posts and content sharing were 90% more likely to hit or exceed quotas.
More impressive is that these sellers had 300% larger deal sizes than their counterparts who did not use these methods. When sellers build a personal brand through active content sharing and giving industry insights and solutions, they simply win bigger deals and more of them.
2. Motivation to Share Brand Content. Marketers often have the challenge of motivating the team to share brand content. They shout “please share it” to the team via Slack messages, email and even text messages. But, often our contacts tell us they get between a 1-3% response rate from their team. And, that is not consistently the same people sharing posts. It is a different set of 1-3% sharers with every post.
Why do you suppose this happens? There is really nothing advantageous to sellers to share content that leads to the company website. When a team uses ContentHubs for sales, they are immediately motivated to share content with their personal network because it helps build their brand and leads readers to their Hub. Plus, this entire process helps maximize the companies SEO and Google Analytics through the Canonical tagging feature. For marketers it is like putting gasoline on their domain authority efforts.
3. Identify Your Visitor and Content Engagers. With FunnelAmplified’s cookie-less approach to identify ContentHub visitors, sellers get immediate insights into who is engaging with their content. Sales reps have large LinkedIn networks. Part of their daily activities are to use LinkedIn and Sales Navigator to expand their network and introduce buyers to your company.
When your sellers have ContentHubs, it amplifies your entire funnel by empowering every team member as a micro-influencer. When they share brand content and curated articles to their Hub, it increase all of marketing efforts. With our simple API, all the ContentHub traffic for every buyer is automatically sent to your ABM or CRM platform.
4. Watchlists. Your ABM strategy most likely has targeted accounts assigned to your sellers. Wouldn’t it be nice to know if someone from a targeted company was visiting a reps ContentHub? The combination of the sales rep leveraging their social influence with LinkedIn posts and our Watchlist technology, sellers can identify buyers much earlier in the buyer’s journey.
Remember, 90% of buyers are willing to engage with a value-adding sales rep early in their journey. Consistent content sharing with Watchlist tracking is the best way to help sellers get connected to buyers early. The early bird gets the worm!
5. Clickpaths. Beyond the notification when a buyer visits their ContentHub, our Clickpaths report provides deeper insights into the buyers interests. The buyer may have clicked to read an article. But, what about the next 2 articles they also read.
Clickpaths reports give your sales rep insights into buyers interests and challenges before they ever talk to the buyer. It gives them insights to share more information with them or share more social posts and tag the buyer for engagement.
Clickpaths is a sales reps best friend when it comes to efforts to make themselves valuable to the buyer while the buyer is still researching and learning. It helps the seller stand out as an industry expert and trusted advisor who the buyer can access for help.