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How to Make Your Company a Thought Leader: Developing Content Targeted to Other
Decision-Makers at the Prospect's Company
(Part 4)

by Eric Gagnon

According to a 2005 study by research firm SiriusDecisions, the average sales cycle is now 22% longer, and three more decision-makers are now usually involved in the buying process. Companies are involving more managers in their evaluation and purchase decision-making processes, and it’s also likely these managers will work in different functional areas inside the company than the prospects you usually sell to.

For example, if a VP of Engineering is usually your primary prospect, you may also need buy-in during the sales cycle from the company’s VP of Finance, CEO, and IT manager. Each of these decision-makers will be approaching your product in view of their own interests and responsibilities to the company:

• The Finance VP, of course, looks very closely at the numbers you’re using to demonstrate your product’s advantages, but may also be looking at the payback her company is already receiving from their current operations without using your product, and at other purchase priorities that compete with your product’s expense:

• The IT Manager is looking at the time and manpower he’s going to have to devote to putting the IT-based element of your product in place across the company and, given his limited staff time and backlog of projects, needs to be convinced your installation isn’t going to force him to take staff time away from these other projects;

• Your prospect’s CEO may trust one manager’s judgment over another’s (and you’ll never know which one that is). You and your sales team just need to make sure you have done your best to convince everyone in the loop so there will be no surprises before the purchase order is signed

As a result of the need to meet the expectations of multiple decision-makers through your selling cycle, consider the variations you may have to make to the deliverables you use in your lead development messaging program. For example, in addition to your standard white papers, case studies, product spec sheets, etc., you would do well to produce additional deliverables and supplemental analysis to address the concerns of other financial and technical influencers at your prospects’ companies.

Following the previous example, these deliverables might provide more specific detail on the financial aspects and benefits of your product, and streamlined processes for implementation by IT staff, to address the concerns of the VP of Finance and IT Manager, respectively. This might be a challenging task when you must develop these pieces to help your sales team work with a single prospect sales opportunity, but the upside is that once you’ve developed these specialized deliverables, you will have them ready for use in your CRM system’s document library if these issues are raised again in other selling opportunities.

Writing and Producing Content for Your Editorial E-Mail Messaging Program

Developing relevant, high-quality content necessary to support an e-mail messaging program that keeps your prospects informed and keeps your company foremost in your prospect’s mind during the sales process is a challenging task. Executing a successful program, even for a small company, requires you to develop an extensive collection of materials for your e-mail messaging program and your CRM document library. As well, the amount and variety of content required increases when additional deliverables are required to reach the number of additional decision-makers who are often involved in the buying process.

Unless you’re a field marketer working in a very small company, content for deliverables required in e-mail messaging programs is often written by a third party consultant, contractor, or freelance writer. Your responsibility is to connect the person who is writing the deliverable with the background research and the key contacts inside your company they’ll need to interview and develop the final deliverable.

Authorship of editorial deliverables: It is always better to publish editorial deliverables with bylines showing authorship by the person who wrote the piece, and the more this person is recognized as being an expert in the article’s topic, the more credible, and therefore, more effective, this article will be in your lead development program. For example, a white paper on new trends in your product’s underlying technology written by your company’s VP of Research and Development is a major selling point to your prospects who need to learn more about this topic. Likewise for articles on any other topics written by specialists in your company, or by recognized experts in your field.

Developing outlines for e-mail editorial deliverables: In addition to gathering the researching and contacts needed for the project, as a marketer you will also need to develop an outline of the content that must be included in the final deliverable. This will be similar to the “sales copy outline” described in chapter 3, but it should also include the following information, as appropriate to the deliverable required:

• Theme: What is the underlying theme that must be stressed throughout the
deliverable? Themes are positive attributes customers receive from buying and using your product, such as greater productivity, efficiency, cost savings, increased profit, low product reject rates, improved customer service;

• Issues and answers: A list of the issues that must be addressed, or
questions which must be answered for the case or white paper;

• Measurement and analysis: Details and analysis of savings, efficiency,
productivity gain, or other improvement described in the deliverable, using actual measurements and real-world results wherever possible (measuring the benefits of the improvement provided by your product is very important, since your prospects will use these measurements and analysis to evaluate your product in their purchasing decision);

• Customer improvement: In case studies, clearly indicate how the customer
benefited from using your product, through narrative, quotes, and hard measurement of before-and-after results;

• Charts and graphics: Will charts or other infographics be required? If so, sketch these out in rough form. Infographics (basic explanatory graphics, like those published in USA Today) increase understanding of complex topics and are often more effective than using text alone

The outline you create and provide to the person writing your final content deliverable provides a list of the minimum content elements required for the project, and gives your writer a useful starting point for the scope and direction of the project. As with a sales copy outline used for mailing pieces or other marketing deliverables, your outline only sets the “guardrails” for the project, and you should encourage your writer or consultant to discuss their own, additional ideas with you as you both work on the project.

Comments? Questions? Send them to me at: eric@businessmarketinginstitute.com

Eric Gagnon (eric@realmarkets.net), a director with the Business Marketing Institute, is author of The Marketing Manager’s Handbook and The CRM Field Marketing Handbook, and president of GAA ( http://www.realmarkets.net ), a marketing, sales turnaround, and product development consulting firm.