How do you get sales aligned with on-demand B2B content marketing?
Nathan: One of the other big roadblocks out there can always be sales. How do you get sales on board with the idea of on-demand B2B marketing?
Elle: One of the things that we’ve done internally, we have this concept of a fast moving buyer. Obviously, we track how much time somebody spends with an individual piece of content. It could be an eBook, or a video, or a blog post, or a webpage. We track exactly how much time they spend with each individual asset. We track the path through the content that they take. As a demand gen marketer, I’ve been dealing with things like lead scores my entire career. There’s sort of a lot of dogma involved in a lead score. Marketing is telling sales, “Don’t worry, trust us,” like, “This is the best lead. We’ve given it an A or a 95,” or whatever the score is. And sales never quite understands why. What goes into making that score? What are you scoring it on?
I will say that they really understand the concept of time and so we created this fast moving buyer alert where once someone reaches a high threshold of time spent with content, we send an alert to our BDR and our account executives and they can see exactly what assets that person has consumed and how much time they spend with each individual asset, and it really neutralizes the conversation. Because, I’m not saying, “Trust me, this person did a bunch of great things.” I’m saying, “Here is exactly what they did and here’s how much time they spend doing these things and you can see what the high value assets were they consumed.” They get really excited about that ’cause they, oh, this person watched our explainer video for three minutes and I know it’s a three minute and 30 second video, so they watched most of it. And then, they went over here and they read these three blog posts and they spent five minutes and then they came over here and read this eBook for another five minutes. That person is showing some real intent, some real buying behavior.
So, instead of me saying, “Trust me, the did a bunch of stuff and it’s a good score because of that,” I can say, “Here’s some time that they’ve spent with content assets that’s telling me that there is some real buying behavior happening.” Sales tends to get on board with this very, very quickly. I don’t think it’s a particularly hard sell when you can demonstrate what time spent with content means in terms of actually buying behavior. And then, if you can then start to track the impact that that has down the funnel, you start to show, hey, people who spend this much time with content tend to convert at this rate, turn into meetings at this rate, turn into revenue at this rate. It’s pretty easy to show them that that’s a winning equation.