Great content provided in the early stages of your sales process helps your buyers become more aware of your offering. In our Salesforce.com consulting, setting up the communications process with prospective buyers requires a focus on content marketing. Your sales team can gain great advantage by distributing content via Salesforce.com email templates and monitoring the feedback loop of Leads and Contacts which consume your content.
Salesforce.com Email Template Creation
Setting up your email templates within a categorized folder makes it convenient for your sales team to use during the course of their sales engagements. As they are educating new prospects and building credibility, ensure that your email templates are ordered and titled with clarity. It should be easy to find based on the relevance of a customer’s discovered needs. Your sales people will use this library based on how easy it is to use the templates and how easy they are to find. We typically implement 5-8 key templates.
Content Management System Landing Site
Within the design of the email templates, hyperlink to the landing page with the article of focus. The page should be contained as a part of a content management system. This system becomes a portal for your prospects. Be sure it is laid out with appealing and natural calls to action for any visitors.
Each of the articles can have additional multimedia such as videos, white papers and any other media to augment the overall education of the visitor. Your sales team has the advantage of being intimate with prospects and deciphering which pathway to send the prospect down. Thus, the site should have a robust search engine to find any relevant content. This content can be hyperlinked within the email templates to adapt the communication to the customer’s needs and desires.
Measuring Interest And Supplying Ongoing Value
As your sales team follows up with customers, the various email templates can be sent as a sequence of value. Within Salesforce.com, you are able to monitor the openings of HTML emails. For the salesperson, this is valuable tactical data. They get a glimpse into the interest of prospects based on their engagement with the content provided.
More powerful marketing automation systems can be integrated to delve deeper into the customer’s digital body language and use this for timing sales engagements and follow-up. Timing is critical today, thus the way to deliver relevant content which is personalized using a system greatly increases sales readiness.
Living Content
The advantage of a sales team is the personal attention and touch with the customer. Content has advantage because it lives and can be used to build trust and credibility apart from interruptions via phone and email. It is an opportunity for the prospective customer to focus on you and experience your position via branding.
Living content which is distributed precisely by your sales team is a smart strategy for using Salesforce.com for increasing demand. The human element to figure out what content is valuable becomes trackable within Salesforce.com’s reporting engine. Sales effectiveness increases based on value provided on the front end of the buying process.
