Sit down with their sales team!
On the latest episode of The Marchitect, guest host Ashley Faus, Director of Integrated PMM, Atlassian, and I were joined by Morgan Ingram, Founder & Chief Edutainment Officer, Ascension Media Productions, and Devin Reed, Director of Content & Thought Leadership, Clari to discuss what content and sales teams need from product marketing to help their companies Exchange Value for Money, efficiently.
Read the conversation highlights below—or listen now to hear these experts answer the following questions:
- From a content & sales perspective, what should product marketing do to be a value-add to a company and its revenue team?
- Who are the key interlocks/ stakeholders in the Revenue Ecosystem? What do these interlocks look like?
- How sales, especially those on the front lines like SDRs/ BDRs, view product marketing & content, and what the relationship between pmm-content-sales should look like?
- How is product marketing & content marketing helping sales exchange our value for our customer’s money efficiently?
- What does success look like for your content marketing team?
Product Marketing, as well as content marketing, is the bridge between the market and the company. Our guest host, Ashley, describes the role of this bridge as follows:
“We look at what the market needs. We translate that into audience insights and journeys to influence the company's build. Then, once we have that offering, we share it with the market in a way that resonates with them.”
When building and traversing through the bridge to add value to a company, one key aspect that becomes important is exploring the positioning and differentiation of the brand. What’s the most effective way to do that? Talk to your sales function! Your SDRs and BDRs are the closest touchpoints to your target audience and communicate with them regularly. Gather insights from how they take leads to being your customers and how they are serviced. This data will help you build your strategies around content marketing.
When PMM meets Content and Sales
There are enough stakeholders both upstream with the folks that build things and downstream with the folks that sell and market things in product marketing. Your sales and marketing teams are your strongest internal advocates. They can easily turn your organization into a growth powerhouse if they believe in your vision and mission.
Devin believes that…
“We have to win over the sales team before we're going to win over the market. If our sales team doesn't like our content, isn't excited to share it, or isn't sharing feedback from sharing it with their prospects and clients, then we haven't quite tipped yet. We have to win them over first before we get what I'll call random prospects and buyers who don't even know about us.”
He follows a simple yet highly effective process:
- Identify senior sales stakeholders and join their weekly team calls
- Request 15 minutes on their agenda twice a month
- Spend time understanding the roadblocks as the product goes to market and take detailed notes.
- Take them through the upcoming marketing strategies and content plan with a deep dive into the intent and purpose.
This helps sync up sales and marketing teams, reduces potential friction, and enables the sales team to refer back to any content or marketing strategy while converting clients.
How does one efficiently exchange value for money?
The buyer is evolving more rapidly than we can imagine. Marketing styles and processes also need to keep up with this evolution. Morgan took this problem head-on in a very enlightening LinkedIn post, explaining how developing a foundational content strategy that amplifies conversations and creating content is essential to start conversations that convert into one thing: REVENUE. To drive that revenue, marketers have to focus on three main pillars.
1. Community expansion: Multiple digital and physical channels where you're putting out content and people feel comfortable engaging with that content.
2. Social lift: Creating content that makes people believe in you and your brand and feel attached to you, elevating your social presence.
3. Brand awareness: Once you build a brand reputation and create content across platforms that is congruent to this identity, it makes your audience want to be a part of your community
This is a robust way to take your audience from just your audience to your community and eventually become your advocates.
Measuring Success
Reach and Impact are pivotal to pipeline revenue. A part of Devin’s process looks like this:
“Sometimes, I start at the top of the funnel and move down to revenue. Sometimes, I flip (the process) if I know revenue is what folks care about most. But it's also things like: Are we growing an audience on social media, podcasts, and email? What is the health of those channels? Are our efforts hitting web traffic? Are we getting more organic or direct search web traffic? How's the content performing time? Is our content being consumed? Is our reach getting larger, and is the impact there? That is ultimately pipeline revenue.”
This ensures that not only is the importance of product marketing established in the larger workflows, but it also meets content and sales to efficiently exchange value for money in ways that can be measured through existing and newer metrics.
Well, like Devin says:
“Between product marketing and content, take away whose fingerprint is on it most and who gets the credit and say, hey, we're in this together, and let's make the best damn campaign narrative event we can.”
If you want to learn more about sales' role in the content-to-revenue pipeline, listen to the full interview.
