How to get sales to care about thought leadership

Here are 5 steps to elevate and motivate sales to use thought leadership to sell:

Get them involved upfront

Recent data from @B2BMarketing research reveals that 45% of marketers only involve sales in the later stages of campaign development. Forcing a marketing driven programme on sales who already have, quite rightly, their own agenda, busy schedules and pressure to hit targets, is unlikely to get many of them clamouring to use it.

It may not be a road well travelled at your organisation, but getting commercial people involved from the beginning is an absolute must and will get them invested early in the strategy, and the story. Their depth of knowledge will make sure the strategy is extremely customer focussed, and those who are closest to the customer will now be well versed and raring to share the story.

Give them a credible narrative

With our buyers overwhelmed with the features and benefits of technical solutions, their desire to understand why your solution is better won’t be a priority. Instead they are hungry for inspirational stories to help them navigate complex problems and drive their businesses forward.

Using research as the foundation of your thought leadership will generate unique and meaningful data insights, which can then be transformed into a narrative that illustrates the better future your customers are keen to realise.

Data makes these stories credible, and enables deep and meaningful consultative conversations.

Think beyond the PDF

Having data also enables you to stretch your thought leadership beyond the PDF.

Transforming the data into interactive, engaging and entertaining formats allows sales and the customer to interact with the insights and visualise how these insights apply to them specifically.

Comparing themselves to peers is just one powerful draw for your customers when exploring your insights, and a very easy conversation starter for sales to jump on.

Motivate and train them

It’s not enough to just give sales another methodology, another tool, another thing to do. Make sure you educate them on the story, how their input and the data has been transformed into a powerful unique story to tell, and give them the materials they need to get this out to the market.

Sales are as much your audience as the customer. Train, incentive and inspire them to use it.

Ignite the consultative sell

In this climate tech firms are moving from product sell to a consultative sell and thought leadership makes this transition incredibly easy.

Your CTAs are changing from book a demo to book a consultation – and what better way to give sales something to talk about than a juicy bit of thought leadership.

Interactive content can also be designed to first educate and then suggest solutions, making it easy for sales to make the same leap with their customers.

If it works, stick with it!

Using thought leadership to sell isn’t going away soon, getting the insight right and using research is a powerful repeatable methodology.

Learn what’s working and repeat it for other products or services, or annually. How powerful is it to have something that clients hunger to receive on an annual basis?