As a CEO of a fast growing firm, there are several growing pains that you and your senior leadership team will encounter. And just as kids experience the deep cramping or aching pain during their growth spurt, the leadership team will feel a shooting pain when they stumble upon non approved collateral featuring your company's logo positioned above butchered value messaging. Who's the author? Often its a sales person.
Sellers who create their own content are looking for the shortest path to "find stuff" to put in front of buyers. And these sellers wont wait around when a pending prospect meeting is on the calendar. Instead, they take matters into their own hands, and head for the arts & crafts box. Suddenly, a set of slides are created and shared with buyers. And when these slides make it around the sales team and back to the CEOs desk, well, the crayons hit the fan. These are CEO's growth spurt pains.
Emerging growth CEOs can take a few simple steps to avoid renegade content by brokering a collaborative work session between your marketing and sales teams. Since your firm may be a year or two away from having a Chief Revenue Officer function, as the CEO you must play this role.
Its important to establish a content standard early. Any market facing sales content must educate buyers by helping them think about how to solve their business problem. The content should guide them on how to solve their problem in a way that is different than is commonly found via a quick google search. To effectively create value and build credibility for your company and the salesperson, ensure that any content that leaves your building will target the specific buyer’s needs, help the buyer complete a buying job, and show how the information will support that job.
Buyers don't want to hear about the year your company was founded, or the experience of your leadership team, or your awards, or the breadth of your product catalog. None of these educate a buyer on THEIR need. When sellers are allowed to create content, they will build it with what they know, and not what guides a buyer.
#Gartner provides a simple 10 question approach to ensure your content is designed to help buyers do their job. The guide is a great starting point for designing your firm's content standards.
To learn more about building foundational maturity of your sales organization, reach out to us at info@LucrumPartners.co . We can help.
Brian Shea
Principal
Kommentare