How Content Allows a Company to Make Sales Calls, as if by Artificial Intelligence
A veteran salesperson knows that look. That tone of voice. That one question for clarification uttered by a prospect that indicates a buying signal.
And that’s when the sale begins to become final.
A good sales agent knows what to do when that signal reveals itself. Soon, the seller becomes the closer, and the prospect becomes a client or customer.
The only disappointing thing about that promise of future success is that they are hard to come by. By that, I mean: those opportunities…those moments…those qualified, veteran sales professionals that can detect the aroma of opportunity and know how to respond to it.
If only you could clone that qualified sales person. If only those opportunities would arise in greater numbers. If only artificial intelligence could scrape the internet for you, uncovering prospects and revealing sales opportunities.
That’s where content comes in.
Let Content Serve as Your Artificial Prospecting Team
Just as people in all walks of life are experimenting with artificial intelligence to perform human labor at scale and with greater pace, thought leadership content — once developed, published and syndicated — can permeate and infiltrate the digital universe and find prospects who are looking for answers, perhaps shopping for service providers, and at very least, consuming expertise and insights to further their own personal and professional objectives.
Your human sales team can’t be everywhere at once. That’s not realistic, and it’s not scalable.
But what can live everywhere all at once is content. Mining and extracting expertise from your company’s leadership, then refining those raw materials into consumables (in the form of blog posts, emails, published articles, social media posts, podcasts, videos, etc.) allows your experts’ ideas to travel. It makes your corporate expertise discoverable by those on the lookout for it. It works on a 24/7 time schedule and can travel to all corners of the globe in the time it takes someone to click a link, perform a Google search, open an email, or download a podcast.
Where your humans — especially those wily sales professionals — can contribute to this winning formula is to share with your content strategy team what those common clarifying questions are…what those trigger points are that generate that one recognizable look, or tone of voice.
What are the questions your prospect ask?
What are the answers your sales team provides that trigger clarifying questions?
What are the most common inbound questions or challenges posed by existing and prospective clients?
What was a topic you knew more about than anyone else in the competitive field that landed you the contract of a coveted customer or client?
What do people go looking for, and how can your content provide a conduit to those answers, your products and services, and ultimately, your opportunity to win their business?
Content isn’t exactly artificial intelligence. But it is exploitable intelligence that travels, that lives and breathes everywhere your human sales team can’t, and it is discoverable by your prospects, whenever and wherever they going looking for it.