With the decline in face-to-face connection and the rise of technology in the sales process, your content needs to work harder than ever before...
He was referring to how companies and brands could harness the power of the internet (still in its infancy at the time) to engage with their audience. Fast forward a few years and by the 2000’s content marketing had really taken off, with ebooks, how-to-guides, social media and video all vying for the reader’s attention.
With so much material out there, the next logical step was personalisation, making it relevant to the reader’s industry or interests, and adding their name to make them feel it was written just for them.
Until the start of 2020, most sales teams were still utilising this brand of personalised content to support their face-to-face sales processes and help them drive opportunities forward.
Over the last 12 months however, in the sales arena in particular, remote working, new technology and AI-driven sales tools have all combined to rapidly diminish the human connection that is the cornerstone of good selling practice.
With that taken away, the impact has been profound and is forcing a radical rethink about the role of content and what sales teams need to survive and thrive now.
We’ve now entered a new era where content needs to work harder than ever before, taking on a much more critical role in balancing the machine driven and human driven sides of a sales engagement. More than just a means to inform or persuade, content now needs to connect at a much deeper, more unique and individual level, and enable informed salespeople to demonstrate credibility, true empathy and understanding.
