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Letter #31: Source content ideas from your sales team the easy way
Expert interview on how to work with Sales on content ideas.
Hey hey hey 👋
Woke up this week with a mini-panic-attack-inducing realization: I’m almost running out of books to read! I still have two but this is sign I need to go book shopping ASAP.
Because books are food for my brain. They nourish me. Teach me. And even give me ideas for this letter and more.
Speaking of ideas, I’ve got Hannah Cameron, the Director of Content at Affinity, on how to source ideas from the sales team today.
As is usual, I asked her the three questions that we ask all experts:
A mistake Hannah’s made when sourcing content ideas from the sales team.
An actionable tip to get you one step closer to sourcing ideas this way.
And, a secret tip for getting more audience-relevant content ideas.
👉 Learn from Hannah’s mistake: “Assuming what I published was important for leads and valuable for sales.”
“I write for one audience on the blog and that audience MIGHT not be the same one that speaks to Sales for a demo,” Hannah explains. “But I still expect Sales to share all of my content with leads and often get mad when they don’t.”
The truth, however, is that Hannah shares she has published content based on guesswork.
Her realization?
“Create content that meets my needs (and OKRs) and helps Sales better achieve their goals. The goal should be cohesion, not assumptions.”
👉 Do this today: Create a shared space/channel.
“There’s nothing better than letting Sales share content and ideas they find in your industry.”
“The sales team is constantly pinging me on Slack, saying, ‘Hey, I just saw a competitor launched a new report,’ or ‘Hey, this is an article I found; could we do something similar?’ or ‘I love the video we just released, but I think we forgot to mention our BEST feature....’”
Hannah says, “It’s an easy way to get Sales more invested and involved in the content process, but also, they’re sharing insights that I’m probably missing or didn’t see.”
To encourage Sales to share ideas with you, you can also instill healthy competition as Jason advises back in letter number 15.
👉 The secret tip for sourcing content ideas from Sales the correct way: Ask for a list of common questions from demos.
“These common questions being asked during demos tell me the lead couldn’t find that answer in their research,” notes Hannah. “It’s not on our website; they couldn’t find it in an article or Google searches.”
“So this is a great way to work with Sales and say, listen, I’m either going to create new content (or I have an existing piece of content) that addresses these questions.
Can we drop it into Drift so that when people are on our website looking to book a demo, it’s the first piece of content we give them while waiting to get on the call with us? There are lots of things you can learn from this.”
So today’s takeaways:
Ask, don’t assume
Create a shared channel
Ask for a list of common questions from demos.
That’s all for today, folks.
Here’s me signing out,
Masooma
P.S. Have any book recommendations for me? Send them my way.
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