Podcast 121: Using Sales Content In Meetings With Doug Winter

This week we’re pleased to have Doug Winter on the podcast.

This week we’re pleased to have Doug Winter on the podcast. Doug’s the CEO of Seismic Software, with over 9 years of providing slicker sales enablement solutions to draw experience from and share with us. A lot of Doug’s work is around helping sales teams plan out their content that they can use in calls, but mapping out what content they already have and tweaking it is harder than it sounds…

In this podcast, you’ll learn:

Sales Content Preparation

Measuring Sales Content Impact

Categorizing Sales Content Efficiently

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Sales Content Preparation

Doug Winter: So imagine you’re walking into a presentation with your buyers. They’ve seen the online demo and some case studies. They know about your competitors, hopefully you did a good job on discovery.

If you start reeling off case studies from healthcare or other industries not their own, they can’t resonate. But for the rep, there is a big chance that they’ll sell into a lot of different industries and buyers with different use cases or needs.

This creates a bunch of different selling situations which means you need content for each.

We have something internally, we call it complexity score, which talks about how this scales as an organization scales. So you think about a small startup company, the technology, it may have one product or two, right? They may sell to one geography in one language.

But on the flip side, a huge company like IBM may have thousands of products and thousands of industries, situations and nuances. That’s millions of situations that need different content.

We found from the Forrester research that 88% of the buyers expected a more relevant and personalized information today than what they’re used to. They want Amazon level personalization. Content is the way to do that, you just have to categorize and prepare it that way.

Measuring Sales Content Impact

John Barrows: So now I have to ask about measuring this. How do you get from having the content, to being able to measure the impact of what works and what doesn’t? Which pieces of content get people from stage 1 to stage 2, all that kinda stuff.

Doug Winter: I’m an engineer by training. That’s where I came from. And so you’d always think as an engineering about closed loop systems. You measure the results, you make some changes that you think are going to have an impact, and then you watch to see what happens. And you take that feedback and you continue to iterate on that, on that cycle. Right? That’s how a Tesla drives itself down the street, right? It’s kinda that same closed loop system. I think it’s the same thing applies here. You know, it’s being able to test and I’ve got a hypothesis, I’m gonna come up with how I think content should map into the buyer’s journey. Okay. And I’m going to talk to sellers. They’re going to give me some input.

Some ideas are gonna sound weird or bad. Some sound great but don’t work. That’s the thing with this, it’s an ongoing experiment.

Categorizing Sales Content Efficiently

John Barrows: So how do you recommend people start on that journey of categorizing the content they have?

Doug Winter: Yeah. Great question. I actually tried to encourage our customers to turn it upside down. So rather than starting with categorize the content that you have, take the sales process, the buyer’s journey, and the other variables that you think are important along that buyer’s journey.

I’m saying think about all of the variables of a situation, industry and geography, pain and goals, everything.

What are the questions that they’re going to be asked maps back to the buyer’s journey and coordinates off of what product am I talking about? Okay, now do I have the right content? If I don’t, well then I should go build it.

A lot of the time you already have the content but it’s just in need of some editing and repurposing. Most of the time that’s just trimming it down to make it more bite-sized.

So I try to encourage our customers to flip that process over and think about creating content. Now, in truth, you’re not going to start over. But it’s the mindset that’s different than saying, look, I’m thinking about this from the point of view of what content do I need to progress this sales process along?

What questions do I need to add for her to answer for that particular situation that I’m in? The key thing, this is really controversial, right? You’re going to love this one. Have Marketing and Sales both chip in on it.

Ask something like “Hey, you’re in this situation. You’ve been in this situation before. What do you think you need in order to get the job done?”. And then yes, you can create the content, you can tag it or you can build it in.

That’s a wrap. Join us next time

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