Quality inbound leads come from great educational and informative articles, videos, and podcasts. And one way to harvest great content of this nature is from salespeople. No, seriously.
I’ve seen great content strategy success from this very straightforward process. I instruct salespeople to listen for common or recurring questions and concerns and write down those questions. Later, we work together to answer that concern via a new post for the website.
The idea is this: if they are being asked questions, ideal customers not presently on their radar are likely asking that same question in a search engine. At the end of the day, questions aren’t truly unique. When we post articles like this, over about one month they begin to see an organic rise in traffic.
The strategy is iron-clad. Incredible. It drives results. Salespeople are close to the customer. Salespeople hear their pain, track customers all day long, and are constantly working to provide solutions. Salespeople know what makes a customer tick. Their skill in this area means they have a knack for creating compelling web content.
Customer inquiry is the best content marketing resource. But I started finding exceptions to the salesperson method. It has a weakness. At first I couldn’t see why some salespeople were naturally good at this and others struggled. Then I saw it.
That weakness is bad salespeople. Bad salespeople don’t listen, and therefore have zero ideas.
Bad salespeople suck at listening (and suck at content).
Bad salespeople are bad at content strategy because it requires listening to the customer with the intent of helping them. You can see bad salespeople a mile away. They talk about themselves “I want to tell you about…” and never listen. They push features and go for the close without taking a second to understand if their product is even helpful to you.
They send the same emails. Make the same phone calls. And use the same jargon. If you’ve always thought they behave like robots it’s because they are. Just check out how ChatGPT writes a sales email. The bot writes general statements, uses plenty of useless jargon, and doesn’t waste time on specifics.
Look familiar? It’s creepy.
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