Results-Driven Content: The Secret to Sales and Marketing Alignment [Endless Customers Podcast Ep. 83]

This transcript has been generated by AI and not checked for accuracy.

John Becker
0:00:00
So Alex, according to research from LinkedIn, 96% of sales and marketers see sales and marketing friction as a persistent challenge.

Alex Winter
0:00:09
96%.

John Becker
0:00:10
96%, which is pretty much everyone. Yeah. But most businesses don't know how to solve it.

John Becker
0:00:16
Here's how.

Alex Winter
0:00:27
Welcome back to Endless Customers. I'm your host Alex Winter and today we are joined by John Becker. He's a coach and trainer here at Impact. John, welcome back to the show.

John Becker
0:00:34
Thank you, Alex.

John Becker
0:00:35
Yeah, I'm glad to be here.

Alex Winter
0:00:36
We're excited to have you here. We have a great topic today. Today we are talking about content and how it plays into working with SMEs and how you get your subject matter experts involved. And we all know here at Impact and for everyone out there watching, listening, how important content plays into the growth of your business, how you lead, nurture, and all the things about it.

Alex Winter
0:00:55
So where's a good place for us to start when it comes to leveraging your subject matter experts to create content that's valuable and that's going to help attract more of your

John Becker
0:01:03
best customers? Yeah, I think it starts by reorienting the way we think about what content can do for your business. And I think most people, most marketers, when they think content, they think, I'm building an audience, I'm building a brand, I want to reach as many people as possible. And that's important, but the way that you can have

John Becker
0:01:20
the biggest impact most quickly is by creating a piece of content that you can hand to a salesperson that's going to speed up that sales process or increase that close rate. And that's not gonna get a lot of views necessarily or a lot of clicks or likes, but it's gonna have

John Becker
0:01:35
a real impact on the bottom line of the business, and that's the most impactful way content can help.

Alex Winter
0:01:42
So it sounds like, correct me if I'm wrong, it sounds like the spray and pray of like, let's just hit as many people as we can and like throw out this huge net. It's getting more strategic about pointing it towards people that are quality versus the quantity piece.

John Becker
0:01:54
Yeah, I don't wanna undersell this, but creating content that attracts a lot of views isn't really the hard part. You can do that, and we've seen this with clients that we work with where they might write a piece of content or film a video that gets a ton of engagement,

John Becker
0:02:11
a ton of traffic, a ton of views, but ultimately it's so broadly focused that those viewers are not likely to become customers. And so you've heard those referred to as vanity metrics, and it's funny because sometimes some of the things that we track, like bounce rate,

John Becker
0:02:28
the higher your view count, the higher your bounce rate is too because most likely the people who are coming in are not really looking to take that next step with your business. So that's all important.

John Becker
0:02:39
Getting views is important, but thinking about, as you said, casting so wide a net means you're gonna get a lot of people who aren't realistically gonna become customers and it might not be a good use of your time.

Alex Winter
0:02:49
Yeah, that's interesting. And vanity metrics, everybody wants a lot of views. Everybody wants the numbers, the bragging rights, if you will, but that doesn't always necessarily convert to real customers or real interactions. So you said something earlier that was interesting, too,

Alex Winter
0:03:03
about getting the sales team involved and getting sales people involved. Can we talk about what that means? Because I don't know if a lot of organizations do that. I think the marketing team is in one bucket, sales is over here, marketing's trying to create

Alex Winter
0:03:14
the content that they think, and it's like, how do you bridge that gap and give the sales team what they need?

John Becker
0:03:19
Yeah, I mean, sales enablement is an issue in every business even though it's something that people have talked about for years and probably decades. You know, we gotta break down these silos, we gotta make sure that the things that marketing are talking about are the same things that sales

John Becker
0:03:32
are talking about. Easier said than done. Yes, it is. And I think part of that is the sort of intransigence on both sides where you have salespeople who think, look, I've been doing it this way for a long time.

John Becker
0:03:44
I've gotten where I am. I don't need to change it up. And who are you to change my process? And then you have marketers who think, just like we said before, they want those clicks, they want those likes, they want those impressions,

John Becker
0:03:57
they want those views. That's the most important thing for them. And so there's a, there's a divide even to begin with. And so it does take a little bit of push to get over that initial hesitancy. It's work that we do with clients a lot. But, you know, I think the way to start is to have a content manager or marketer.

John Becker
0:04:19
First of all, you have to attend each other's meetings, you have to kind of speak the same language, talk about the same goals. But ultimately, once salespeople hear the simple question of, look, Alex, are you answering the same questions in meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting? And most salespeople will say, Oh, yeah, yep. And do you almost know that these questions are going to happen before you even exit the mouth of the prospect and you would probably say, Oh, yeah, every time I have a discovery call, I get asked the same things over and over and over again by prospect after prospect

John Becker
0:04:58
after prospect. Right, right. And once they're aware of that, you can ask the follow up question of, well, if you had a piece of content, an article, a video, a buyer's guide that you could hand to someone ahead of a meeting or right at the end of a meeting ahead of the next meeting that's going to say, look, this is going to answer all of those basic questions you're

John Becker
0:05:20
likely to ask and then we can have a better conversation specific to your needs. Once salespeople know that that's possible, then they're suddenly really receptive to being part of the content process.

Alex Winter
0:05:32
Right. And that really plays into the assignment selling piece that comes from the ask and answer where it's really like, let's address the fears, worries, doubts, concerns immediately before people even have to ask them, so you're giving them what they want and they have all that content,

Alex Winter
0:05:44
they have all those answers right there. And then also for your sales team, I feel like not having to answer the same questions over and over and over, it's probably a really nice piece

John Becker
0:05:53
to have. Right, and that means faster sales cycle, it means a better close rate. And honestly, that means that some of your bad fit prospects are gonna self-select out of the sales process. And sales can kind of have a vanity metric too.

John Becker
0:06:07
You often hear of salespeople, they just want more at-bats. Get me in more conversations, get me in more rooms, get me on more phone calls with people. But they also know, just like the vanity metric with marketing, the more views you attract, the more bad fit views you're gonna attract.

John Becker
0:06:22
And for salespeople too, if you're just looking to get at-bats, you're gonna get at-bats with not great fit prospects. And the flip side of assignment selling, those good fit prospects are ready to move forward because more of their questions have been answered.

John Becker
0:06:36
But those bad fit prospects are less likely to move forward. You're not gonna waste your time having a conversation with someone who's not serious.

Alex Winter
0:06:42
Right, time is money, so that's important.

John Becker
0:06:45
Of course, of course. And if you can have fewer conversations but better conversations, I think every salesperson would take that trade

John Becker
0:06:52
any day of the week.

Alex Winter
0:06:53
I would hope so. Yeah. I would hope so. And I find this fascinating too, the blend of sales and marketing, where they need to meet regularly.

Alex Winter
0:07:01
And I'm curious what that cadence should be and what you should talk about to help discover what the sales team needs. Because I know here at Impact, and we preach this to a lot of the companies that we integrate with, we watch sales calls.

Alex Winter
0:07:14
And it's not really a normal thing you hear in most companies, like the marketing team is watching sales calls. You record your sales calls? Like there's all these things that we do that even for me as a marketer, I was like,

Alex Winter
0:07:24
why are we watching sales calls in the beginning? And it has literally shifted the way that we create and address questions, fears, worries, doubt, concern, and the content that we make. So can we talk a little bit about that and like the cadence?

John Becker
0:07:34
Step one is actually recording sales calls. And it's amazing that here in 2025, so many businesses still don't do it.

Alex Winter
0:07:43
Especially when people are on Zoom.

John Becker
0:07:45
On Zoom all the time. But even in in-person meeting, record on your phone, use an AI tool to record a meeting, or on a phone call. And I've said this to a lot of businesses, and I always hear the same objection.

John Becker
0:07:57
Number one is, well if I click record, people are gonna feel uncomfortable. They're gonna say, why are you recording? And they're going to bristle, and it's going to be a bad conversation. And I say back to every business who says that, every

John Becker
0:08:09
person who says that, have you ever called your cable company? Yeah.

Alex Winter
0:08:14
Oh my god.

John Becker
0:08:14
Have you ever called your power company?

Alex Winter
0:08:15
It's been like that for 20 years.

John Becker
0:08:16
What do they say? This call may be recorded for quality assurance. Yeah, exactly. And how many of you have hung up the phone because you said, you can't record me?

Alex Winter
0:08:24
Yeah, never.

John Becker
0:08:25
And so often when I'm saying this, it's on a Zoom meeting that is being recorded and all of them clicked okay to be in that meeting. So we've learned to become comfortable opting into that kind of thing. It's really not an issue. You'll get over it almost immediately. So step one is you have to record the sales calls. And then, yeah, share them with marketing. Because as you're saying, if I'm a marketer and I talk to a salesperson and say, you know, what questions did you get

John Becker
0:08:53
during that hour-long call you had with the prospect? It's gonna be hard for you to remember because you are in that moment having the conversation focused on the prospect and their needs. And so it's easy to miss the nuances of that conversation that you were just engaging with

John Becker
0:09:09
but you weren't writing down on the side. So a recorded sales call is a place for marketers to pick up all of those cues, all of those nonverbal cues, those unasked questions or those bundles of questions that really get to, as you said, the fears, the worries, concerns of the buyer. If you can get a lot of these sales calls, take transcripts, dump them into a chat GPT and see what are the questions that are coming up over and over and over again.

John Becker
0:09:36
You can get an aggregate summation of what people are actually asking. Because ultimately at the end of the day, if you're a marketer creating this kind of content, you have to be the proxy for the buyer. You have to ask the questions that the buyer wants to ask, that you've heard from past buyers or you've heard from customers in the sales calls you've listened to, so that ultimately those are the questions that you're going to address so that the next prospects can

John Becker
0:10:03
read it in a piece of content or see it in a video and not have to ask that question that prospect from three months ago asked.

Alex Winter
0:10:11
Right. That's the dream scenario. So you coach and train a lot of companies on this and I'm curious for the content manager side of it, so the marketing side of it, what do you tell content managers they should be looking for? How do they talk to the sales team?

Alex Winter
0:10:24
How do they get these interactions into a place where they can pull meaningful content out of it and then start to create blogs and videos and all sorts of content to help support what we're talking about?

John Becker
0:10:35
Yeah. It's one of the reasons having an outside coach can be really helpful because it's sort of a mediator. You know, sometimes it feels like therapy because if these two groups don't typically spend time together or, you know, sometimes have misperceptions about the others. You can kind of get them into a room together and run what we call a content brainstorm. That's the way to start, just asking those questions about

John Becker
0:10:58
what are you hearing in sales calls? What's on people's minds? Something Marcus Sheridan always says is, the truth is three questions deep. So you have that first question. There are things under the surface that people might be less likely to talk about. It's also a very Donald Miller, building a story brand idea where on the surface they would say, well I need a new project management software for my business.

John Becker
0:11:22
That's their surface level problem, but if you dig a little bit deeper, they're concerned about productivity, they're concerned about spending too much money or about the new software not integrating with other tools that they use.

John Becker
0:11:33
And the more that you can anticipate that as a content manager, the more you understand what's really going on in that person, that buyer's mind. And so I think being able to ask those questions of the sales team, being able to, we already said watch sales calls, but being able to ask those questions of the sales team to say, so Alex, what are you hearing? And when someone's asking that, what's really on their mind? What's the follow-up question you're

John Becker
0:12:00
likely to hear there? Or when does this come up? And how do they respond when you say X or you say Y? And the more that you can kind of dig in, the better you can be that proxy to give

Alex Winter
0:12:11
the buyers exactly the information they're looking for. Yeah, I really love that just because you're right, the surface level answer, the first question and then the first answer is usually surface and it's you have to dig deeper to get to the root of why the person's saying what they're saying. And it usually comes out right at the top. Like you have to dig in and keep going like, and why is that?

Alex Winter
0:12:31
And it all philosophically.

John Becker
0:12:33
Yeah, if you see a friend, you're like,

Alex Winter
0:12:34
how you doing? I'm good.

John Becker
0:12:36
How you doing? I'm pretty good. How you doing? How you doing? Well, I'm stressed about work. I haven't gotten all my Christmas shopping done.

John Becker
0:12:43
Exactly.

Alex Winter
0:12:44
Whatever it is. Yeah, exactly.

Alex Winter
0:12:45
That's a great point.

Alex Winter
0:12:46
You work with a ton of clients, and you've helped a lot of people on this journey of bridging these gaps between marketing and sales and creating content. Do you have maybe a story you could share with us of some people that are really doing this well

Alex Winter
0:12:57
or maybe they weren't doing this to begin with and as they started to work through our content and training program, they really have stepped it up?

John Becker
0:13:06
Yeah, I have two examples to share. One is from a company that has pretty old school sales team. You know, a bunch of people who have been with the business or been in the industry for a very long period of time. And they have a content manager who is producing content that is a lot of what we talk about with endless customers.

John Becker
0:13:23
Big five type content about cost and price, about problems, about comparisons, things that feel a little taboo in the industry. Not a lot of people are talking about it. And at first, a lot of the salespeople, especially the older ones, were very much,

John Becker
0:13:40
it's not how I do things, I've always done it the same way. But some of the younger sales reps were very excited about the idea that they had content to share, that they could talk really openly about these things that were sort of hush-hush. And they started seeing some early wins, two ways. One was sharing content with prospects who were already in the buying cycle.

John Becker
0:14:02
So someone who, like we said, assignment selling, you have these questions, I'm gonna share this piece of content, it's gonna answer them all. But they're also using it in what we would call assignment prospecting.

John Becker
0:14:12
So if they're talking to, it's kind of cold calling a company or a company that's been on their website or that they had some loose affiliation with, they're able to share a piece of content, suddenly they had a reason to talk to this person

John Becker
0:14:25
rather than just, hey, do you need X? They'd be able to say, hey, we have this piece of content. It's really interesting about what's going on in this industry. Take a look. It starts a conversation in a way that's really valuable for the buyer or the potential buyer

Alex Winter
0:14:40
rather than just, hey, remember me? Right. Otherwise, you're going hat in hand. Exactly. And there's no real substance to that. So it makes it that much more meaningful of an interaction.

John Becker
0:14:49
Exactly.

Alex Winter
0:14:50
Yeah, and it provides value. Wow, that's a cool tip.

John Becker
0:14:52
So second example is, solves a challenge that a lot of businesses experience when they're going through this journey, which is content manager, videographer, produce a lot of content, but then the salespeople don't really know where to find it

John Becker
0:15:05
or they're confusing one piece of content with another or whatever it is. And so they built a custom GPT that is a sort of library and repository of all the content that they've built. And because it's linked to the website and linked to the YouTube channel, all the content that they're going to build. So it's a smart search feature where someone can type in,

John Becker
0:15:25
you know, do we have any content about X? And it's smart enough that it doesn't need to match keywords exactly. It can bring up everything that is related to X, videos and articles and provide a summary. And if that content doesn't exist, it takes them automatically to a form where they can submit a request for a piece of content to be made.

Alex Winter
0:15:44
That's incredible.

John Becker
0:15:45
Wow. Such a solution, such a simple and elegant solution to a problem that a lot of businesses have, which again, even if marketing and sales are trying to work together, if sales can't find what they're looking for, it might as well not even exist. And so we have this tool that is super easy and allows people to find exactly what they're looking for or request something that doesn't exist yet.

Alex Winter
0:16:07
To me that's fascinating only because it does happen where certain struggles, there isn't content for the sales team to use so the struggle is getting the content created. But then for other companies that are really creating a lot of content, then it becomes the backlog of like, I don't know where to find this video that we shot three months ago or this blog article that came out that I need right this second.

John Becker
0:16:24
So that's an incredible solution. Or, and if people have been creating the content for a long time, they might have, I don't know, a few different articles about the same topic or similar, about similar topics. And if a salesperson is trying to think about one and confusing it with another, or one is outdated or something, this is a way to sort through all

Alex Winter
0:16:44
the mess to find exactly what you're looking for. Yeah. Wow. Great examples. So for the content managers, I'm thinking marketing again, I'm on the marketing side of the equation here. How do we track and measure success with this? How can we interact with the sales team in a meaningful way that's like, hey, I've given you this content, hopefully you're using it in the sales process. How can you track that they are, and then if the content is helping to convert, or what does that picture look like just from an analytics standpoint?

John Becker
0:17:12
Yeah, great question. And I think always it's important to think anecdotally, to think, you know, to have a salesperson come back and say, look, I use this piece of content, it was really helpful. And that doesn't feel as quantitative, but I love those examples because there's a storytelling aspect to it. Otherwise, it depends on the tools you use. We do a lot of work in HubSpot, a lot of our clients do too. So you can see if a single piece of content is associated with a deal, when it was viewed, how it was viewed, if it was shared, etc. And then all the metrics that always

John Becker
0:17:46
matter to me, especially things like time on page, dwell time, bounce rate, things like that that show that a single piece of content is performing in a way that shows that it has value for the people who are engaging with it. So, as I said in the beginning, if a piece of content doesn't knock it out of the park in terms of views or traffic, but it really is highly engaged with

John Becker
0:18:13
and is really prompting a lot of conversions or is being used effectively in the sales process, those are the numbers that really matter.

Alex Winter
0:18:21
Yeah, I know that makes sense. And I want to try to highlight too, and I asked you some customer insights from earlier, but is there a story you could share of one piece of content that literally changed the game for a sales team? They weren't using this piece of content and now they started using it and they have all these new SQLs or all these new leads or something like that.

Alex Winter
0:18:41
I know I'm putting you on the spot here, but I'm just curious if there's anything like that because I feel like historically we've heard that in the past where sales teams weren't doing this, the marketing team wasn't interacting with the sales team. And then they created one blog post, and off of this one blog post, there's all these leads that came in,

Alex Winter
0:18:56
and off of this one video, you know, like all this, it just changed the game for them.

John Becker
0:19:00
Yeah, I think, yes, and I'll share a couple examples, but I think it's important for the audience to remember that content is never, you know, it's not gonna be a silver bullet, that you're gonna do a single thing, and it's gonna completely change the game.

John Becker
0:19:13
It's a marathon. You got to commit to Answering questions from all different angles from all different constituencies about everything that you sell But I will say I think any single example that has a big effect is always ones about cost and price Yes, it might not necessarily be a single blog article. It could be a service page. It could be a video but Always that's the first thing on anyone's mind when they're making a purchase. And as we know, and we talk about all the time, and Marcus talks about all the time, it is so frustratingly hard to find on so many

John Becker
0:19:45
websites and so many industries, just tell me what I'm going to have to pay. And I know I'm not going to get a perfect number from you because it's a range, because it depends, but give me something. Otherwise, I know that you know, and I know that you're going to make me jump through hoops to get the information I need. You're gonna make me schedule a sales appointment. You're gonna make me wait until the end of that sales call

John Becker
0:20:07
before you tell me what it actually costs. So anytime companies can be open about price, again, it's 2025, it's amazing that we still have to say this, but when they do that, that's the single, if I had to point to a single piece of content in different industries that really has an effect,

John Becker
0:20:23
it's that.

Alex Winter
0:20:24
Wow, I totally agree. And it is frustrating as a consumer. And I think that's the coolest piece about this conversation is we're we're Trying to really get in the mindset of your your customer what your ideal customer needs wants and how to meet them where they are and yeah, not do the smoke and mirrors and do all the

John Becker
0:20:38
Yeah, the fluff. Well, I think so much, you know so many times when you learn about marketing it feels as though there's a big emphasis on gimmicks on tricks on manipulation and this is the opposite of that. It's about being honest, being unbiased, being helpful and think about when you're on the other side of the table as a buyer, what do you want? And anytime we can treat our buyers like that, we win.

Alex Winter
0:21:05
Well said. Well said. All right. Now it's time for my favorite part of the show. It's called The One Thing. And out of everything we talked about today, when we're talking about sales and marketing and creating content and how to bridge those gaps, what is the key takeaway, the one thing people should really take away from this conversation?

John Becker
0:21:22
I think the key is getting those teams to start to work together and to not see each other as adversaries or as competitors. That if you can see the marketing team, a content manager and a videographer as a conduit to help, if you're a salesperson, as a conduit to help you communicate, to help you have better conversations, the whole company is going to be better. And what I see transformatively at businesses is, you know, once, especially a videographer or a content manager, when they're

John Becker
0:21:51
really established and trusted, people will come and knock on their door and say, hey, I had an idea for a video, or hey, I keep getting asked this, can we make something about it so I don't have to keep sending the same emails over and over again. Can we make a quick video?" And the more that they see that as a possibility, they start to be excited by it. And that's really fun because all of a sudden there's a momentum and it feels as though these teams are collaborating for the first time rather than in separate camps not really understanding

Alex Winter
0:22:21
what the others do. Yeah, wow. It's a beautiful thing. Very beautiful. Well, John, thank you for your insights and for your time. Thank you for being on the show.

Alex Winter
0:22:28
We really appreciate it.

John Becker
0:22:29
Yeah, of course.

Alex Winter
0:22:29
All right, excellent. For everybody out there watching and listening, this is Endless Customers. this is Endless Customers. We'll catch you on the next episode.