Salespeople can be great sources of blog content. They engage with prospects and the market everyday. They're hearing questions and overcoming objections, and their responses to these questions and objections are great content for blog articles because this is what your prospects want to know, read, and learn.

THE CHALLENGE: How do you get your salespeople to get the info out of their heads and into the blog? How do you get your salespeople sit down and write?

Every day, I talk to business leaders who share some common sales challenges. Whether it's a business owner, VP of Sales, or a VP of marketing, the struggles are often the same. I often get asked these questions:

• How can we generate more qualified leads for our sales team?
• How can we get our sales team in front of more opportunities?

Yet, when I go to their websites, what I often find, is websites that are old, boring, static, and basically online brochures. This might be great for communicating your brand message, but its one-way communication. That could have worked back in 2008 or 2009, but it's 2019, and your prospects (and your market) expect so much more!

Think about all the time your sales team isn’t at work, but you wished they were. 

When they’re on vacation.
When they’re at lunch.
When they’re commuting.
When they’re on a flight.
When they’re with their family on the weekend.

Now think about the time your sales team is at work, but they’re not involved in sales-related activity.

When they’re in a staff meeting.
When they’re filling out an expense report.
When they’re flying to a conference.
When they’re working on a proposal.
When they’re responding to an associate’s email.

The list seems never-ending. The truth is, salespeople aren’t always very productive. In fact, according to HubSpot Research, salespeople spend just one-third of their day in sales-related activities.

Now, imagine if you had a sales resource that never went on vacation, or took a break, or got sidetracked by unproductive activity. Inbound marketing is that resource.

Today’s economic indicators seem to be positive. Unemployment rates are down. GDP numbers are up. And it seems that more and more companies are meeting, and even exceeding, their revenue growth objectives. Favorable economic conditions are always welcome, but we all know that success just doesn’t happen. It takes hard work and preparation from a lot of people to grow a business.

Preparation can take a lot of different forms – hiring, training, building out processes, and leveraging new technology. Proper preparation also requires that we re-evaluate our infrastructure. Do we have the essential elements in place in which to build upon? Our houses have infrastructure – foundation, plumbing, electrical, heating, and air conditioning, etc. Our marketing has required infrastructure as well. Below is a list of the basic marketing infrastructure elements critical to growing a company.

Governments repair and build roads. Utility companies run new transmission lines and fiber optics. And at home, we attach rain gutters to our houses and add-on new rooms. These are all examples of enhancing infrastructure. Even at work, we get new computers, new phones, and new desk chairs. Those too are infrastructure upgrades. 

Sales and marketing organizations have infrastructures as well.  Websites, sales collateral, CRM, marketing automation, and email are all examples of marketing infrastructure basics. How often does your firm evaluate the status of your marketing infrastructure? Do you have everything you need? What are you missing? Is everything working as it should? Like any infrastructure (roads, bridges, roofs, plumbing, etc.), a marketing infrastructure can become less effective if it’s neglected. And a neglected marketing infrastructure will eventually lead to ineffective marketing plans and missed revenue targets.

When you invest in a new effort like inbound marketing at your company, or you enter into a partnership with a marketing agency, everyone expects to get results. No one does marketing for marketing’s sake. We want to establish our brand, build an audience, convert leads, grow a pipeline, accelerate deals through the funnel, and ultimately grow revenue. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen. Instead of experiencing the euphoria that comes with achieving goals, you suffer the frustration of unfulfilled potential.   

A few years ago you started to blog. It went well. Your brain was fresh, and ideas for new articles flowed. But then life happened. You got busy at work, and you got busier at home. Before you knew what happened, your once-a-week blog update slowed to once-a-month. And then it slowed further to one new update every few months. And then you woke up one day and realized that you haven’t posted an update to your blog in over nine months. 

Lack of time is an easy excuse. However, I guarantee you that if your blog was producing the results you thought, it would, then you would find the time. Let’s be honest. It’s not really the lack of time. It’s the lack of results.

Most organizations do a pretty good job of tracking basic marketing KPIs – top of the funnel performance metrics like webpage visits, session lengths, bounce rates, and lead conversions. Those are early indicators. They tell us if our marketing is accomplishing its most basic function – attract an audience and generate leads. 

Your marketing, however, should accomplish much more. Ultimately, isn’t the role of marketing to help drive revenue?

Many organizations have built barriers between the various functions of their business. Even groups that rely on and support each other’s goals (like Sales and Marketing) are “siloed” in their own worlds and rarely communicate. Breaking down those walls and aligning goals and expectations can be challenging, but there are tremendous benefits as well.

A good theatrical performance can transport you to different places and times, and it can help you experience situations that you’ve never encountered before. It can change the way think and feel and provide a whole new way of looking at a situation. Brian Stokes Mitchell, Tony Award Winning Actor, says, “That's the magic of art and the magic of theatre: it has the power to transform an audience, an individual, or en masse, to transform them and give them an epiphanal experience that changes their life, opens their hearts and their minds, and the way they think.”