Page 108 - The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million - PDFDrive.com

thought leaders, they can contribute as well. Your salespeople on the front lines
are valuable resources here because they understand your buyers. They hear the
questions buyers have at the beginning of their buying journey. Salespeople have
well-rehearsed answers to those questions. They understand which answers
resonate with the buyer. These questions and corresponding answers make for
beautiful blog articles. In fact, check the “Sent Items” folders on your
salespeople's email server. Salespeople often send the same canned responses to
their prospects as they address questions that arise throughout the buying
journey. These canned emails make for exceptional blog articles.

With both the journalist and thought leadership committee in place, the final step
is to put the two functions together to produce content on a continual basis. I
refer to this step as defining the content production process. Let's assume you
have 10 people on your thought leadership committee. An example content
production process would look like this. Every Tuesday at 9 a.m., one member
of the thought leadership committee will sit down with the journalist for a one-
hour interview. The interview should be on a niche subject. Don't choose your
product as the subject. The interview should be about a trend in the industry, a
question buyers have early in their buying journey, a phrase that likely resonates
with an individual your business can help, and so forth. After this one-hour
interview, that member of the thought leadership committee is done for 10
weeks, as the other members will cycle in.

An hour interview can generate a lot of content. From that one-hour interview,
the journalist can write a three-to five-page ebook on the discussion topic. The
journalist can write three or four short blog posts around niche subjects in the
ebook. The journalist can generate dozens of social media messages for Twitter,
LinkedIn, and Facebook about the quotes, stats, and trends mentioned in each
blog article. Although this content is created within a day or two, it can be
scheduled for release to the public over an entire month. Each day of the month,
one of the social media messages is published. It links to the corresponding blog
article, driving interested readers to the blog. At the end of the blog article is a
call to action to the reader that states, “Did you like this blog article on XYZ?
Perhaps you will like the ebook we published on the same subject.” Many
readers click the call to action and are brought to a landing page, where they find
out that the ebook is free. They simply need to provide their name, email, phone
number, and company URL, and they will have access to the ebook immediately.

This process can be repeated each week. If you're feeling enthusiastic, you can
repeat it twice per week or even every day. The result is a stream of high-quality