For two weeks in December 2013, ShareBloc ran a contest to find the Top Content Marketing Posts of 2013 as part of our open beta launch. More than 640 voters cast their ballots 7,678 times to narrow a competitive field of 175 nominations to the top 50.
SAP content was featured prominently as 
well, placing two posts in the top 50 with 99 Facts on the Future of Business and The Secret To Amazing Customer Experience: Know Thy Customer. We covered eight key areas in sales & marketing, including Sales Management, which we define as the best practices of sales including aspects of human capital management, logistics and operations.
Given SAP’s broad coverage in CRM, HCM and ERP, we thought the SAP blog would be the ideal place to dive into the six sales management winners in the top 50:
Objection-Handling Technique: The Agreement Frame by Alen Mayer
#1 in Sales Management, #10 in the Overall Contest
Why it was chosen: Perhaps one of the most critical skillsets honed by the best salespeople is how to handle objections. After all, not all leads start warm. Alen notes that 44% of salespeople give up after the first objection, regardless if the lead is qualified or not. In a tight 9 minute video/podcast, Alen walks through how to re-frame objections, changing the conversation from confrontational to agreement all but changing the word “but” to “and”. There’s no better way to increase the percentages in your sales funnel than working on existing leads and Alen’s video can help you do that.
Click here to watch the whole video/podcast. It’s a quick and helpful 9 minutes.
Key Quote: “Only 8% of salespeople left to sell after 4 objections! New rule is needed: 92/8 rule.”
Experiential Selling is What Leads to Buyer “Aha Revelations” – An SSTools Classic by Nancy Nardin
#2 in Sales Management, #20 in the Overall Contest
Why it was chosen: Nancy’s experiential approach to selling is a great best practice on how to trigger emotional engagement from your sales prospect, or when your prospect “gets it.” Nancy calls these “aha revelations” and in this post, she contends that “aha revelations” can be encouraged by firsthand experience and investigation. Nancy outlines the key tools in your experiential selling toolbox: Trials and Pilots, Promotional Videos, ROI Tools and Marketing Content. If you use one, some or all of these tools effectively, you can get your lead to the “aha revelation” much more quickly.
Key Quote: “Experiential selling taps into the prospect’s innate desire to learn through a more emotionally connected encounter. Put your valuable time and money on the fact that they are willing to be actively involved in the experience, and indeed, that their preference is to actively discover.”
The SaaS Buying Experience: Mapping How Businesses Buy Software by Scott Albro
#3 in Sales Management, #34 in the Overall Contest
Why it was chosen: If you’re been paying attention, you may have noticed enterprise software has shifted towards SaaS and the cloud and by extension, so has the buying and selling experience. Former Focus Research co-founder, Scott Albro, outlines in a thorough post how the SaaS buying experience has changed in 27 distinct steps, and how your marketing and sales team has to adapt to take advantage of these changes. I’ll draw attention to step #9: “Collects basic info – the buyer uses Google -> 3rd party sites -> vendor content to collect basic information and understand market landscape.” With more of your customers going to Google before your sales team, it’s imperative to make sure your content marketing strategy is defined and works with your sales team.
Key Quote: “(…)There’s been a major shift in power from software vendor to software buyer. Much of this is due to the internet of course. Buyers have access to more information online, are able to more easily connect with their peers, and can identify and evaluate different options. For example, pricing information is now readily available for most software products – again, something that was uncommon a few years ago.”
Beat Status Quo With a Great Value Proposition by Jill Konrath
#4 in Sales Management, #41 in the Overall Contest
Why it was chosen: Sometimes the simplest ideas are the most important. This certainly holds true with Jill Konrath’s slideshare on how to better engage your leads with a stronger, more relevant value proposition. Think of your value proposition as the kernel from which your entire sales team grows from; if it’s not great, your sales strategy and execution will also be poor. Jill outlines three key attributes that makes a great value proposition: business driver, movement and metrics.
Jump through the quick 42 slide deck for a great primer on building strong value propositions for your product.
Key Quote: “Because strong value propositions jolt your prospects out of their complacency with the status quo (…) and they pique your prospect’s curiosity about what’s possible. [This] is important because [the status quo] is your biggest competitor (…) especially since making any change is more work for your already stressed out prospect. You have to give them a really good reason to take action.”
[NOTE: We just realized this was a post from 2012! We’ll let it slide this time since the lessons here are as relevant in 2013 and 2014.]
7 Key Performance Indicators That Every Sales Manager Should Use by William Tyree
#5 in Sales Management, #43 in the Overall Contest
Why it was chosen: Author William Tyree admits that revenue-per-sales rep is the tried-and-true metric that most sales organizations measure their team on. While topline growth is important, the convergence of marketing and sales has opened multiple new Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that give sales managers a more nuanced, and potentially accurate view of sales performance. Using a baseball analogy, marketing and sales technology enables Moneyball in Sales Management, which means metrics like lead response time or opportunity-to-win are not only metrics that can now be measured, it can also be measured in real-time and at scale. One particular KPI that interests this marketer is the usage rate of marketing collateral. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from this contest, good marketing is becoming increasingly important to the sales process. If you don’t leverage your marketing team’s content, you’re missing out on 60% of your leads.
Key Quote: “As a marketer that has worked on many sales & marketing alignment projects, I can say with confidence that much of the content created for sales enablement purposes goes unused. This can be because sales reps didn’t get favorable responses to it in the past, or because reps forget it’s available, or even because they didn’t know it was available in the first place. This is surprising because the right marketing content can provide tremendous value to reps. Great content such as whitepapers and videos actually offer reps an opportunity to follow up with leads to see what they thought of it.”
B2B Marketing: Why Marketing shouldn’t promise BANT qualified leads for Sales by David Green
#6 in Sales Management, #50 in the Overall Contest
Why it was chosen: David Green’s great post on moving beyond BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) leads is a good reminder that nobody wins in the turf war between marketing and sales. BANT is not customer-centric, because most leads are not ready to provide one or all of the requirements in BANT before marketing hands off the lead to sales. Instead, David outlines in his follow-up post to replace BANT with PAM or Persona qualification, Account qualification, Motivation.
Key Quote: “Instead of promising sales leadership the moon and the stars, maybe we marketers need to be a little more realistic. Marketing can’t deliver BANT leads without an inside sales operation. Instead, Marketing can deliver leads that are most likely in the target market and more likely to have a desire to speak to Sales. Yes, most of those leads will not convert any time soon into revenue. But, neither will cold calling. That is the point of reference for marketing leads.”
You can view the rest of the top 50 content marketing winners here, including all the sales management nominees. We cover other important topics including lead gen/inside sales, marketing automation and sales enablement.
The contest may be over but the conversation continues on ShareBloc. Hundreds of users read content every day on ShareBloc’s sales & marketing feed. Like the contest, the content is all posted and curated by our users. Come post your favorite marketing content, even if it’s your own, and let the community know how you feel about their content.
David Cheng is the CEO & co-founder of ShareBloc. Launched into open beta in December 2013, ShareBloc is a platform for like-minded professionals to share, curate and discuss business content that matters. ShareBloc is backed by angels like 500Startups. You can find him @davidpcheng and @sharebloc.