Joey and Nels delve into the seven types of sales collateral industrial marketers need to equip their sales team through a typical industrial sales cycle.
Joey and Nels delve into the seven types of sales collateral industrial marketers need to equip their sales team through a typical industrial sales cycle.
Welcome everybody to another episode of the industrial marketer podcast your place for the tips tech trends and tactics for industrials who care about driving leads to their companies. I'm one of your hosts Joey Stawn, marketing fan and follower and as always, I am joined by my cohort Nels Nels where knowledge dwells Jensen, how are you today, my friends?
Nels Jensen:I'm doing great. Thanks for the intro, Joey looking forward to diving into collateral.
Joey Strawn:You know what I? I thought this was going to be a fun episode for you. Okay, so before we dive in too deep, you know, everybody, if you've been listening to us this year, you know how much we love talking about specific things and specific marketing elements within the industrial b2b sales cycle. In the q4 year, as we lead up into 2020, we know it's budgeting season, we know it's planning season. So we're actually going to be talking about sales, all of q4. And what we're starting with is sales collateral didn't dawn Bertha? Oh, Nels this is right up your alley. And we're like, all right, where do we start in the world of sales? And you're like, how about with all the stuff you have to make? And I was like, You know what? That's a great, great idea. So now, you're the you're the content guru, you're the content guy. Tell us what makes sales collateral different than other collateral? Like, what is it? Where are we starting here?
Nels Jensen:Yeah, so you know, content marketing has, you know, if you're, if you're doing a good job of content marketing, you're educating when you need to be educating, you're convincing when you need to be convincing, you know, you're helping people figure out, you know, where they are in the buying journey with the right message at the right time in the right place, right. Sounds a lot, right? Boy, that it really is. But one of the fundamentals of that really is the education that comes through materials and sales. collateral is often technical in nature, but not always. So we're going to talk about the different types of sales collateral, but it's basically information that you're you're using to help communicate something to, you know, a target audience, it's right, and where it fits in, the different pieces fit in throughout the buying journey, right? Sometimes it's just, Oh, I didn't know something about a product all the way to very specific specs. So where does that fit in, it fits in across the spectrum of the buying journey.
Joey Strawn:That's an interesting point. And so kind of differentiating there, and we'll dwell a little bit on the collateral side of it is, you know, ultimately, and in days of yore, if you will, you know, there was a very clear distinction between what was marketing and put out on television and magazines and the newspapers, and then what the sales team a capital S, capital T, we're doing, and especially in the industrial buying cycle, where where relationships and repeat business and referrals, and all of that is so important. So nowadays, the lines have been blurred a little bit. So to your point now is understanding where everything fits into the timeline. And in our marketing, speaking to the customer journey into the accounts journey, the sales journey, you know, knowing where all those pieces fit in, really is what determines in our mind, and for today's conversation, I should say what we mean by sales collateral, so anything that ultimately is going to pick up once a true opportunity and sales process has been started. So it's not someone looking usually for general topics. It's more specified technical nails, which you had mentioned earlier, which I think is was was very true. But again, those lines are going to be blurred. And so using a tool like Pardot or Marketo, or something that feeds directly into your sales atmosphere, or sales universe, ie your Salesforce or your CRM, whatever you're using those lines, they're going to blur what stages people need, what collateral Sure, sure. But for our purposes, and what you were saying now, so this is going to be usually the more technical pieces, the more in depth pieces, the things that salesman can use can leave behind can have at their disposal that will benefit them into generating tighter turnarounds on closes and on sales and on driving revenue.
Nels Jensen:Yes, and but keep in mind when we talked about sales enablement. In a previous episode, we talked about how sales enablement really is a team sport, right? It's not it's not just about the sales clutter collateral content. It's also about where is it available? How do you find it? How is it distributed, you know, and you really If you're doing it right, you're getting some help from your engineering and your product people. When you're doing sales collateral, you know, if you do it right, you're in sync with your marketing people about where you're distributing it and who you're targeting it to, you know, sales and enablement really is a team sport. And sales collateral plays a piece for almost everyone in the company. You know, in this case, we're going to be more focused on the actual content itself. But keep in mind that sales collateral is something that many departments at the company really need to be aware of.
Joey Strawn:I was very happy because one of the notes that we had in our general outline for this episode is not only like what sales collateral is, and where does it fit into the journey and the customer journey, but then who uses it? And most of the time that go to answer would be Oh, well, the sales guy uses that. And that is where it gets to be interesting nowadays, because you can really merge that process a lot easier. So let's take a couple of you know, if you think of sales collateral as a brochure, or a one sheeter, or maybe like a written up testimonial and case study about a specific service, or product or manufacturing process, whatever it may be, however you're connecting with your prospects, if you have that sales collateral, most of the time, you're thinking oh, well, we'll give it to so and so salesman, they'll leave it behind after their meeting, they'll make notes, they'll send it to them as a follow up for a meeting. But if those assets are clearly identified and stored in a shared universe, or a shared database, and, you know, one that I'm fond of is HubSpot, so HubSpot has with that, you know, their asset library that both sales and marketing are tapped into. So as a marketing person, I would love to be able to build a workflow that's going to coincide and drop in the helpful sales collateral automatically along the way. So the salesman may not have to, and he can just sort of passively be fielding questions and really driving that conversion value. So the question of who's going to use the sales collateral nowadays is anybody that's going to touch that person from their new unknown opportunity phase to their closed one or closed loss status? Anybody in that whole process can touch that sales collateral and should be thinking of how to use it to generate a conversion better and quicker?
Nels Jensen:Sure, well, there's almost the who's using it from the internal perspective and who's using it from the external perspective because some sales collateral is designed for a certain external audience and it's going to be different than other sales collaterals so you know, actually your question about who uses it is a good one from both lenses internally and externally?
Joey Strawn:We'll dive into that a bit now so if you don't mind like how, how would you approach different content pieces for who you know is going to be.
Nels Jensen:So if you think about your fundamentals of the industrial buying cycle, right, at some point, you're talking about technological product features, you're talking about engineers, you're talking about shop managers, you're talking about end users, so that may be a different collateral than the finance people who are really curious about ROI or the show the facility manager who has you know, compliance concerns or even in this day and age with the disrupted supply chain When can we get the dang thing you know, it's it's right you know, the we are hearing more and more stories about the delivery the quoted date and the on time delivery ends up being months apart. And it's not rare it's happening in a lot of manufacturing communities if you will. So yeah, again it kind of it kind of comes back to the fundamental issues related to the buying journey you know, whether we're talking about the the content marketing aspect You know, this is a subset of content marketing in my mind so yes, right for people are using different pieces of collateral at different times in the in the buying process.
Joey Strawn:Well, and we've talked about personas and how to use them before and designing collateral and marketing pieces for those different types of personas. But I mean, one of the one one industrial example or or one that could be used in a handful of industries, but it is you know, unique or it is prevalent in the industrial sectors is very multi dimensional organization. So you may have a handful of divisions that handle different services. So you have a machinery division and you have a parts division and you have a surfaces division, but they can all ladder up and there's an ability for on a corporate level, all of you know company XYZ to help in multiple ways. Areas of another company but you if you're talking on just a division to division level having the collateral that then can ladder up to a corporate CEO level to say, Well hey, you know about our machinery division, but did you also understand that that fits into this much larger scope and if you go tap into that scope it can save you time it can save you money, it can save you hassle as a CEO, you know, having those elements to then throw up the food chain or you know, tie loose ends together that may or may not be in that one salesman's purview or that one departments or divisions specialty, having those elements and having those pieces at hand and ready to use is going to be critically important you need to build the libraries you need to clearly label the libraries and you need to make sure that at every step along the way, not only are your personas being matched with content but the entire account health you know, we hear a lot nowadays, Nelson we're gonna have an episode about it, but about account based marketing or account based experience marketing, that's a lot going on in especially in the b2b worlds b2b sales in particular the relationship and understanding all of the touch points within your client account and your prospect account and making sure that all the needs are met within that account is critically important and all of these sales pieces that we're going to talk about today fit into that timeline somewhere and fit into that journey somewhere
Nels Jensen:Yes, so let me reword that in a slightly different way just to help make it real think about this old I'm going to give you an old legacy example so you go to a trade show and you know you are representing you know, a company and you're looking at my real cool machine and you're you're the engineer and you're nerding out on the incredible specs and capabilities and can run higher throughput and less vibration and we have predictive maintenance and you know all this cool stuff right now
Joey Strawn:Man I love this machine
Nels Jensen:But right but I'm also given you some lead behinds take with us about you know hey here's the brochure on the ROI with a couple case studies because you know your finance person's going to say well who else is using this machine? Right How long is it going to take to you know return our investment so yeah the if you if you think about the digital capabilities we have it's you know the it's your trade show on a website your library that you take that you would take to a trade show is really what we're talking about how to how to store share to access this collateral the way you put it earlier is is spot on.
Joey Strawn:Well in a you mentioned trade shows well you know a bunch of trade shows are going away in the light of the pandemic and and so I've got white papers but I feel like this huge gap is just missing now you know people I think realizing without maybe that hole to fill with trade shows that they're a little bit light in some areas I mean Nels you've worked with a lot of industrials. When you look at their content libraries and their sales as that libraries do you see holes and gaps and go sure is where where a lot of industrials are missing things
Nels Jensen:Sure and and the other thing to to keep in mind is you know websites are living breathing things right there's nothing wrong with opening up the hood and you know tightening the spark plugs I realized Nobody does that anymore I keep showing my age but you know upgrades just like you know your you know preventive maintenance for machines you know, yeah should be doing some preventive maintenance on our websites too. So anyway, that's a whole nother that's a whole nother episode.
Joey Strawn:And an episode that we're going to have especially when we dive into the tech specifics of how websites function for industrials in a little bit. But But now as we were talking about like well you know what, we should probably just get on down to the shop floor because we're actually going to outline the seven very fundamental and necessary types of sales collateral that all industrials and b2b should have so before we just dance around and start throwing out examples you want to go down and
Nels Jensen:Yeah yeah this is where this is let's get to the good stuff.
Joey Strawn:All right, this is gonna be the meat of the episode so let's head down to the shop floor whoo fan, Sue is that was such a long walk down to the shop floor and there's no audio editing or whatever. So here we go. Section two. All right now is this where we wanted the meat of the episode to be so we're going to talk about the seven types of sales collateral and that all industrials need to have. These are key ones, these are ones that, you know, maybe you can't produce them all at the same time. You should have a lot of them. You want to have all them if you want a very good deep bench in this category, so I'm going to go through the list now. So if you want to give us an example, some a definition, we can dive into each one a little bit. So the number one, these are no particular order, but what number one, one sheeters. These are like fact sheets, product sheets, sell sheets, anything that can be condensed into a singular leave behind sheet. So now kind of talk about it from a content perspective. And let's talk about how we can put one sheeters to use for people.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, so let's think visually also, because, you know, the old days, how often and again, showing my age, I'm a, I'm a Progressive Insurance add in. We printed stuff out, right? Hey, this is you know, and you didn't want to print out 10 pages, but hey, a one sheeter was easy to print out and share. It was the kind of thing where, you know, maybe it wasn't just for me, but you know what the person over in that department, they really should know this, here you go kind of thing, the leave behind the trade shows that I mentioned earlier. And as you pointed out, there are different types of these two there. You know, it could be fact sheets, it could be the product specs, specifically, it could be something you know, that's a sell sheet that includes a little bit of everything, maybe some testimonial and you know, who's using it and various things like that. But people still do occasionally print things out. But also it's a lot easier to you share Hey a quick easy PDF, you know, you you pass it among yourselves kind of thing. It's just it's really what it is is easily consumable and shareable is really amounts to,
Joey Strawn:I agree in from from a connectivity standpoint. And from a tech interface standpoint, having one cheaters in a PDF stand in a PDF. function and a PDF ability is, is great because not only can the salesman be out there and they can sell it and there's going to be a lot of different ones shaders guys, we know that industrial sort of run the gamut. So it could be a product sheet of your of your eecom database. It could be cell sheets and spec specifics based on returns for your services, or you know, downtime, downtime estimates for for any of your industry. So it could be whatever it is specifically for you that you need to condense into a sheet and have a leave behind. But as a marketer, being able to include those in nurturing emails, being able to have those available on the site. So we can generate interest and generate lead conversion on site and have people raise their hand and say, Hey, I'm specific, I'm interested in this very specific type of thing or type of service. There's a million uses for for these types of one sheeters these types of cell sheets. And so outside of getting into deeper, longer in depth content that we'll talk about in just a minute. These one sheeters are just so economical, so easy to use, and they're just they're useful across the board. So yeah, number one, number one sales collateral.
Nels Jensen:And, you know, I'm a pretty literal person. So maybe it used to irk me when somebody would say, you know, in a social media post or a nurturing email, you know, they call it an infographic sometimes and it's not, but it's like, okay, the point was, it's easy to view, it's easy, you know, click here, look at it, and actually calling it a one sheet or just, you know, look at this simple PDF to learn this, you know, hit people over the head with how easy this is to use. That's some writing that people underestimate. If you tell me that this is only going to take me 30 seconds to look at. I'm more interested in doing it that I don't want to download a white paper all the time unless I'm really serious about investing if you know some time so you know, watch cheaters it's like nurturing emails, social media posts, easily shared, easily consumed. tell people it's, you know, a quick, a quick look at right.
Joey Strawn:Great. Alright, number two, sales presentation decks.
Nels Jensen:Now define them, and then we'll kind of go so as they're not going to be as public facing No, and this one, this one is kind of tricky. But you know, we put a lot of our best work in marketing into presentation. Sometimes it's for an investor, sometimes it's for clients, sometimes it's for, you know, vendors, sales pitches, proposals, whatever it is, but there's a lot of good information in there because you're doing it in a sort of commonality and language that is easy to understand for people who don't want to get into the weeds. Now, the issue with decks is that almost every deck that we've ever seen, there is nuance in the bullet points, right? So, yes, maybe you don't want to actually take your deck and put it online and say Hey, look at our presentation on this, right, you might have some of that work, or you might be able to transfer them into something usable on your website with minimal amount of added work, maybe you flesh out the bullet points, you take the notes that are in the presentation, and you add them to the bullet points. And you know, or you turn it into almost like a living blog post. But my point would be, don't underestimate that as a resource for you to create other material. Right?
Joey Strawn:I agree, I agree that the presentation decks, they're going to be a necessary resource for your salespeople. So your sales guys are gonna have the same conversations over and over and over again, they know the services, they know the benefits, they know the features, they know how to sell those. So working with your salespeople to come up with templatized decks that they can customize for the individual companies that they're talking to, those are going to really help at different stages in the buying process. And then Nels Yeah, just like you said, Take those the best features and the most convincing elements out of those sales decks and atomize those out, that's how we can then use them in a marketing aspect. We can build those into emails, we can put those in blog posts, we can use those in one cheaters or other types of sales collateral, but making sure that your salesmen are equipped with decks and outlines and presentations, for almost any common scenario that they're going to come up against is going to be very, very helpful because being able to customize those on the fly will allow them to get in more calls, make more turnarounds attach those to then the files that you have in the monitors that you're keeping on the account progressions, so you can know what they've gotten, how much information they've gotten, and at what stage in the journey, they actually exist. So those are going to be a very good just functional pieces for your sales team.
Nels Jensen:I have a hot sports take here too. Oh, please. In the near future, you'll see more people animating presentations and turning them into videos, and a more proactive, visual, engaging story.
Joey Strawn:I, I I'm going to hold you to that now. And I'll come back in a couple years when we're listening and I'm going to hold you to that and sound marinara, me and our listeners are going to make sure that that happens. But I think spot on honestly,
Nels Jensen:That's my business number five that I've come up with, to get into.
Joey Strawn:It's gonna be we're gonna be so rich. Alright, number three, we mentioned this already. But number three is the old tried and true. The white paper nails. Yes. Why do we still need white papers? They're still important though, right?
Nels Jensen:You know? So the, the gated content, right? If If you want my customer information, if you want to qualify me as a lead, and instantly start, you know, hitting me up with with sales messages. You have to provide me something in return. Right? So yeah, a white paper. And this is become really a meaningless term in some senses most Oh, almost Yeah. Because, you know, the original white papers, academia, right, it was in depth, it was basically getting into the weeds and the details behind the story, if you will,
Joey Strawn:Or an issue or a toward a logical right advancement or whatever it may be. Yeah,
Nels Jensen:Right. And, you know, white papers, you know, we're impartial, objective, talks about technology and subprocesses. They weren't about the benefits of a product. So, you know, we have basically in the marketing industry, we have sort of, you know, polluted this, this medium.
Joey Strawn:But you know, what I'd like to here's what I'd like to theorize though analysis, I'd like to theorize that what we could do is essentially take this term back for the industrial sectors, because if you are developing a new engineering solution, or let's say, an oven technology that can cure, you know, pharmaceutical type of equipment faster, better cleaner, for, you know, pandemic usage, then writing out the inexact white paper on the technological advancements behind it, and how the engineering of it actually works could then be the thing that convinces an engineer that your that your solution is worth taking up, or if you know, if you're a government agency that's trying to spread knowledge about a new plan or a new initiative that's coming out within the, you know, the manufacturing sectors. You let's, let's take that term back now.
Nels Jensen:Yes, exactly. You're exactly right. It is an opportunity to explain solutions. It's an opportunity to explain how technology works. It's an opportunity to even show examples of this in action. There There is definitely a value for white papers in terms of, we're going to give you in depth information. And in return, yes, we want some some information. But, you know, if your average blog post is, I'm just gonna say 800 words, you know, whatever I, it doesn't mean your white paper has to be 3500 words, but it should have some meat on the bones, right? It should be Yeah, going into into breadth, or depth, or something that differentiates itself from other forms of content marketing.
Joey Strawn:I agree, I think and I'm gonna, you know, hashtag take back the white paper, I think we live in an industrial sector, we work in an industrial sector. So when we say white paper, and when we use listeners to the industrial market, or podcasts, a white paper, that's what we mean, we're talking in in depth, technical or educational article about an issue, topic or process. And that's going to establish you as an industrial proof, whether it's an association, or mechanical process, or powder coating process, whatever it may be, that's where you want to take that term back. Now, again, we're talking about sales collateral here. So we want these to be taken in and digested by people who were very interested in having a conversation with your company about what you do. So these are passive viewers, you know, those passive readers, and those passive online searchers, they can find those three to 500, blog, word blog posts, these white papers, and when we talk about white papers, these are the ones that an investment is required, because the knowledge is valuable, it's very specific, and it's going to help them make a decision.
Nels Jensen:Yeah, and I think there's some people out there who are like, that's not really sales, collateral, that's something else. But as we discussed earlier, education is part of the buying journey, it's an important part of the buying journey. So yes, white papers also have shelf life. And, you know, you should be using them frequently. You know, in newsletters, you know, you can, you have a really good white paper, there's no reason why you shouldn't be re circulating that through your newsletter, some type of frequency, right is that this, this isn't a, you know, everybody's going to view this, you know, at the first or second opportunity,
Joey Strawn:So, and listen, not to get timely and not to get weird, but you know, if you're an industry or you're you're working with companies, where a government shutdown isn't as impactful for them, maybe writing a white paper about how government shutdowns impact to your business and what you can do about it that you can whip out every couple years that everybody freaks out about this. So, you know, like having those in depth articles for the times that your salesmen are going to be approached with those questions or questions that deal with those topics. It could be very helpful. So be like, man, now I gotta talk to this again, it's like, No, no, here's the paper that explains that that we wrote, because we're experts about this. So
Nels Jensen:Yeah, and someday Also, I'm going to go on a rant about good content, too, because some of the things that we're as marketers asking people information for, not a fair exchange.
Joey Strawn:We are stingy. Would we want our emails now? Watch those emails, and we want those names. Yeah, but your rent will be justified. Don't you worry. Yes. All right, number four, we're on to number four of seven. This is another tried and true, old timey social proof, case studies and testimonials. You need case studies and testimonials out the wazoo. Guys, you need to make other people believe that you're great at doing what you do because other people have said it not because you say it.
Nels Jensen:Okay, so, you know, start different rant now. Right? This is the most underutilized content marketing out there for you think about? What do prospects always ask when you're pitching them? The service? Well, who else uses it? And how, what have they done? And what can I learn? I talked to them. Yeah, okay. Well, and you know, we get wrapped up not we manufacturers get wrapped up in their NDA is their proprietary relationships. And well, if you know, we can give away too much information. Because if someone figures out how we're doing this, then they'll be copying it. Or they you know, client A, B and C don't want the world to know that we're working with them. Or if somebody finds out I've heard this many times, somebody finds out how much money we actually saved and how much we lowered the cost. They're going to want to renegotiate our deal. So there's how these sort of artificial hurdles that there are plenty of workarounds for all of them. So anyway, end of rant. Case, studies are super valuable, right? People want to know who else uses this. How did they do? What can it do for me, and you're showing people you're not just telling people you're showing people, the more numbers you can put in there, this saved X amount of Time, this led to a throughput increase of X percent. This, you know, reduced our turnaround time for, you know, inspections, whatever, whatever it is the metrics are everything and case studies. So yeah, and and it's one of those things that just is frustrating for some of us in the content world because people are afraid of what they can't do, as opposed to understanding what they can do. Yeah, and that is great stuff.
Joey Strawn:And that points us like, and that's why we put case studies and testimonials together. Because you know, we we do nails, we work every day in the b2b and industrial spaces. And a lot of those spaces are very heavily litigated. They're heavily watched and overwatched. And there's a lot of contractual things you can and can't do between industries. And so we get hit with that a lot of, well, man, we're the best at XYZ is like really, Who says that? They're like, well, this company and this company and this company, and this company is like, wow, can we talk about that, and they're like, now. And so it gets, it gets a bit tough when you're trying to put those together. And that's why like, if you have a company, that their, their founder is okay to say that they love working with you guys, but they don't want, you know, any details about their story coming out, then there's a testimonial, and maybe not a case study, but you have another company who's like, Listen, I don't care, you just can't use our name, you know, say you built an oven and say you did what it did or whatever, but just don't use our name in it. And you can build a case study around that. And so making sure that you're thinking about the best ways to tell the stories that exemplify your expertise at the solutions. And again, nobody's going to believe you, as much as they're going to believe someone else that saying you're great. So the more case studies, the more testimonials the more other people that you can document, saying that you're a good provider, or good prayer, your products are the best, or whatever it may be. That's the sweet spot. And that's what you want to gather just over time, because as Neil said before, just like white papers, testimonials can have a long shelf life. So gather those over time and just start showing, just start peppering them for all of the different benefits and features that your company has.
Nels Jensen:And the wide distribution to their, you know, if you, you can certainly atomize pieces of them if you happen to have a lot of good metrics. But you could choose to them from social media, they could be a nurturing emails, if you know, again, it's as a sales collateral tool. It has its limits in the buyer journey, right? You're you you might not be handing these out, trying to actually win somebody over to close a deal. But they are very useful in the education and sort of convincing, you know, how do you show multiple people at your company that this is something where pursuing, right.
Joey Strawn:And it's valuable, again, if you have those in the database in our repository, and one of your salesmen is talking to a CEO of some companies, like here's seven other CEOs of very similar companies who have said this and he's like, Oh, well, I know that guy, you know, they're These are small industrial world. So have that stuff at your disposal. Number five is going to be an easy one, it's going to be a quick one, it's a standard, you got to have brochures, you got to have some leaf behinds, whether they're you know what sport you're taken to trade shows, it's what your salesmen carry around, and their leave behinds or their go bags, you know, whatever it may be that you've got to have some brochures about either your services, your products, the benefits and values that you bring to clients, and to prospects. And so these may not be the most used of all seven of these, but there's still a place for some of these good old bifolds and tri folds.
Nels Jensen:Yeah so what we really what we really haven't talked about is print versus digital also. Right? And because in many ways, a brochure is just a printed blog that is not in narrative form. It's a visual subsections you know, but you're talking about benefits, you're talking about, you know, values, you're talking about use cases, you know, app be visually you're showing pictures, right. So you know, a brochure in many ways for, you know, products is a is a sort of was a precursor to a blog post. Anyway, that's..
Joey Strawn:That is that is very true. But yeah, so that's always going to be valuable, it is always going to be valuable for you to succinctly and quickly be able to summarize the value that you bring to people and leave it with them, whether that's in a digital PDF form, or whether that's in a brochure that you leave with them at a trade show. It's gonna be valuable at some stage in the sales process. So all right Moving on to number six videos come on guys you got to have some videos now tell us why videos are important.
Nels Jensen:Are you talking about a welcome to the company video? Are you talking about virtual reality training competency? You can't do this machine till you can pass our test video. Are you talking about a product specs? Are you talking about a video as simple as Hey, this is cool. Look at what we made. I mean, what kind of videos are you talking about joy?
Joey Strawn:That is an astoundingly good question now's because I will say that a lot of times we bring up video, people automatically think of YouTube videos or they automatically think of commercials or about us videos that you would house on a website. But you brought up a fantastic point is that videos can be and if produced correctly, should be a very strong tool in your tool belt, being able to show a process being able to exemplify a solution or detail, a product catalog being able to link people to very, very specific NDA based information behind firewalls and privacy settings. The types of videos you can create are endless from illustrative based videos to real world filmed videos to simulate a serious to everything in between. So the idea we put videos on here because I promise you, there has not been one instance that I have come up against where a video is not helpful and could not be utilized better in a sales process for every company that we've talked with.
Nels Jensen:And at some point will perhaps someday do something on Workforce Recruitment, which is a really growing element we're being asked to do more and more for manufacturing companies and videos is unlocking the power of that there's, as we've talked about this many times, videos are underutilized in the industrial space,
Joey Strawn:right? Yeah, they are and and we know there's an investment to them. But that's why planning ahead and making sure that they're done in a smart way with smart investments. And smart strategic decisions on what the videos are about is so important. So they're definitely a necessity, start planning them out and talk with people that you work with, about how they got their videos made.
Nels Jensen:And talk to your younger people, but doing it big Yeah. You know, though, you'd be shocked at how excited they are to contribute, right?
Joey Strawn:A lot of people can make a lot of things in video happen very quickly, if you know the right questions to ask and the right people to ask. So just start asking around. Alright, now so we've, we've come to the end to number seven. And then we're going back to tried and true, we're talking sales, you know, this is there are methods and theories and, and, and fundamentals that have just worked over time. And one of those is number seven sales scripts, they have worked, they have been proven to work because in every industry, there are common feedbacks. There are common, you know, arguments, there are common reasons that people try and back out or they try to stick with their old companies, or they're all providers that are all vendors and partners. And so having a sales script that can help train and scale in a scalable way, get all of your sales team acting with the best practices with the knowledge that you guys have gained over the years is very, very important. Most people can fumble themselves, you know, fumble around until they find the right pathway to that sale. But if you can help them get there faster, they're going to drive a lot more revenue for you.
Nels Jensen:So I'm going to guess that you're not just talking about what to emphasize, but also how to deal with objections, right?
Joey Strawn:Exactly. I mean, I'm talking about like, you know, what's the best way to start a conversation, what's the best benefit that you should start with start talking about this element, if they come back with this objective, make sure that then you take the conversation here, having that understanding of a sales script or a way that a conversation at whatever stage of the buying cycle or the sales cycle they may be and it's still very important you'll hear a lot of times nowadays that you know old sales scripts and things kind of went out the window when everything went digital. And I'm a huge proponent of digital Don't get me wrong but understanding objections understanding the path of conversations and which benefits are most valuable for which types of industries or which you know, type of buyer persona that you're talking to. Those those types of conversational bullet points and guidance tips can we can really change a conversion rate or velocity rate of how quickly someone feels comfortable and trusting enough to turn around and give you that sale.
Nels Jensen:And I suppose if you get your scripts refined enough, that could become almost like a self q&a that could be a one sheeter
Joey Strawn:Or or what Believe it or not the narration or dialogue in a video wow it's amazing how all of this can benefit from each other That's why I'm saying like you'll see oh seven things of sales collateral these are this is all a world that we're building it's like the sales collateral Extended Universe Marvel's gonna get involved it's gonna be great the SC EU
Nels Jensen:Yeah
Joey Strawn:But okay now so we've gone through all seven I'm gonna recap them real quick because you know that was a big chunk of time but so number one one sheeters number two sales presentation decks number three white papers, real white papers, Asterix number four case studies and testimonials number five brochures digital and hardcopy number six videos of all shapes and sizes and number seven sales scripts those My dear industrial marketer listeners are the seven key types of sales collaterals that all industrials need to be working towards creating that are going to make a difference in your sales cycle when your salesmen are trying to get you those deals and trying to close those books. Anything you want to add before we let the good people go today now so we've gone through
Nels Jensen:That's that is great. That is great. And we threw in a few creative ideas on how to utilize them too. So there's there's a lot a lot of good takeaways in this in this segment.
Joey Strawn:Well I am thrilled I have we I think we've had another very fantastic another very fun conversation. And if you're listening to us for the first time thank you so much for joining us on the industrial marketer podcast. subscribe to the podcast for wherever you listen to podcasts. If you haven't already, go to our website, industrial marketer comm and sign up for our newsletter, you'll get notified about new episodes when they come out. And trust me, there's a boot qoodles of content on industrial marketer comm they come out with we come out with new articles all the time out there a lot more frequently than we're coming out with episodes. So get over there, get your Fix, dive in, learn as much as you can. We're growing and we're learning communities together. The industrial marketing space is so vital and so important and so fun, that we just want to grow this community together. Follow us on social media. If you haven't already sneak into your neighbor's house and download the podcasts on their phones. Make sure that everybody's listening. And until next time. I have Joey and he has been Nell's and we have been the industrial marketer podcast and I'll see you next time.