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Building Credibility
Outbound Prospecting
Building Your Lifeline on Inbound
Breaking into Strategic Accounts
Daily Workflow
Additional Resources
1. What Changes?
Content 301 is when you’re ready to actually invest in content as an extension of you and your personal brand.
This is different from Content 201 in a few distinct ways:
Content 201
1-to-many nurture sequence
Create content from capture doc
Post a few times per week
Targeted to lurker personas
Warm up accounts indirectly
Content 301
Build audience and followership
Create content from POV
Post daily
Targeted to multiple personas
Warm up audience
The metrics of success stay the same in our perspective – look at the later modules on this topic – since we still want to generate qualified inbound pipeline. But as you move toward an evangelist play, you’ll start considering follower counts and building an engaged audience.
The most substantial change comes from how you start creating content. The capture doc is now the foundation to your work, not the end goal. It’s only a starting point for the Content Prism and now you add an essential new ingredient: a point of view.
2. Creating Your Point of View (POV)
The world is filled with noise. The mistake most make when it comes to becoming an evangelist is they automatically think their POV is valuable.
No offense: it isn’t. To most of your target audience, you’re just another voice in the noise. There’s no strong reason to pay attention to you… yet.
This is why starting with Content 201 is so crucial.
- Your capture doc helps you ID what pains and problems your audience is experiencing
- Your content becomes “validated” → content that speaks to your intended audience
- You have a feel for articulating headlines and frameworks
- You understand what it takes to write (decent) content
Now, we’re going to add a layer to the Content Prism. Your Point of View.
Your POV is a mix of three crucial ingredients:
- A unique perspective or opinion
- A powerful story that informs your unique perspective
- An insight that you can’t find elsewhere
This framework is directly informed by Morgan’s work as a brand strategist for years with multimillion dollar brands. These same ingredients are essential to making you successful in articulating your POV.
Florin is a well-known sales trainer and influencer on the platform. Let’s breakdown the key elements of his POV.
- Unique perspective or opinion: “There’s a lot of information out there about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to outbound and prospecting. A lot of it comes from coaches and influencers that have not been operators in an SDR/AE role or B2B SaaS environment in years.”
- Powerful story: “I was lucky enough to be the first sales hire at Loopio and have had the opportunity to be a part of and contribute to the exponential growth that had led us to a sales team of ~50 strong. In my 6.5 years at Loopio we grew revenue by 65x.”
- An insight you can’t find elsewhere: Florin’s recurring series on SDR tips from the trenches, informed directly by his experience, but particularly the way he structures his email advice and copywriting advice (his niche).
Jen Allen is the Chief Evangelist at Challenger and is a well-known host of the Winning the Challenger Sale Podcast. Let’s break down her POV.
- Unique perspective or opinion: “38% of complex B2B purchase attempts end in "no decision" and involve ~11 customer stakeholders. We're not losing to our competitors. We're losing to customer risk aversion.”
- Powerful story: Jen has a unique position where she can use Challenger’s own story (by extension) and their deep research that has been published in multiple books and referenced across the sales industry. But personally – she also has an extraordinary career in enterprise sales that adds credibility to her content.
- An insight you can’t find elsewhere: Ways to navigate the complex enterprise sale by resolving buyer group conflict, developing commercial insights, and more Challenger-related concepts.
Nate Nasralla has recently blown up in the enterprise sales space due to his unique style of content and his POV.
- Unique perspective or opinion: “Sellers don’t close deals, buyers do. The make-or-break moments in a complex deal happen without sales reps in the room.”
- Powerful story: In addition to Nate founding a product that helps sellers navigate his POV, he also was an enterprise seller and previous founder that sold into enterprise.
- An insight you can’t find elsewhere: Nate’s “The Enterprise Sales Playbook” is the linchpin of his insight: how to build champions when you’re not in the room. This is built from his unique experience and shared with graphics, narratives, and more.
So break down each element of your POV:
- A unique perspective or opinion: This is the “bright line” you draw in the market for your audience. What will people learn from you? Why should people listen to you? What is the flag you’re planting in the ground?
- A powerful story: What’s your background or current position that provides credibility to your perspective? Is it your experience? Research? Experimentation?
- An insight that you can’t find elsewhere: What will people keep on coming back to you for? What’s something they can’t get elsewhere? What’s the nugget of truth inside your perspective that you can always return to?
3. Attention is Temporary. Credibility Isn’t.
People confuse attention for credibility.
- Attention is a short-term reason for people to pay attention to you. Attention is often generated through personality, spectacle, controversy, and value delivery.
- Credibility is a long-term reason for people to pay attention to you. Credibility is built through consistency, generosity, trust-building, and value delivery.
So yes, there’s overlap. And having lots of followers does tend to lend you credibility.
Over-optimizing for attention is why accounts can grow quickly. They’re fun to pay attention to, engage with, and participate in the spectacle. But it’s also the reason many accounts cannot sustain engagement. They haven’t built up enough credibility.
Accounts will earn thousands of followers in a month but then 90 days later, they can’t seem to sustain the kind of engagement they had previously. Their followers have now tuned them out because the credibility hasn’t been built up.
This is why each element of your POV is crucial.
- Your unique perspective gives them a reason to continue to pay attention (it will draw a line in the sand for your audience and pique curiosity)
- Your story builds credibility, so as they pay more attention to you and learn more about you, your story reinforces the attention you’re earning.
- Your insight gives them a reason to keep on coming back. If they can’t get what you offer from anywhere else, that builds credibility and attention.
When you add this layer to your Content 201 strategies, your content really can take off!
4. Developing Your Insight
This is it. The big kahuna. This section will transform everything about the way you create content for your audience. If there is one thing that will change everything about content, it’s the insight that you’re delivering. So, how do you do it right?
First off: what’s an insight? We like the way Challenger proposed it in The Challenger Customer:
What do our customers fail to fully understand about their business, but should?
You’re not reframing a product. You’re reframing their problem.
We eat our own dog food, so consider this graphic we created. We share this out regularly.
This isn’t promoting a social selling service. It isn’t talking about a product feature. It’s not even talking about an identified pain (Content 201).
It’s an insight we have, that the way people think about social selling is all wrong.
The general framework that The Challenger Customer proposes is as follows:
- A. Current Pain. What is the current problem they’re experiencing? What are the pains that they have? This is stuff you should have identified in Content 201.
- Missing? Instead of articulating some fun headlines, now it’s your job to point out what they’re missing about their own problem. What are the dots you can connect that they simply cannot connect by themselves? This is the “frame breaker,” something that once you know it, you can’t un-know it.
- B. Solution. Now, you tie it back to some solution that you offer. But that solution should seem obvious based on the insight you provided. The reframed problem flows naturally to the solution as offered.
5. Tie Your Content Together
The full exercise of developing your insight looks something like this:
This is an actual insight mapping exercise we’ve done. We’re not keen on violating copyright, so we’d encourage you to look into The Challenger Customer and follow their prescription for developing the insight at a really deep, meaningful level.
But suffice it to say:
- Take all of your buyer’s stated needs (yellow) and lay them out, one-by-one. Use Content 201 and social listening to list them all out.
- Write out all of your differentiators (green) one-by-one. These are the things that make YOU or what you OFFER different from anyone else in the market.
- Write out the higher order concerns of the buyer’s. Sure, they’re talking about their day-to-day problems. But what higher order problems do they lead you to? These are usually things like “profitability,” “efficiency,” or other executive goals.
- Then map them together. Take the stated needs and tie a key insight to one of the higher-order concerns. Connect the dots and help your buyer rethink their problem.
This is a very powerful exercise tying together what people think they know about their problems and compare it to what you know about their problems.
6. Evolving the Content Prism
In Content 201, you learned about the Content Prism as a way to map pain points to themes/topics and develop them into headline concepts for posts.
In Content 301, we’re going to take this a bit further and incorporate your POV into some of the posts.
Here are some options to consider:
The Pure POV Post
This is a post where you simply write up your perspective on an issue. Tell a story, share an interesting insight, or plant your flag.
The Insight-Only Post
The first sentence should be your insight. “Social selling is more than posting. It’s a mix of many activities.”
Then, explain your insight in further detail.
The Problem-Insight Post
The first sentence should be the problem. “Sellers keep on telling me they can’t get people to pick up the phone.”
Then explain where they’re going wrong using your insight.
The Insight-Story Post
Tie together your story from your POV and tell how you came to understand the problem differently.
Usually story posts will start off with a “context setting” sentence like:
“In 2007, I sold my biggest deal ever. Then everything went wrong.”
There are many other options to generating posts using your POV (and in particular, your insight) but this is what upgrades your content from a simple 1-to-many nurture sequence in Content 201.
Share your story. Offer your perspective. Demonstrate your insight. These are the key ingredients to attracting new clients at a high level with great content.
