Should Content Creation be Part of Prospecting Duties as a Salesperson?

Recently I was tagged recently on a question by Brandon Redlinger, he asked: "Here's the $1M question - should sales reps be writing and curating content on social? Or is their time better spent selling?"

Noah Goldman tagged me and I wrote ... "As a sales person I never make time for blog writing, don't have to. I go on calls, I write this up, version is shared internally, version is shared with the client, I get a blog. All part of a sales persons day to day activity."

So of course, I had to write a blog about it ... :)

My view is that content creation is all part of your prospecting duties as a salesperson. You make calls, you send emails (where you can use your content, or create content to use) and you share on social media to educate and excite potential and existing clients. Salespeople creating content is not new, in fact, you will see from the quote below, we have been doing this for years!

To quote Kathleen Glass, "Once upon a time, as a young sales rep, I read the daily (print) newspaper, and I clipped out articles, added a personal note, and mailed them to prospects in an envelope. Either a congrats for being in the news or something along the lines of, "I read this and thought it would be of interest." Today, social media makes that easier. Reps need to use social as one more way to connect and engage with the prospect, to bring them value and build the relationship. They don't need to blog, but they should be able to curate intelligently."

Similar to Kathleen, when I was selling in my 20's; before the internet. Prospecting for me would be:-

Cold Calling - Warming up calls with letters (before email) and then using email. It might amaze some people today, but many people didn't have email addresses in those days.

Plate Spinning - Outside of prime selling time (PST), I would what I called then "plate spin". Today this is called nurturing. All those people that said "yes, interested, but call me back in 3 months", I would send interesting or useful information to them. A Gartner report here, a white paper there. It might amaze people I would put these in envelopes and write a short note on a with compliments slip.

Now Social Selling enables us to do this faster, cheaper and at scale.

But Tim, I cannot write enough material, where else can I get content from?

One of the questions are always get asked by sales people who start down the road of social selling is, "where do I get my content from?".

Content is all around us. The penny dropped for me when I was writing an email to a VP at my previous company about how to use Twitter lists. She got a user guide on how to create lists and I got a blog. Yes, both were tweaked slightly differently, but based on the same basic shell.