I recently participated in a conversation over at Focus.com: How can you create a culture where your employees feel comfortable creating content? The idea being, that the creation of content is now an organizational responsibility as opposed to just being Marketing’s.
At one point in the dialogue, I was sick of hearing what all the pundits think (myself included) so I threw down the glove and asked a Sales Exec to chime in. Well, Alex Shootman the Chief Revenue Officer of Eloqua did. His excellent response follows:
Three interesting words in this exchange; culture, sales & content. In a vacuum these words do not seem like they should go together but let's break this down.
1) Culture is the external manifestation of the shared values of a group.
2) Sales is connecting what you have or know with what someone else hopes for.
3) Content is useful information or tools that people find helpful.
So the question of creating a culture of content management for sales to me might need to be re-framed. What parts of the sales culture are already in place that result in content being created and shared? What values always exist in great sales organizations? Since the beginning of time great sales people need to go hang out where their customers hang out and be interesting. What we need to help sales people understand is that their customers are hanging out on-line and they get interested in interesting content....
