Reinventing Virtual Events

CHAPTER 22Customer‐Centric Outbound (Oops, Sales Time!)

Change before you have to.

— Jack Welch

There's a gaping chasm between educational content that your audience wants and the selling point or value prop of your product or service.

Building a bridge between the positioning of products and the use cases they solve through the lens of the customer is the challenge of a modern go‐to‐market (GTM) content team that's aligning sales and marketing. Product marketing coughs up product diagrams and one‐pagers with bullet points on the customer's external factors, like key performance indicators (KPIs), outcomes, and quantitative return on investment (ROI) claims that look eerily similar to your competitors. If you can switch out your most significant competitor's logo with yours in your outreach, you may need to listen closely to the advice in this chapter.

We're talking about a move toward storytelling from an emotional and human‐centered perspective that can resonate with buyers versus marketing brochures. Welcome to a new paradigm for most outbound teams, even from famous unicorn companies that you'd expect would already embrace an elevated GTM motion.

You can't convince anyone of anything in sales. You need to do the discovery to uncover whether your product fits before ...