Gartner published a very interesting study whose outcome flies in the face of traditional wisdom, certainly if we were to view typical B2B sales onboarding, training and enablement as reflective of traditional wisdom.

It draws a distinction between two types of salespeople.

Information Authority: This sales rep is known as an expert for providing informed opinion based on personal experience…and in-depth knowledge.

Information Connector: These reps serve as curators or brokers of information rather than individual experts. They largely focus on directing customers to the right information, tools and data rather than relying on individual experience.

“Not only do connectors make it easier for customers to complete a purchase; they also increase likelihood of buyers making a larger, complex and low-regret purchase by 90 percent.”

In the midst of what G2 terms a “trust crisis”, with 94% of buyers not trusting sales reps, this makes perfect sense. Information seen as coming directly from the sales rep is tainted by that distrust. Buyers cannot discern what is true and what is simply designed to induce them to make a purchase.

While intuitive in light of recent trends, the idea that a connector outperforms an authority runs counter to the long-standing truths around which sales onboarding, training and enablement has been built.  

While these programs vary, they are typically designed to establish that rep’s authority through subject-matter expertise on the product, market and customer pain points. These skills are still valuable, providing the rep in question has the self awareness to deploy the expertise appropriately.

What the study does show, though, is that there are some skills and traits which we should be emphasising more in how we train our reps and how we build our GTM organisation. In this article, we’re going to take a look at 3 big ones that can help improve your sales efficiency.

Train Content Curation, not Fluency.

Certainly fluency will always be a part of sales. The ability to talk with credibility and confidence is vital to delivering a value proposition.

Complex sales is about more than just delivering a pitch, though. It is about sense-making; helping your prospect to make sense of a complex problem and the possible solutions amidst a noisy market.

This is where content curation, not fluency, now seems to be critical.

Rather than internalise statistics, social proof, or case studies that can be dropped into conversation, reps must be able to draw on a breadth of information and deploy that information to make their point.

Internalising those sources adds a lot of credibility. Average “connectors” follow up in writing with curated information. Elite “connectors” will be able to draw on their knowledge in real time. They will sell the study or article they plan to share, and then let it make the argument for them after the fact.

Beyond training, I would expect we will see a shift in the key traits we seek in a sales hire. Curiosity has always been a valued trait at least on paper, but in practice is often overlooked in favour of fluency and confidence.

This was understandable. While sales is about listening, at a point you have to do something with that understanding or you’ll just end up with the most unbelievably diligent notes on all your competitor’s customers.

No more.

The shift towards curation gives the curious mind the edge.

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Build Content Hubs

The best reps likely are likely to do this already to some degree, and great teams often habitually read and share great content with one another. We’d suggest formalising this.

Enablement teams can maintain a repository of helpful content, indexing it according to when and how it should be deployed. This lets reps quickly draw on the repository, on a call and in follow up, to support them in their engagement.

We would recommend indexing this repository along the following lines:

• Pain Point
• Topic
• Purpose (e.g. use this when up against competitor X, or to put focus on requirement Y).
• Persona
• Demographic (you want to share appropriate sources with each individual. Don’t share TikToks with boomers, they might hurt themselves, and don’t ask Millennials to read anything over 140 characters!).

Not all content should be owned - part of the impact of connectors is that they draw on information that is unbiased. Establish processes to discover and index great external content that supports your argument and put this at your reps disposal so that they can leverage it alongside your own.

Which brings me to…

Invest in Content

Owned content will always be valuable, as it allows you to blend sense-making with establishing the credibility of your own voice.

Sales collateral has a place in this, but is inherently “authoritative”. Alongside this, invest resources into deeper sense-making content. Thought leadership that isn’t just leveraged to drive leads, but can support your sales reps throughout the sales process in influencing prospects at critical points in their journey and on topics that are essential to your value proposition.

It’s important to start viewing content not as a “marketing job”; a nice to have for brand awareness and lead generation. In a world where 80% of sales touchpoints are digital (Gartner), content is critical to sales efficienct. Stakeholders you don’t even know will conduct research and content is the only route you have to influence their perspective and support your reps in their information connector role.

Content is not a marketing priority. It is a go-to-market priority.

Technologies that can help

Digital Sales Rooms (DSR)

If you aren’t familiar with a Digital Sales Room (DSR), it is essentially an online portal to which both seller and buyer have access. It creates a hub for content curation, including marketing content, sales collateral, implementation and legal documentation, and in many cases now also e-Signature functionality.

As well as enabling simple content curation and keeping key documents together, there is the added benefit to the seller of detailed analytics into the buyer’s engagement.

The market for DSRs seems to have exploded in recent years, including both specialised solutions (Trumpet, Jointflows, GetAccept) and bolted onto enablement solutions like Seismic and Highspot.  We would suggest at least exploring specialist solutions - they are not expensive, and will provide a far better buyer experience that goes beyond simply sharing enablement and enable you to create far more seamless buyer experiences.

Content Attribution and Analytics.

Content curation is underpinned by a need for outstanding content, both owned and sourced externally. Content influences every stage in the customer lifecycle, yet most SaaS businesses aren’t able to attribute any impact beyond clicks and downloads at the top-of-the-funnel.

This makes it impossible to identify the role content plays in your sales motion, identify the right content to leverage at each stage in the buyer journey, identify content gaps, and allocate budget to the right channels and formats.

A specific content analytics solution like Demand-Genius will help you understand which micro-conversions and specific inflection points in the buyer journey you are influencing with content, and which ones you aren’t. This lets your content team do more with less, arming sales reps to excel as information connectors.

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