Building trust throughout the sales cycle

By Paul Davies

Tech sales can often be a complex, drawn-out affair, and with good reason. In many cases, adopting a new technology goes hand-in-hand with the customer making a fundamental change to their business or way of working. A well-planned content strategy is a great way of building trust over the course of the sales cycle and ensuring you are never far from a customer’s thoughts.

With a long sales cycle, other factors will come into play that were not there at the start – technologies will evolve, expectations will change. And you’ll probably need to get buy-in from multiple decision-makers and teams, each with different priorities. This nurturing stage is less about presenting a product and more about building trust in your brand and projecting your expertise – showing your prospective customer that you will be able to solve their problems as they evolve over time.

And what of the competition? There may be a bigger, more established company that customers can choose without being questioned internally. I had first-hand experience of this working for an advertising technology vendor, where there was a common mantra: “no-one’s going to get sacked for choosing Google.” You have to convince a decision-maker to take a perceived “risk” by choosing you over the better-known brand.

To achieve this, you must produce content that hits the right notes over time and builds a convincing narrative: you’re a smart company that can solve problems; your tech is reliable; and you can help them in ways that the competition can’t. Trust is not built overnight. There must be a strategic approach to the content you create: it must speak to the challenges that your customers – and the different teams within them – are facing.

If you’d like to find out more then we’d welcome the opportunity to have a chat and talk through some examples of successful content strategies.

You may also be interested in our latest guide, 5 Steps to Lead Generation in Tech, which you can download for free here.