Why Sales and Content Aren’t the Same
(You Still Need to Sell)
TL;DR : Content WORKS, but it is not a substitute for a strong sales process.
I remember getting so pumped watching the comments roll in from literally all over the world.
“Is the app available in my country?”
“Can I use the app for [insert almost any business type]?”
“This is literally what I’ve been looking for!”
These are just a few of the validating comments I saw as the short-form content I was putting out was consistently going viral with hundreds of thousands or millions of views.
My goal was to drive registrations to gain traction for the startup I was co-founder at, and the results were better than I could have expected. We saw registrations go from ~300/month to ~2,500/month organically. The first time I put out a call-to-action at the end of a post we broke our largest month of registrations in less than 24 hours by over 40%. It was honestly mind-blowing. It hit our servers so hard that our app crashed. I thought to myself “this is it… this is the distribution we’ve needed! Hold on tight, the rocketship is about to leave!”
On the surface, the goal was achieved. A massive step forward had been taken. But there was an issue that I learned the hard way… I hadn’t dialed in the sales process, which rested solely on me.
Before that massive influx, I was calling each new user and helping qualify them to some extent. Conversions still weren’t consistent, but the personal touch went a long way. But when the content strategy started pushing so many more people, I didn’t have capacity to reach out to them, and neither did my co-founder. The only other person on our team was our solo full-stack dev, and we weren’t going to pull him off of dev for sales calls. I justified nixing the calls in my mind by doubling down on content, growing our following, increasing registrations, and building the narrative that would allow us to raise our next round.
My thought process went like this:
We’ll raise a round of funding on the social traction and increased registrations to a) improve the app to handle more and add the key missing features as well as b) increase the quality and quantity of content we were putting out.
Once we monetize, the content will drive people to the app, the app will be self-serve to help people convert as easily as possible, revenue will go up and to the right.
I raised almost $1M on this narrative. I believed it 1,000%, and the fact that I was our largest individual investor backs that up.
Here’s how it actually played out…
Our content quality and quantity increased, and we saw decent results for the increased efforts, but revenue wasn’t climbing at the pace of our exposure, and we were not converting consistently. We had begun monetizing, but our price point was too low and churn was too high. Ultimately, I had to lay off the team members I hired after closing that round of funding.
Going back to the drawing board with my co-founder and developer, we decided to increase the price of our product (which had improved dramatically over the prior year), qualify users more intensely, and I would implement a direct sales motion at the expense of our content strategy.
I built a playbook that handled different customer personas in a way that would help them move forward, putting extra personal touches on those that were within our ICP. I prioritized larger potential customers that were likely to purchase our newest and most expensive tier.
It was during the following 5 months that I more than 3x’ed our MRR.
But I didn’t put out any content because we were back to our (more than) bare bones team.
Here’s what I learned through this tough 2.5 year stretch that I just summarized for you:
Content Works: if you are consistently providing valuable content to your ICP where they are hanging out online, then you’re going to grow a following and your business will benefit from it whether it’s increased leads, brand awareness, or increased sales.
Content does not always convert: Content brought users into our funnel, but the work wasn’t done because our specific ICP needed an extra touch to actually convert 9 times out of 10. Know your ICP, test different strategies, but do not expect them to simply purchase because they consume your content.
Content is a multiplier: This applies to the good, the bad, and the ugly. We tapped into a large group of people who could use our app. It was encouraging to see so many people resonating with our value proposition and product. It’s the energy founders live for. But it wasn’t all good! Remember how the surge in registrations crashed our app? It also shined a light on the other bugs we had in our backlog that we had been punting on. Who knows how many people would have converted had our product been in a more stable place.
Content is not a substitute for sales: Had I dialed in a sales process and been seeing consistent conversion rates and known what actually converted (like I learned when I implemented direct sales), content would have multiplied the effectiveness of that and been an incredible way to layer on distribution. It’s for this reason that I almost exclusively recommend that those considering a content strategy have sales before using this marketing channel.
In retrospect, here’s what I would have done differently when content started driving all those registrations to our app:
Get very strict about who I was reaching out to rather than stopping all calls.
Time-boxed my content strategy rather than doubling down on it.
Fought hard to dial in the sales process to ensure users were converting consistently and quickly.
Then, after raising the round of funding I would have allocated a team member to own sales while maintaining a consistent content strategy.
Let’s make this actionable. Use these questions to reflect on the relationship between your sales process and content strategy:
How far can I expect my content strategy to take potential customers? What is a good hand-off point from my content strategy to my sales process to ensure potential customers continue moving down my funnel?
What does my ICP need to convert consistently? Are those requirements already baked into my sales process? How can my content strategy help tee those items up?
