Peter Winick explains two ways to embed your content into B2B clients: sell measurable training programs to HR, or target P&L owners with content that solves immediate business pain like leadership change, market shifts, or M&A. Position your work around business outcomes, not just skill-building.
Peter Winick here from Thought Leadership Leverage. Today I wanted to talk about 2 different ways to potentially get your content embedded into a new B2B client. So number one is skill building. So when it comes to skill building, if you're able to identify the skill that your client develops in the end user, it's pretty easy to articulate the features and the benefits and the impact of that. So if you've got a negotiation skill program, you can articulate that as a result of somebody going through that program, they will be a better negotiator at the end, and we can measure that, we can show an improvement, etc. That's pretty straightforward. The problem with that is you're going to be selling into typically the training or the HR function. Not that those are bad places to be, but they tend to not be strategic, and they tend to be a little bit more of a commodity when you're selling your content. The other way, and this is my preference in terms of getting embedded into an organization, is selling from a situation. So what does a situation mean? It means something that's going on in the business or in the market. Change is always a good thing, so a change in leadership may be an opportunity to get in. A change in market conditions, either an extreme positive or an extreme negative. We're launching a product and it did incredibly well, We launched one and it flopped. Those could be situations to come in. Changes in culture, changes in ownership. So there's a merger and acquisition, Company A buys Company B, and now there's a whole bucket of things that come up. That's an opportunity to address certain issues in terms of leadership, management, and sales processes. Again, always look for a situation that has its basis in a business. Change or a business scenario as a way to introduce your content. In that case, you're typically not selling to an HR or a training professional, but you're selling to someone that owns a P&L or is a significant decision maker in the business, and they're looking to use your content not to develop skills but to drive business or solve business pain, right? So salespeople, for example, there is a ton of sales content in the marketplace. At the end of the day, salespeople, sales professionals, and sales managers only care about a handful of things. Things like generating leads, things like closing deals, things like protecting their margins, etc. There's 4, 5, 6 things that they care about. You need to take your content and show that it actually helps in those situations as opposed to developing a skill that we may use at some point in the future. So again, 2 ways to get your content deployed. One is from a skill development perspective, the other is from a business situation perspective. And just be broad in your thinking and try to think about as many ways as you can where your content applies in both scenarios. Thanks for your time.
