If your marketing team grapples with demonstrated impact on sales opportunities and Closed Won deals or your sales team gets ghosted after call one, consider self-solutioning content.
“It’s our goal to speak to each individual on our buying committee in terms understandable and important to them. They all have something different they’re looking for and self-solutioning helps them to see themselves individually in our solution,” explains Michael Passanante, SVP of Marketing & Communications at Capital Rx.
Self-solutioning content helps those individual buyers envision themselves using your solution independently by offering tools like checklists, diagnostics, or ROI calculators. This type of content showcases the unique advantages of your products or services. And it also allows buyers to draw their own conclusions about its relevance to their needs.
Outside of direct sales conversations, a buyer’s proactive effort to apply your product or service to their specific needs or challenges is the most reliable indicator of intent.
Capital Rx offers next-generation pharmacy benefits technology and solutions and has multiple buyers on its buyer committees within employer organizations across multiple sectors and health plan executives including CEOs, COOs, VPs of Pharmacy and technology stakeholders.
I recently had a conversation with Michael to cover his three key principles behind effective self-solutioning content at Capital Rx.
1) Buyer-Driven Process
Capital Rx’s “Pharmacy Benefits 101” is a series of 8-targeted, medium-length blog posts. Each is around 1000 to 1500 words and takes on a different element of the Capital Rx value proposition from Pharmacy Rebates to Medicare, Traditional to Pass Through Payment Models, Drug Management Programs, Specialty Drugs, and Successful Implementation of Capital Rx programs.
While each covers a different part of the Capital Rx value prop, all eight are structured to invite a buyer-driven self-solutioning process. Each post has a series of 5 to 8 diagnostic questions to guide buyers to recognize their own gaps or pain points. The diagnostic questions are followed by positioning language that presents Capital Rx as a potential solution. This method ensures that the company is introduced as a solution only after the buyer has independently identified their needs.
2) Personalization for Each Buyer
Within this shared structure, the content of each post is designed to speak to specific buyer’s individually. For example, the post “Pharmacy Benefits 101: Successful Implementations” speaks broadly to the stakeholders that might need to be involved in implementing full service pharmacy benefits solutions or SaaS technology depending on the nature of the buyer.
The post “Pharmacy Benefits 101: Specialty Drugs” goes deep on the questions that benefits administrators have around classes of higher-cost medications used to treat more complex and chronic medical conditions that have larger price tags. The post offers some baseline data on the average cost of brand, generic, and specialty drugs as well as the drug name, generic name, and disease addressed by the dozen most common specialty drugs.
3) Contribution to Intent Data
Combined with other data sources, self-solutioning content can help identify buyers who may be receptive to initial sales outreach. It can also provide important signals for buyers who are currently engaged in an active opportunity. It can be served up as part of a drip sequence to those who visit your website or offered up at the end of the first discovery call to encourage internal collaboration among the buying committee.
Michael notes, “Our job as marketers is to ensure that we bring the entire buying committee along for the ride to get to the closed sale.” Self-solutioning content can help to bring each member of the buying committee along their journey in a parallel but coordinated way.
Self-solutioning content is a powerful tool in modern marketing, enabling buyers to independently recognize the value of your solution. By focusing on personalized, buyer-driven content and integrating it with intent data, companies can more effectively advance buyers through the sales process – from discovery to close. As Michael and Capital Rx demonstrate, self-solutioning content can help your company foster deeper connections with potential buyers.