It can be difficult for industries who have long relied on face-to-face personal selling (e.g. pharmaceutical sales, B2B services) to understand how content marketing can help generate leads.

The current impetus for sales representatives to transition (either fully or partly) into ‘social sellers’ is based on the premise that seeding content in the virtual world –– versus using traditional interrruption selling techniques to actively ‘push’ a product –– provides a valued, permission-based information ‘service’ that can better foster brand affinity and deeper levels of engagement with prospects ‘on their terms’.

The following excerpt from the ‘Content marketing and lead generation program handbook’, courtesy of Pharmaceutical Manufacturing (PharmaManufacturing.com), demonstrates how the ‘silent conversations’ that characterise content marketing can offer as much, or even more, value than blatant in-your-face sales talk.

By Candice O’Sullivan, Director and Head of Strategy at Wellmark. You can find Candice on Google+ at +Candice O’Sullivan, follow her tweets on brand strategy, content marketing, social media and related topics @candicepill or subscribe to our blog here.