Utilise the salespeople in your business

Araminta says: “If you’re in the B2B space and you have salespeople, instead of looking at what your competitors are ranking for or going through forums, sit down with your salespeople and interview them about your customer viewpoints.

Record those interviews, go through those interviews, and you will find an amazing number of topics and keywords that your competitors might never think of. Use those to build your content strategy and rank better for keywords that your customers are actually looking for.”

Why salespeople specifically?

“The best way to get keywords is to know what your customers are looking for. What are they reading about? That can be difficult to know. The second-best way is to talk to the people who are always talking to your customers. Those are your salespeople.

You could also put customer service in there, but your salespeople are the ones who are asking questions, resolving problems, and selling a product. They are a treasure trove of information and, by not talking to them, you’re missing out on a lot of ideas and keywords.”

Should you interview all your salespeople?

“It depends on how big your organisation is. If you’ve only got 3 or 4, I’d interview all of them. Try and speak to 2 or 3 and then, every 6 months or so, interview 2 or 3 again. You want to keep talking to them and keep that steady flow of information because new things come up all the time.

You can start with that. Obviously, if you only have 1 salesperson, then just talk to them.

You want to talk to them so that you can better understand what the customer’s pain points are. I have a list of questions that I love to ask salespeople to get a deeper and better understanding of what my target customer is looking for online, what problems they have, and why they pick us over our competitors.”

What questions should you be asking?

“There’s a whole list but some of my favourite ones are: What are the main pain points of the best customers? That is quite important. The best customers are the ones who bring in the most amount of revenue, stay with us the longest, and cause the least number of headaches. What are their pain points? What are their challenges?

What are the most common reasons that people buy our product? What are the most common use cases? I also really like to ask the salesperson to tell me about a recent conversation that they had with a prospect. What was the challenge that they were trying to solve?

Also, what are the alternative products that people compare us to? Who are the easiest customers to close? There are a lot of these questions you can ask to really understand how our prospective customers think, what their challenges are, and what makes them choose our product.”

Is it worth creating a database of keyword phrases and producing content that specifically targets the phrases that you get from salespeople?

“Instead of first going to what your competitors are ranking for, start with your customer. Start with interviewing your salespeople, and then you can try and see what your competitors are ranking for.

Interview your salespeople, get that recording, and then go through that recording and listen out for interesting keywords or interesting pain points that might be keywords. By going through that recording, you’ll find many keyword ideas that your competitors would probably never even think of. They’re doing what everyone else is doing: looking at what other competitors are ranking for.

It’s a great way of finding completely new, different – and often better – keywords that no one else has thought of and are also very specific to your ideal customer.

We had a client who operates a B2B corporate expense credit card. We were doing their content marketing, and I asked one of the salespeople to tell me about the most recent prospect that was really easy to close. They said that it was someone who was looking for a cheaper alternative to Amex.

I asked myself, how would someone put that in a keyword? After doing a bit of research in SEMrush and Ahrefs, we decided to go after the keyword, ‘Amex business card no fees’. We were able to create a piece of content targeting that keyword and rank on the first page, and it brought in quite a few leads and customers.

I would never have got to that keyword by looking at their competitors. I heard the idea directly from a salesperson. We also knew that the people who were coming in from that keyword would be more likely to close quickly, so that’s another benefit to the business.”

How do you prioritise what content needs to be produced first, and which keyword phrases to focus on initially?

“We specialise in helping companies generate leads and acquire customers with content, so our primary focus when selecting a keyword is whether or not a keyword will help bring in customers.

It’s a bit more of an art than a hard science here, and there are a few different ways to do it. If you have a client that has been running Google Ads for a few years, that’s a really good place to start. If they’ve got a lot of non-branded keywords that have been bringing in conversions, you can look there. You might start by organically targeting the ones that have brought in the most conversions.

If they don’t have that, then it’s more of a hypothesis. Based on your experience working in that sector, your conversation with the salesperson, and your own experience in SEO and content, you can choose keywords that you think are going to bring in customers or leads.

Typically, the first 4/5 keywords that you go after are hypotheses, to see if they’re going to work or not. Start from there. There are a few types of keywords that are more likely to bring in leads. For example, comparison posts, ‘X vs Y’, do really well, so you might prioritise one of those. Your experience, plus the USPs of the product and a few different variables, will help you decide how to prioritise.”

Do you ideally have a different page that focuses on each keyword phrase, or do you try and combine them in a longer piece?

“For our clients, we do one page per keyword because we have found that it’s a lot easier to rank highly for a keyword when you’re going after it with a single page.

If you’re going after it with too many different pages, then there’s a lot of cannibalisation, and it confuses Google over which one they should rank. We would typically do one page, and one piece of content on the client’s websites – usually in their blog. It could also be a separate page with the goal of ranking for that keyword.”

How often should you attempt to interview those people?

“It depends on the company and the product. If it’s a really complex product with a lot of different features, you will want to talk to them more frequently. I know companies where they meet with the sales team every two weeks to find out what they’re seeing and the problems that people are facing.

Content isn’t just keywords; you also want to create content about current topics and what people are worried about. Companies that are on the ball with this will have a constant flow of communication between the sales team and the content team. If that’s not feasible, once a month or every 3 months would be good to aim for.

If you’re very new to the company, you’ll want to see them more often because you’re still trying to understand the ideal customer and the product. If you already understand those things really well, and you’re a veteran, then you could check in every 6 months.

The content we create for our clients is nearly all based on an interview with an expert. Those experts are often salespeople because we’re talking about financial services and technical industries where, in order to sell, you need to know your product really well. We often get ideas by interviewing them on those different topics.

It varies depending on yourself, the product and how complicated it is, and the industry as well.”

Can customer service teams provide different questions and additional insights from sales teams?

“Definitely. When we start working with a client, we’ll interview salespeople, product people, product managers, and ideally the CEO or someone in leadership. We’ll interview a whole variety of people to get ideas.

Customer service is a great one, there are just different questions that you can ask them. For example, what are the most common questions that people ask you? What kind of customers are the best kind of customers?

They’re not actively selling to prospects, so it might be harder to get a good understanding of their pain points. They’re only talking to customers, not prospects. What you really want is information about prospects. However, if you can talk to customer service as well, they’ve probably got some really good insights too.”

Do you ever record them with video, and try to incorporate that audio or video as part of the content?

“We primarily do written content. When we’re interviewing, it’s only for research purposes. It’s all recorded, but it’s never made public.

We only do written content at the moment. In one of Marcus Sheridan’s books, he suggests interviewing prominent people within your organisation and getting them to record a video answering the most common questions that people have, then using that video as part of the sales process.

If you have the resources for video and audio, that’s great because some people want to watch the answer or hear the answer rather than read it.”

If you don’t have a sales team, is there another way to get access to these types of keyword phrases?

“It’s a lot easier when you have salespeople, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t interview people on your team who have a really deep understanding of your target customer.

If you’re B2C and you don’t have salespeople, maybe your founder or your CEO has a really good understanding of that target customer. Maybe you want to spend some time interviewing them.

It doesn’t have to be salespeople. What’s important is that it’s someone who is talking to prospects and customers all the time and has a really good understanding of their pain points and problems.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“Spend less time putting together and going through huge spreadsheets with everything your competitors are ranking for, search volume, etc.

If you’re doing SEO, you’re probably doing it to help with customer acquisition and lead generation. Start with the people who are already talking to your prospects and customers, then you can look at that spreadsheet afterwards.

Start with that customer research to get the best keywords, and only look at your competitors afterwards. Don’t spend so much time going through those huge spreadsheets.”

Araminta Robertson is Managing Director at Mint Studios, and you can find her over at MintCopyWritingStudios.com.