PayShepherd content goes beyond ROI by focusing on core customer values

Enterprise sales is all about navigating big budgets, complex environments, and multiple hurdles involving different stakeholders. To tackle these challenges, marketers must understand the purchasers and influencers to give them relevant, convincing content that keeps the sales momentum going and eliminates barriers to close.

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From the beginning, PayShepherd knew that addressing the processes and mindsets within heavy industries required deep knowledge of the people in charge of managing facilities, controlling finances, and nurturing relationships with contracted services.

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Having deep roots in heavy manufacturing, PayShepherd’s founders had early successes with relationship-based sales before deciding to expand their prospects towards those unfamiliar with the company. This meant proving the right product-customer fit early through a new content marketing strategy:

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• Understanding the environment, goals, and challenges of different personas within customer facilities

• Producing marketing content to convince multiple stakeholders in different departments of PayShepherd’s value, deployment process, and return on investment (ROI)

• Integrating content marketing into the lean, purpose-driven PayShepherd team

 

“PayShepherd supports different people and processes within very traditional and complex industrial facilities, requiring a content marketer that could translate our value in different ways,” said Thomas Paris, Director of Marketing at PayShepherd. “Roy Writes Content brought us marketing and copywriting experience with highly-technical software to produce sales enablement and marketing materials that covered different personas effectively.”

 

Here are three ways PayShepherd teamed up with Roy Writes Content.

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1. Messaging & positioning

 

Whether a business is early stage or mature, prospecting and demand generation activities require a strong understanding of product-customer fit and the ability to communicate it through content. Riding on the successes of early customers gaining massive cost savings realized by the PayShepherd platform (up to 15% of contracted services spend), the team needed to shift their sales and marketing strategy towards values more personal and intrinsic to the customer.

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Through interviews, industry research, and customer and competitor analysis, Roy Writes Content developed corporate and product messaging that focused on how the platform helped people do their jobs better, beyond cost savings. “Roy has leveled us up in many ways, including customer interviews, media announcements, and general all-around messaging support,” said Wesley Sessenwein, CEO and co-founder of PayShepherd.

2. Persona development

 

Good content starts with a solid understanding of the audience and PayShepherd needed to refresh and expand their existing personas to overcome recent sales blockers and train new hires. Agreeing on a new persona framework developed by Roy Writes Content, the process followed these steps for each target customer:

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1. One or more interviews with real PayShepherd customers

2. Research of industry publications, job boards, conferences, salary databases, and media to develop a holistic understanding of the persona’s motivations, concerns, reporting structure, career path, and more

3. Development and review with PayShepherd executives and department leaders

4. Final publish and extraction of key quotes for sales enablement

 

“The amount of persona information we got was pretty amazing,” shared Thomas. “Not only did we get the usual data on demographics and challenges, we also learned how to communicate with that person and the best arguments for selling. These personas are an important tool for everything we do now.”

3. Copywriting

Fundamental to any content-driven marketing strategy, copywriting fuels the pipeline for bringing prospects into the company and engaging them through to close. For an early-stage company like PayShepherd, a copywriter must be able to research, write, and incorporate feedback rapidly as there’s little existing content for sales and marketing to rely on.

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“Roy’s speed of execution was impressive – when we’d ask for a blog post and he said it would be ready in two days, we knew we’d get that first draft notification in two days,” said Thomas. “He’s also a good listener, which makes him good at understanding needs and applying the right lens of experience for focused positioning and rapid content development to make our lives easier.”