The “Trojan Horse of Sales”: Leveraging Cornerstone Content to Elevate Your Business

No matter what type of environment your business is in, elevating your sales pipeline always comes down to your ability to do one thing well: build new relationships. Often, business owners themselves are the best conduit for developing those new relationships — but as we all know, that can be rather time-consuming. So, the ultimate question is: how do we better leverage our time?

The “Trojan Horse of Sales” strategy (while dramatically named) doesn’t involve drastic process changes or rely on overly-aggressive sales tactics. It’s simply a different approach to starting those sales conversations — one that allows you to leverage your time by leveraging your business’ not-so-secret weapon: cornerstone content.

The “Trojan Horse” Approach

Again, I know that referring to something as “the Trojan Horse” may sound a bit dramatic. But trust me on this one, the efficacy this approach has to offer will more than make up for the silly moniker.

Ultimately, the Trojan Horse strategy makes it easier for business owners to accomplish three things: 

1. Leverage time for ourselves and our teams

2. Open doors to more sales conversations

3. Develop new business relationships naturally

A major advantage of the Trojan Horse approach is that it doesn’t require finding more time to dedicate to our sales efforts. Instead, it empowers business owners like us to make the most of our time by leveraging our cornerstone content — or the content we use to drive revenue for our business — to elevate our sales strategy.

How to Leverage Your Cornerstone Content

When leveraged correctly, cornerstone content can be used to identify and attract new business within our target audiences, create opportunities to connect with those individuals, and strengthen those relationships through meaningful interactions.

If you’re not sure how to start leveraging your cornerstone content, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Make Sure it’s Niched

There’s no doubt that some of you have heard me talk about the importance of niching down before. Spoiler alert: it’s about to happen again. 

If you’re creating cornerstone content for your business, and you intend to use that content to position yourself as an authority, then it absolutely has to be niched. Why? Because you can only be relevant to your audience if you’re teaching them something they can actively apply. 

If your content could be copied and pasted to another business’ site and offer the same amount of value to any given audience, then it isn’t niche. And more importantly, it isn’t worth your time, because it won’t resonate with the people in your audience that you most want to reach.

Don’t Rely on a “One Trick Pony”

If your content is married to a single channel or can only be delivered in a specific format, then it’s what we refer to as a “one trick pony.” In other words, should that channel cease to exist, then your content is gone forever and the time and energy it took to create it was all for naught.

Ideally, cornerstone content is content that can be created in any medium and can be reshared and repurposed for most  — if not all — other platforms. Whether it’s a podcast, a blog, or a video series, you want to make sure that your cornerstone content can be sliced, diced, and shared across multiple channels — preferably those that are most relevant to your niche.  

Can your video content be turned into a blog post? Can parts of that blog post be shortened into social posts? How about an email? The more you understand your niche, the easier it will be for you to construct and create multiple types of media for them to consume.

Turn it Into a Process

Perhaps the most important aspect of creating cornerstone content for your business is making sure that you can turn it into a sustainable process. Processes can be seamlessly handed over. They can be run entirely by a trusted team who can not only set a cadence for content creation, execution, and management, but also maintain that cadence. 

As business owners, sometimes the best thing we can do to ensure our cornerstone content is being created and delivered on a regular schedule is to avoid holding it hostage. Don’t keep it on your own plate. If the goal is to beter leverage your time, then leveraging the time, skills, and talents your team has to offer is the solution.

If you want to hear more about how you can leverage your content to invest in meaningful relationships and build momentum behind your business— check out this episode of the “Evolve to Succeed” podcast, where PROI’s very own, Erik Jensen, talks about what it takes to create cornerstone content, how you can use it to attract new business, and ways to build a sustainable sales strategy around it. 

And if you’re already a member of the Authority Sales Machine — you can find our Specialized Training on how to create and apply the Trojan Horse of Sales Strategy here.

Not yet an ASM member? You can find the details here. 

Other questions? Join our free “How to Fill Your Sales Pipeline” Facebook Group here.