Prospects now drive much of the process for enterprise sales themselves, doing more of their own research before making contact with vendors. This means that content marketing is key—you must have the right infor- mation available for them to find and read. Before creating your content, research the current market landscape to make sure you focus on relevant topics. Look at the specific keywords that prospects are searching for, measure your performance, and continually look to improve the process. Content Marketing “Content marketing is the number one way of getting customers interested in you.” — Stefan Groschupf, Automation Hero “At the early stage it isn’t even sales – it is evangelizing. You’re feeling out the market, gathering feedback at the same time as you are soft selling.” — Ian Collins, Wysdom A specific way of evaluating buying interest and helping qualify where your prospects are in the sales funnel is to use content honey pots. These provide a variety of related pieces of content—you can then map interest in relation to the sales funnel. So, if a prospect downloads a white paper on “What is big data?” they are likely to be at the top of the funnel, compared to “Big data in production” which is much closer to the point of reaching a decision. 10