Anya’s Formula To Turn Customer Questions Into A Full Content Strategy

Most ERP and CRM partners are sitting on a goldmine of blog content without realizing it.

The best ideas are already coming up in sales calls, demos, consulting conversations and customer meetings every week. Your prospects are telling you exactly what they want to know. The problem is that those questions are often answered once in a call or email and then forgotten.

That makes content strategy much harder than it needs to be.

If your team regularly struggles with the question, “What should we write about?”, here is a simple step-by-step formula you can use. Start with the questions your prospects already ask, turn them into six related blog posts, link those posts together into a content cluster, and, if you want to take it further, turn the same material into a downloadable guide that can generate leads on your website.

In other words, one good interview, or a handful of sales call transcripts, can give you months of useful content.

Here is the formula.

Step 1: Find the Questions Your Prospects Are Already Asking

Start with the people in your company who spend the most time talking to prospects. Depending on your organization, that might be your sales team, subject matter experts, consultants, product leaders or founder.

Schedule a 15- or 30-minute call, record it, and ask one simple question:

“What questions do prospects ask us over and over again during sales calls and demos?”

Don't send your subject matter expert a blank document and ask them to write a blog post. For many experts, talking is much easier than writing. Your job is simply to get the knowledge out of their head.

You may also find that your experts don't realize how valuable their knowledge is. When someone has answered the same question hundreds of times, the answer seems obvious to them. It isn't obvious to your prospects, and that's exactly why it can make great content.

If your company records sales calls and demos, you may not even need to schedule a separate interview. Take the transcripts from several recent calls and ask AI to review them for recurring questions. 

Don't stop when you get to five questions. Try to identify at least ten and then choose the five you think would be most valuable to someone seriously evaluating what you sell. Include the obvious questions, but don't shy away from the difficult ones. Prospects may want to know how much your solution costs, how long implementation takes, how you compare with a competitor, what integrations are available, what the limitations are, what can go wrong, or what type of customer is not a good fit.

And if your company doesn't have a high volume of new sales calls, that's okay. Ask your experts to think back over previous deals and customer experiences. Why have customers switched to you? What problems did they have with another solution? What questions did they ask during the evaluation? What mistakes do prospects commonly make? What do your consultants wish buyers understood before beginning a project?

Those conversations can uncover equally valuable topics.

Step 2: Write One Article That Introduces All Five Questions

Next, write an overview article built around your five questions.

The title could be something as straightforward as:

5 Questions to Ask Before Choosing [Your Type of Software or Service]

Start with a short introduction explaining who the article is for and why these questions matter. Then include each of the five questions with a useful but relatively short answer.

Don't try to put everything you know into this first article. If one question could easily require 1,000 words to answer properly, give the reader the most important information now and save the deeper explanation for the individual article you're going to write next.

Think of this first article as the roadmap for the entire series.

Step 3: Turn Each Question Into Its Own Blog Post

Now you have five more articles practically outlined for you.

Take Question #1 and write a detailed answer. Then do the same thing for Questions #2 through #5. Whenever possible, use the actual question as the title.

If prospects repeatedly ask:

“How long does a Business Central implementation take?”

don't feel that you need to turn it into a clever marketing headline. That question is already a good title because it reflects exactly what a potential customer wants to know.

Then answer it the same way your best salesperson or consultant would answer it during a conversation. Explain why the answer may vary. Talk about the factors that affect it. Give examples. Mention common mistakes. If there are exceptions, explain them. If the answer is “it depends,” tell the reader exactly what it depends on.

And don't get caught up in the idea that every article needs to be 3,000 words to be valuable. Some topics may justify that length, but others don't. In fact, some of the most popular posts on ERP Software Blog are surprisingly short. The goal is to answer the question well, not to hit an arbitrary word count.

A focused 1,000 word article that gets published is far more valuable than the 3,000-word masterpiece that nobody has time to finish.

At this point, you've created six articles from one brainstorming exercise: one overview article and five detailed answers.

Step 4: Link the Articles Together to Create a Content Cluster

This is an important step, it's easy to do and search engines and LLMs love it.

Once the detailed articles are published, go back to your original five-question article and add links to them. If someone is reading your short answer to Question #3, give them an obvious way to click through to the complete answer.

Each detailed article should also link back to the original five-question article. When it makes sense, link the individual articles to one another as well.

You have now created what marketers call a content cluster.

The terminology may sound technical, but the concept isn't. Think of the original five-question article as the table of contents and the five detailed articles as the chapters. A reader can start with the overview and explore the questions that matter most to them, or they can discover one of your detailed articles through search and then find the rest of the series.

Instead of publishing six unrelated articles, you've created a connected resource around a topic your company knows extremely well.

Step 5:  Turn the Five Questions Into an eBook (BONUS IDEA)

If you want to get even more mileage from the work you've already done, turn the five detailed articles into an ebook or downloadable checklist.

You already have most of the content. Organize the answers into chapters, add an introduction and conclusion, clean up the transitions and give the guide a strong title such as:

5 Questions Every Buyer of [XYZ] Should Ask

Then put the guide on your website behind a simple lead form.

This is particularly valuable for ERP Software Blog and CRM Software Blog members because you can use your blog posts to attract readers and then give those readers a reason to visit your own website.

For example, at the end of an ERP Software Blog article, you might offer:

Evaluating a new warehouse management solution? Download our free guide: “5 Questions Every Buyer of Warehouse Management Software Should Ask.”

Instead of simply hoping that someone reads your article and remembers your company name, you're giving an interested prospect a logical next step. They click through to your website, download the guide and become a lead.

These days AI can easily help you create an eBook without a designer.

Step 6: Social Posts

And you still aren't finished getting value from the original interview. Each of your six articles can become the source for LinkedIn posts, graphics, short videos, newsletter content and other social content. AI can help you repurpose the material into these additional formats without asking your subject matter expert to start over every time.

One recorded conversation can potentially produce six blog posts, one content cluster, multiple social posts and one lead-generation asset.

ERP/CRM Software Blog Members That Used This Formula

One of our ERP Software Blog members, SkyBill, provides a good example of how this can work.

SkyBill published an article titled “What Should Companies Ask Before Choosing a Property Management Billing Tool for Microsoft Dynamics 365?” Instead of beginning with a traditional product pitch, the article is organized around nine questions a company should consider when evaluating property management billing software.

That article can stand on its own, but SkyBill didn't stop there. They began publishing separate articles that explore individual questions in greater depth, including “How to Allocate Shared Costs Among Tenants with Dynamics 365 Property Management” and “Can Dynamics 365 Property Management Billing Handle Complex Ownership Structures?”

This is exactly the type of structure I'm recommending. Start with the questions, answer them briefly in an overview article, and then use those questions to guide your deeper content.

Hopefully they will do step 5 and create an eBook soon too.

Another good example is our CRM Software Blog member, ForgeXRM. They created a post of 17 questions asked in a prospect demo and then used that to create an ebook called “The Employee Benefits Broker’s CRM Evaluation Checklist” that is promoted with a banner in the post, to drive people back to their website to download. (They are just missing step 4 for the content cluster for now).

I’m waiting for someone to show me that they have done all five steps – if you do, let me know and I’ll promote you!

Try This Content Strategy Formula and Get 6 Months of Blog Content

Talk to the people in your company who already know what prospects want to know, or go directly to the transcripts of the conversations you're already having.

Then follow the formula:

1 SME interview or a collection of sales call transcripts → 5 questions → 1 overview article + 5 detailed articles → 1 content cluster → multiple social posts → 1 potential lead-generation guide

If you publish one article a month, that one interview has given you six months of purposeful content.

And when those six articles are finished, go back and interview your SME again or get more sales call transcriptions and go even deeper with those questions.

“What should we write about?” will no longer be a difficult question.

By Anya Ciecierski, CoFounder, ERP/CRM Software Blog