You feel a ripple of nausea as your stomach falls. You just heard from the sales team that your company lost a hot prospect that you really wanted to add to your client list.

You'd followed the tracking notifications as the prospect read your articles, downloaded your premium content, read additional articles, and checked out the case studies and bottom-of-the-funnel content that the sales team had sent.

Your hopes were sky-high when your company's best salesperson was assigned to this prospect, and you just knew she would close the deal.

But, no... And the worst part is, you lost the prospect to a competitor you've been enviously watching win again and again.

What happened?

Your competitor offered new insight

Content is like a new baby: To the people who made it, it's perfect—even though there are hundreds of thousands of other babies out there that are arguably just as "perfect."

To capture attention and get a response, your content needs to offer new perspective, new insight. If the prospect has spent any time at all trying to find ways to solve a problem or to achieve a goal, he or she has hit up Google; and if your content just re-hashes what's on the first couple of pages of search results, you aren't going to garner much respect.