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If you’re looking to build a sales enablement strategy and are confused about what content you must create first, this post is for you.
This article will discuss the types of sales enablement content with examples and how you can create them to make your next sale.
Let’s start with understanding what sales enablement content is.
Sales enablement content helps sales teams convert leads and increase their company’s revenue. It should be tailored to the buyer’s journey, from first contact to when they purchase, so that the content answers their questions and objections.
When you’re creating this type of content, collaborate with different teams, including product and customer success to dig into what customers want. You must also look into making the content informative and engaging so that prospects are more likely to take action. It ensures your content is accurate and up-to-date, and you can strive for higher conversions at every stage of the buying process.
While you’ll find an overlap between content marketing and sales enablement content, there’s a minute difference. The former aims to educate and inform, and the latter is focused on making a sale.
Any content that helps your sales team warm up leads and takes them through the funnel qualifies as sales enablement content. In a broader sense, they’re of two types—internal and external sales enablement content.
Internal sales enablement content includes internal research based documents that equips your sales representatives with the necessary resources to close deals successfully.
Some examples include buyer persona documents, competitor analysis, market research reports, and battle cards that help SDRs understand their target audience and craft tailored pitches.
This type of content can help you achieve the following:
External sales enablement content focuses on customer-facing content. It goes beyond traditional marketing methods and aims to create resources that help prospects better understand how your product works, its value proposition, use cases, and how it compares to competitors.
In short, it engages prospects by equipping them with resources to understand your offering in depth.
The idea is to have a library of resources to allow prospective customers to clearly understand what you do and how it can help them. When you offer them that, there’s a higher chance of conversion as you’re not constantly pushing a hard sales pitch on them.
For example, you can create blog posts, case studies, e-books, sales decks, product reviews and comparisons, explainer videos, and other informative materials.
Now that you know what kind of sales enablement assets you can create to facilitate more conversions, let’s look at a few approaches to help you get started:
If you already have some sales enablement content/strategy, it’s best to conduct a sales content audit.
According to Anup Kayastha, Founder of Auto Loan Calculator, this acts as a roadmap to uncover gaps in your strategy. “It helps to identify the gaps and fill them with purposeful and relevant content, which not only empowers sales teams to effectively engage with prospects but also ensures that your messaging aligns with your overall business objectives,” he says.
When you conduct a sales content audit, it ensures all materials used to market or sell a product or service are up-to-date and effective. It involves analyzing the existing content based on the following:
This analysis will help you determine which sales enablement assets you need to update, remove, or replace to make more sales.
Alternatively, look at the bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) content first and work your way up. As your sales teams typically focus on converting leads into customers, it’s vital to prioritize BOFU content when creating a content plan.
Seth T. Godwin, Director of Brand Marketing at Performio, considers it a great approach. “That makes perfect sense on both, the sales content and sales enablement side. They are very focused on the bottom of the funnel because it’s all very product-focused. You’re trying to close the deal, so you’re going to want to have all this technical material, and all the messaging that they need to close the sale,” he says.
Focus on the customer journey that leads go through before becoming customers and develop materials that support them during each stage. Also, look for ways to personalize and make it relevant to each lead’s needs. For instance, let’s say you’re a customer service SaaS catering to healthcare and retail brands. In that case, create specific case studies for these verticals and focus on vertical-specific challenges. This’ll increase their confidence in your product—creating a high-conversion signal.
Next, create mid-funnel (MOFU) materials that provide in-depth information about your company’s products and services. You can do this through white papers, webinars, or product demonstrations.
You should focus only on top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) materials to attract new leads after this. These materials can be in the form of blog posts, social media campaigns, e-books, or other informational pieces that discuss key industry topics.
If you’re starting and have nothing in hand, you need to talk to your customers and your sales team.
Interviewing customers uncover their questions and objections when considering a purchase and give you insights into what they want. You can use this information to develop content that answers your customers' questions and address their pain points.
James Wilkinson, Co-Founder and CEO of Balance One Supplements, recommends interviewing a diverse set of customers when coming up with your sales content strategy. He says, “It allows you to identify unique pain points and preferences, leading to tailored content assets that resonate with a wider range of customers. Moreover, by incorporating diverse perspectives and experiences, sales teams can build empathy and create a more inclusive and effective content strategy that drives business success.”
Next, look at how your customers prefer to consume content. Is it through interactive visuals, video tutorials, or written sales collateral? This can help you identify channels to build a campaign on while providing content in the audience’s preferred format.
You need to remember that this is not a one-time affair. Keep a tab on what your customers prefer at all times by analyzing their feedback and sales conversations. It’ll help you adjust your strategy as their preferences shift.
Sales teams have a lot of experience in dealing with consumers, enabling them to give invaluable insights into what types of content work best and where the gaps exist. There are several questions you can ask to understand what really drives conversions. Here are a few examples:
You also need to position the conversation in a way that benefits the sales team—and not marketing. Luke Genoyer, Sales & Marketing Manager at Global Call Forwarding, says, “Abandon your preconceived notions. You might think that you understand what customers want, but sometimes you’re totally off. Marketers should go into conversations with sales & support with open minds and truly listen to what the people in these departments have to say.”
This helps you get direct feedback from those using the content daily, making any tweaks necessary or desirable for improved performance.
If you don’t know what the current competitive landscape is, you’ll never know how to outdo your competitors. Analyze competitors and understand their strategies, offerings, pricing models, and customer service history. You can stay ahead of the game by assessing what others are doing.
It also reveals improvement opportunities within one’s own company by identifying areas in products or services that lack compared to a competitor.
You must go beyond the usual “their product does X” analysis. Look at how their customers respond to their offerings, dig into what makes it work, and identify opportunities to differentiate yourself.
To meet these demands and stay ahead of your competitors, you must:
It positions your company at an advantage over competitors vying for customer attention—ultimately leading to more robust sales performance across the board.
You can save precious time and resources while providing valuable insights when you repurpose marketing content.
Look at existing marketing assets such as blogs, website copy, graphics, social media posts, and videos to identify the ones you can reuse as sales enablement materials. You can also use it as inspiration to create new sales assets, such as one-pagers, checklists, and FAQs, that can educate prospects about specific products or services.
It’s also a good practice to evaluate data from your marketing campaigns to understand which content assets your prospects resonate with the most. You can use those to create impactful sales enablement materials explicitly tailored for your target market.
Creating effective sales enablement content is essential for the growth of your business. Marketers can provide their sales teams with the information, resources, and support needed to drive higher conversion rates and better customer experiences.
You can create high-value content that helps boost sales performance by leveraging data-driven insights and leaning in on your key differentiators. It creates a system where marketing and sales align—resulting in a tailored content strategy that drives revenue.
Looking for a sales enablement tool to manage and access your content in one place? Sign up for a free trial of Content Camel today.
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Content Camel is a sales enablement tool used for sales content management. High-growth sales teams use our system to quickly find and share the right content for each specific sales situation and measure content use and effectiveness.