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.
What qualifies as sales enablement content?
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
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:
- Helps your sales reps become more productive
- Increases their confidence during customer interactions
- Builds a comprehensive library of resources for new employees
External sales enablement content
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.
Examples of sales enablement content
Internal sales enablement content for your sales team
Competitor research and analysis: These help sales reps understand your unique selling point (USP) and gaps in your competitors' offerings.
Battle cards: These one-page visual cheat sheets help your sales reps win more deals during the sales process. Battle cards give an overview of your offerings and how they stack up against competitors.
Sales playbooks: These act as blueprints of your sales processes and methodologies and help them navigate challenging situations.
Customer personas: These are detailed profiles of your ideal customer or buyer. It describes their interests, pain points, and other information to assist your sales reps during calls.
Sales scripts: These are detailed written dialogues your sales reps can use during prospect calls. It gives them talking points and helps maintain a consistent brand tone across your sales team.
Examples of external sales enablement materials—for your leads and customers
Customer testimonials: Testimonials in any form—video, pdf, or slides—show how your products or services have helped previous and current customers. These customer success stories act as social proof and build trust with prospects.
Product explainer videos: These videos demonstrate how to use your product and are excellent resources to help your prospects take action.
Product sell sheets: These are visually attractive one-pages that explain your product or service, its top features, and how it solves your prospect’s problems.
MOFU/BOFU blog posts: These can be in-depth guides and articles that answer your prospect’s queries, show how your product/service works, and build trust with your prospects.
E-books: These books educate and persuade prospects by answering their product-related concerns. It can be used as lead magnets or freebies with a subtle pitch for your product at the end.
Whitepapers: These are factual and research-backed documents and reports that give industry, technology, or product insights. It establishes thought leadership and helps you gain the prospects' trust.
Sales decks: These are slide presentations explaining to your prospects why they should buy your product, how it works, its features and pricing, and other details to be used during sales calls.
Webinars: These act as informational pitches and focus on specific challenges your customers face. When co-hosted with product experts, webinars can help address prospects' questions and convert them.
Help guides: These are user guides or manuals that explain how to use your product and show your prospect’s that you’ll support them after the sale.
Demos/trials: Demo/trial lets your prospects experience your product/service before purchase. It shows them how your offering can solve their problems and allows them to make an informed decision.
Use case: It shows your prospects different ways and scenarios in which your product can solve their problems.
Comparisons: Serious buyers always compare two or more products before purchase. By creating product comparisons, you help them compare and understand how your product is better than most competitors.
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:
Conduct a sales content audit
If you already have some sales enablement content/strategy, it’s best to conduct a sales content audit.
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:
- Quality and performance (how many conversions did it achieve?)
- Suitability for its intended purpose
- Accuracy and relevancy for current customers
- Alignment with the company’s branding and overall mission
This analysis will help you determine which sales enablement assets you need to update, remove, or replace to make more sales.
Start with the bottom of the funnel and work upwards
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.
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.
Conduct market research and internal interviews
If you’re starting and have nothing in hand, you need to talk to your customers and your sales team.
Customer interviews
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.
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.
Interview with sales reps
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:
- Do they know where the content assets are stored?
- Do they access the sales content library regularly?
- What are the current gaps in the content library?
- What content formats do prospects prefer?
- What are the current problems their prospects are facing?
- Is there enough vertical or use case-specific content?
This helps you get direct feedback from those using the content daily, making any tweaks necessary or desirable for improved performance.
Conduct competitor analysis
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.
To meet these demands and stay ahead of your competitors, you must:
- Focus on continuous product/innovation
- Develop creative approaches toward content creation
- Have a unique POV in the market
- Understand current market trends and leverage them
- Keep up-to-date with industry developments
- Leverage key differentiators in your content
It positions your company at an advantage over competitors vying for customer attention—ultimately leading to more robust sales performance across the board.
Repurpose existing marketing content
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.
Focus on sales enablement content to drive more conversions
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.