What is sales enablement content?
No seller should work alone — they require the support of marketing teams that can enable them with content to effectively engage prospects. Sales enablement materials are critical for reps to confidently communicate the value of a product and demonstrate their industry expertise. Sales content is both internal and external-facing; internal sales content is aimed at educating employees, while external content showcases a company’s products or services to prospects.
Sales enablement content examples
What is sales content? Sales content can cover everything from foundational persona documents all the way to product training, sales scripts, and customer-facing marketing. Here are a few examples of sales enablement content you’ll want to consider for your team:
- Persona documents: To communicate effectively, sales reps need to understand a buyer’s motivations, needs, and pain points. Buyer personas equip reps with research and insights on each target audience, allowing them to connect the dots on how a product solves a buyer’s challenge and helps them achieve their goals.
- Product training: Product training, such as product marketing one-pagers, manuals, and use case demos, delivers information on features and benefits, as well as context on how a company’s product fits into the broader industry.
- Competitor research and analysis: Battle cards and competitor marketing materials help reps understand the market and set them up to better communicate product differentiators or persuade clients to switch.
- Scripts: To scale outreach while maintaining consistency, call scripts, demo presentations, and email templates get your sales team on a consistent path. Standardizing this type of sales enablement deliverable ensures a strong brand message and makes it easier to update them in the future.
- Customer-facing marketing materials: These assets provide education on an industry challenge or topic rather than overtly promoting your products. Whether it’s a blog post, case study, ebook, or video, injecting thought leadership into your sales enablement assets drives engagement with prospects.
Did you know?
81%
of B2B marketers find a documented strategy beneficial because it aligns team members around goals.
What is a sales enablement content strategy?
A sales enablement content strategy lays out why you’re creating content (goals and audiences), what you’ll do (formats, tactics, schedules), and how you’ll measure impact (metric-based benchmarks). A content strategy is most effective when documented. This allows you to track progress, make updates as needed, and align stakeholders. The Content Marketing Institute found that 81% of B2B marketers believe a documented strategy is beneficial since it aligns team members around goals.
Why is a sales enablement content strategy important?
Sales enablement content is proven to benefit seller confidence, prospect engagement, and bottom-line revenue. Here are just a few of the ways content can support your business:
- Improve the sales process: 57% of the buyer’s journey takes place before a prospect ever reaches a rep. Sales enablement content can prime the prospect with information and education before they reach the rep, as well as ensure that reps are ready to come out of the gate strong when they connect with the prospect for the first time.
- Enhance go-to-market alignment: A sales enablement content strategy ensures that every rep is working off the same information, including clear audience analysis, product definition, and strategic brand messaging. Organizations with strong alignment are shown to deliver “38% higher sales win rates and 24% faster revenue growth.”
- Increase seller performance: Sales content helps reps address challenges and offer solutions, as well as improve the efficiency of the process by providing templates and scripts that reduce manual effort and increase the scale of their outreach.
Reimagine your Sales Content
What does great sales enablement content include?
Not all content is created equal. Effective content creation for sales enablement requires a targeted approach that considers the needs of your audience and communicates a consistent message with clear and concise language, engaging stories, and data-based evidence:
- Tailor content to the persona and buyer’s journey. Use examples and language that are relevant to each buyer’s needs. Content that’s tailored to a specific audience and their stage in the funnel is more likely to get a response and build trust with your prospects.
- Bake consistent, repetitive messaging. Before writing anything, make sure to identify your core messages. Highlight these clearly throughout the piece. Repetition ensures that your message sticks and is remembered by readers as a key takeaway.
- Use clear and concise language. Straightforward language is easier to read for busy buyers. Content should be quickly digestible, with sub-headings and short paragraphs.
- Include engaging stories. Use engaging stories to draw in your prospects. Including examples and customer stories will help them envision themselves using your product.
- Build in data-based evidence. Prospects are looking for validation, so don’t hesitate to include statistics and studies from reputable, recent sources.
How to create a winning content strategy
It’s time to put your strategy in place, and while it might not always be a linear process, there are a few steps that are critical to creating a strategy that delivers results.
- Audit existing content. Review your organization’s existing sales enablement content, and identify which assets are still relevant and usable. Some may just need an update, while it may be time for others to retire.
- Analyze usage and performance. Take time to review sales enablement content analytics to see how it’s used and how it performs. If you don’t have a tracking tool in place, you might survey your sales team for anecdotal feedback.
- Talk to your sellers. Gather feedback from your sales team on their biggest challenges and what types of content might be most effective for them.
- Prioritize customers. The primary goal of your strategy is to meet the needs and pain points of your audience. Frequently ask yourself, “Is this content valuable for our customers?”
- Create a scalable and repeatable process. The key to an effective, long-term program is developing a consistent and efficient system for creating and distributing sales content. This includes a means of producing content, as well as infrastructure, like sales enablement content tools, that make content discoverable to sellers.
- Organize and store content easily. Nothing is worse than docs that get passed around over email or lost on a personal Google Drive. As your content program grows, make sure you invest in infrastructure, such as a sales content management tool, to manage sales content.
- Enable sellers. Provide sales the tools, training, and resources they need to effectively use sales enablement content. Don’t forget to establish a way for them to give feedback.
- Evaluate metrics and performance over time. Implementing a reporting/tracking system for your content will allow you to understand its performance over time and make informed decisions on when to create new content or retire what’s not working.
Ready to do more with your enablement content?
The Seismic Enablement Cloud™ is a unified solution that streamlines the process of creating, managing, and distributing sales enablement content. At Seismic, we provide the rights tools that enable sellers to find, personalize, and share memorable content with prospects or customers, including:
- Content management: Organize your content in one centralized location, and give your reps the ability to search for materials in an always-current content library.
- Content personalization: Reps can easily personalize content and deliver a targeted message to prospects based on their persona and stage in the buyer’s journey.
- Content distribution: Send content faster, while maintaining compliance – helping alleviate the workload on reps and enabling them to scale.
- Content analytics: Track the performance of sales content and access detailed analytics on its usage and effectiveness.
Discover Seismic’s sales content management capabilities, or get a demo.
