Why Should Every Sales Team Invest In Sales Enablement Content?

Content is almost always associated with marketing first. But we tend to overlook how sales and content are equally closely related. Sales enablement content is a powerful tool that helps your sales team carry out their tasks a lot more effectively and efficiently. Your product or service may have a lot of potential and your sales team may be extremely skilled, but they still need access to resources for closing deals faster. Sales enablement, as the name suggests, is a way of empowering your sales team and helping them be more productive. This includes providing the tools, data, and resources they need to achieve success.

Role Of Sales Enablement

Content plays a central role in sales enablement. According to a survey, 71% of tech companies consider content development as one of the top sales enablement practices for success. Sales enablement content is also important for educating your buyers and helping them make a decision faster. But quite often, there is a lack of content in sales that can even result in lost deals. Research by Forrester says that almost 57% of B2B buyers find the materials shared by vendors to be useless. This is both unfortunate and alarming. It indicates that businesses need to put a lot more effort into creating quality content capable of influencing buyers while making the job easier for marketers and sellers. 

What Is Sales Enablement Content?

Sales enablement content is any material, insight, or resource that helps your sales team convert more customers. It helps them answer customer questions instantly and efficiently without having to turn to the product team or escalate the query to their higher-ups every time. Content can be shared by sales reps with customers as learning material if they wish to know more about a product and its features. Creating material that answers all the questions for both the sales team and the buyer is the key to creating quality content in sales.

Source: MarketingCharts

So ideally, every business needs to focus on creating two different categories of enablement content. One category is for the sales team, which helps them answer questions and engage more effectively with prospects. Read more about sales engagement tips. The other is for buyers, which your sales reps can share with prospects to influence their purchase decisions.

Types Of Sales Enablement Content

In listing the different types of content in sales that you can create, we’ve divided them into seller-focused and customer-focused content. 

1. Seller-focused sales enablement content

Enablement content that is created for your sales team usually consists of material that gives them some valuable insights into the buyer’s journey and the selling process. Every business may have sales training programs for its employees. But research by Xerox shows that 87% of what sales professionals learn in sales training is lost within 12 weeks. So retention from training alone is not very reliable. That is why having perpetual and up-to-date sales enablement content they can refer to ensures that they have access to the information they need for productivity.

Here are a few types of seller-focused content that you could create.

2. Customer insights

Documentation of customer insights gathered by the marketing team can be an important type of sales enablement content that helps sales reps maximize their conversions. Insights like the Ideal Customer Persona, customer pain points, buying behaviors, job title, decision-making authority, etc. can tell your sales reps how to go about the interaction with a prospect. Proper documentation of such customer insights is crucial and coordination between the marketing and sales team in this regard is essential. 

3. Email templates

Your sales reps have to communicate with prospects over email at various stages of their journey. The message at each stage has to be different and targeted to push the prospect further down the sales funnel. So having access to a bunch of email templates is absolutely necessary for the sales team. Having readymade templates that they can directly access and easily edit also saves time and makes them more productive.

4. Calling scripts

Another similar resource the sales team can get a lot of help from are calling scripts. Sales involve a lot of cold calling and follow-ups. If the sales reps don’t know what to say or how to start a conversation, you risk losing the deal at the very beginning. Calling scripts can tell sales reps how to start and carry forward a conversation, along with the key points to focus on.

5. Product descriptions

A salesperson can only help a buyer make a purchase decision if they are clear about the product’s features and functionalities themselves. Brief product cheat sheets can help sales reps answer questions quickly and own the conversation when interacting with prospects.

6. Market and competitor research summaries

Sales teams need to have access to any relevant market and competitor research data as well. If you expect your sales reps to convince buyers that your solution is the best option out there, they must know what others in your industry are doing. Summaries of research reports must be readily available for their reference.

Customer-Focused Sales Enablement Content

Customer-facing content in sales enablement is also meant to be available to sales reps. This is content that sales teams can share with prospects whenever they see a window of opportunity to influence their purchase decisions. This kind of content is supposed to educate the customer about the product and the value it promises. 

Commonly used customer-focused content includes the following.

1. Case studies

Case studies are a good way to demonstrate to buyers how your customers have achieved better outcomes using your product or service. These are real-life accounts of actual customers that describe what challenges they faced, how they implemented the solution, and how it helped them. Since it usually involves visible measurable outcomes, a case study can be very helpful to a buyer’s decision-making process.

2. Product comparisons

Often buyers are torn between your product and a competitor’s. In such cases, your sales rep can turn the decision in your favor by offering a product comparison. This is a guide that compares the various features of the two products and shows why your product is a better choice. It is usually created in a tabular or infographic format making it easy to scan through.

3. Product demos

Prospects may sometimes want to see a product in action. This is where a product demo video or tutorial can come in handy. Sales reps can share these videos with prospects whenever they see an opportunity to explain the features better. For instance, say you are selling a mobile app builder. You could create a brief tutorial video or a screen recording of how the platform works. Whenever a prospect wants a demo, sales reps can simply share a link to the video giving the buyer a glimpse of how the tool is used.

4. Whitepapers/ reports

Any kind of research may be valuable to customers too. Whitepapers, surveys, or research reports that highlight a common pain point and indicate how your product is an ideal solution could influence buying decisions as well.

Should You Invest In Sales Enablement Content?

Looking at that long list of sales enablement content types that you need to create, it might seem like a lot of work. But the returns are worth it. It ensures that your entire sales team is equipped to handle customer conversations effectively and increase conversions. Without good enablement content, there would only be a few prodigious salespeople who bring you results while others would be struggling to figure out how to get it done. 

Sales enablement content equips your entire sales team with the best practices, insights, and resources that they need to achieve results. It reduces their dependence on sales managers and other teams. It also aligns sales with marketing as most of the insights that sales require are often consolidated by the marketing team.

Good content gives your sales team –

• Easy and quick access to relevant information in one place
• Better speed, efficiency, and consistency of execution
• Clarity of thought and direction for their actions
• Continuous learning and better retention of knowledge
• Almost 15% higher win rates
• Better alignment between sales, marketing, and support teams 

How To Create Awesome Sales Enablement Content?

To create high-quality and valuable content, you will need a solid sales enablement strategy to start with. This includes what types of content you should create, what tools to use, when and how to use the content, and so on. For creating quality content, it is important to standardize, templatize and automate as much as possible. This ensures that there is consistency in your content and your sales team has no difficulty following it.

Automation tools for sales enablement content creation

1. SalesBlink

For streamlining your content creation and managing your content projects better, using a sales tool like Salesblink can be a good idea. Salesblink can help you with email personalization when working on your email templates for sales enablement. It offers easy image and text personalization in just a few clicks. It also offers A/B testing of email templates and cold calling scripts. This can help you decide which of your content is likely to perform better and drive more conversions. SalesBlink also enables you to create a sales sequence with ChatGPT to make the job even easier for the team.

2. Narrato

Another great tool that can help you with sales enablement content creation is Narrato. Narrato is a content creation and workflow management platform where you can create and collaborate on your content. The platform has a powerful editor that offers grammar, readability, and other improvement suggestions to help you create quality sales content. A very useful feature for your content is the customizable Templates on Narrato. You can create templates for various content types, save them and apply them to content tasks when needed. For instance, you can have a number of templates for your emails, a template for product descriptions, templates for whitepapers, and so on. 

The platform also allows for easy collaboration with your sales and marketing teams as well as freelancers. Assigning tasks, sharing content through public links, and providing feedback through in-line comments are extremely easy on Narrato. Freelancer payments can also be managed from the platform itself. You can keep all your sales content neatly organized under projects and folders. You can plan and track your sales content tasks with the content calendar and Kanban board. 

Staying on top of the latest content marketing trends and meeting your content requirements won’t be difficult as long as you have these tools handy. 

Best Practices For Creating Flawless Sales Enablement Content

Good sales enablement content is very important for any business. Some best practices to adopt when investing in the content are the following.

1. Define the goals

If you are creating content, you must have an end goal. That tells you what you hope to achieve with this content. The same goes for sales enablement content too. Define the objectives of both your seller-focused and customer-focused sales content. For seller-focused content, say, your objectives could be to educate and upskill your sales reps, provide them with up-to-date data and insights or share best practices to better engage with prospects.

For customer-focused content, the goals could be to provide information about the product or service, provide a comparison with competing products or share real-life outcomes to help their purchase decision.

2. Keep the focus on buyer experience

Whether you are creating seller-focused or customer-focused sales content, the focus should always be on providing a better buyer experience. The purpose of any kind of sales enablement content is to enhance the buyer experience so that buyers come to trust the business and make a decision in your favor. Make sure that your content helps salespeople understand the buyer’s needs and journey.

3. Make it a continuous effort

Creating sales enablement content is not a one-off activity. It is an ongoing process. There will always be new data, research, and insights that your sales team needs to be aware of. Also, customer demands may keep changing over time, so your customer-facing content also needs to be updated regularly. Content creation should be a continuous effort.

4. Have a dedicated sales enablement team

For an ongoing process, it is important to have a dedicated team or at least one person who is responsible for overseeing all the related work. You can have a dedicated sales enablement team who would be responsible for regularly creating new sales enablement content and upgrading the existing content. 

5. Track results and share reports

To gauge the success of your efforts, it is important to track the results achieved with your sales enablement content. Set relevant metrics to measure how your content has contributed to increasing your sales. Also, make sure to share these results with your sales team to demonstrate how leveraging content has improved their sales performance. This motivates and encourages them to adopt such best practices every time.

Start Investing In Sales Enablement Content!

Sales enablement content is an important part of any sales strategy and it is important that your sales team makes the best use of it. The benefits of sales enablement can be easily measured by simply comparing how it has increased the productivity of your sales team over time. So, investing in sales enablement content – that is investing in the tools and processes it requires to create quality sales content – is a must for every sales team. You are sure to witness returns in the form of increased conversions and better customer loyalty.

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