11 Types of Sales Content (and How to Use Them)

Sales enablement wears many hats within an organization – onboarding new employees, ongoing rep training, sales tools – but this all boils down to making your sales team more successful.

We all can agree that making a sale is harder than ever. So, investing resources to set your team up for success will help in building the confidence needed to engage your audience across the buyer’s journey.

Consider:

• About 48% of salespeople say their pitches aren’t focused on the right things.
• 55% of businesses said their sales reps are not able to personalize the buyer’s journey because they struggle to find tailored collateral. ( MarketingProfs )
• 38% of marketers were not confident if the content they produce is serving its intended purpose. (American Marketing Association)

Your sales team is the face of your organization so it is important to have the tools available to support this approach. Viewing your sales people as “customers” when it comes to establishing a sales enablement platform is an important part of a sales enablement strategy.

What is Sales Enablement?

The foundation of sales enablement is to provide salespeople with what they need to successfully engage the target buyer throughout the buying process. Sales enablement is not just a set of tools, but a set of objectives that tie into business value and growth.

There is a foundational need for sales teams to be flexible and responsive and to align more closely with marketing teams. Modern organizations establish teams with members from both marketing and sales to support sellers with a formal sales enablement strategy. Peer-to-peer and manager-to-peer collaboration and coaching can have long-term benefits for entire teams. This is  especially true for new hires who can leverage best practices and advice from seasoned sellers. It is important that sales understand the content, are able to access the information when they need it, recall the information and messaging correctly, and deploy the content in the right context to educate buyers and convert leads.

The average company spends $10-15K hiring a sales rep, but only $2K a year training them. Investing the time and resources to develop your team can have a driving force for your company’s bottom line.

Why is Sales Enablement Important?

Sales enablement plays a key role in scaling sales organizations. It provides the sales team with the knowledge, best practices, tools and resources they need to be successful. This includes the data, strategies, and processes that repeatable and scalable across the entire team

In today’s fast-paced world, relying on your team to “wing it” no longer will cut it. Maintaining a high-performing sales force enables companies to increase revenue and enjoy shorter sales cycles. For those companies with ad hoc programs, there’s a good chance your sales team is underperforming and deals are slipping through the cracks and are not being converted.

Who Owns Sales Enablement?

In most companies, sales enablement is a joint collaboration between the sales and marketing teams. Both should work collaboratively to define what resources are needed for the program including content and sales training. Marketing is usually responsible for creating the content that the sales team provides to the buyer as well as the best practices, research and tools that sales will consume internally. It’s up to the sales team to operationalize the information and ensure the program is being put into practice.

Types of Sales Enablement

1. Persona Documents

   Just like other aspects of the buying process, sales enablement content is more effective when targeted to your ideal customer. What do they like or dislike, what goals are they trying to achieve, and what challenges are they hoping to overcome?

   Creating persona documentation can help create an enhanced understanding of your customers and their wants, needs, and preferences. A persona document consists of information like general background, age, gender, job description, the size of the company and other details of the prospect to help give a better understanding of the prospect and their pain points and motivation for buying.

2. Corporate Branding & Messaging

   One of the biggest struggles for organizations is getting everyone across the company speaking the same language about the company. If marketing, sales, and service teams are all telling a different story, the customer experience can be degraded which can lead to higher rates of churn.

   Sales people sell more than just products and services – they also sell their company’s unique value proposition, mission, and values. The world’s top companies have a strong brand that is consistent across all channels – both online and offline.

   So how do you maintain consistency across department lines?

   1. Create a Messaging Style Guide – Build a simple guide that makes it easy for reps to quickly pull up a few paragraphs about each solution they sell. These should cater to all personas and all selling situations.
   2. Use the Right Tools – Reps need a central repository so they can easily access the branded training, scripts, and recommended content that has been created.
   3. Make Cross-Departmental Communication a Priority – Develop a collaborative process for sharing communication to and from the field. Reps collect valuable insight from prospects so make sure it’s captured and forwarded to marketing for creating new content in the future.

   A company profile page or fact sheet is a great resource to help reps get up to speed with a company overview, history, mission, and vision. It can also be used in outreach emails to give prospects a general overview.

3. Competitive Research

   Good sales reps need to be able to understand and effectively sell the company’s products and services. AND, they also need to understand your competitors’ products. No matter your product or service, it is highly likely that the prospect is analyzing at least one other solution. The sales team should know how they stack up against the competition – including strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Giving reps information on how to tackle competitive objections with talk tracks to address those objections is also important.

4. Blog Posts

   As sales tools, blog posts are high-value references that can educate sales reps as well as provide a means to nurture prospects and close a sale. According to a recent HubSpot survey, 20% of marketing leaders described company blogs as one of their “most important channels” for hitting goals. Not only can they can help boost SEO and overall website traffic, blog posts can also help buyers learn more about your industry, brand, products, and services.

5. Product Sheets

   Product sheets are a handy resource for both salespeople and buyers for answering most of the buyer’s questions instantly. Today’s buyers are smarter than ever and are seeking publicly available information before ever reaching out to a sales rep. Creating content that’s best in the industry and putting it out there where it is easily found is one way to get ahead. The buyer’s experience should be the foundation for your sales enablement strategy. Identify specific triggers and touchpoints, then engage those customers with content created specifically for them and where they are in the buying process.
   These documents include vital information like:

   • Who will use or consume the product or service
   • Pricing information
   • Features and benefits
   • Use cases

6. Solution One-Pager

   A one-pager provides a high-level overview of a product or service solution. This helps sellers present the features and benefits of your solution to the buyer and address general pain points and challenges.

7. eBooks and Whitepapers

   When it comes to advancing your content strategy, both eBooks and whitepapers are considered the “next level up” from blog posts. They share some of the same similarities, both can be used as lead magnets to attract new buyers.

   Whitepapers are usually more data-driven and targeted towards individuals who are familiar with the topic. The structure of a whitepaper may differ, but the common components remain consistent – identifying the problem, followed by a methodology, guidance, and then the proposed solution. They are written in a tone that is persuasive, detailed, and authoritative to support the author’s expertise in the subject. A whitepaper targets buyers in the “decision” stage of the buyer’s journey where the reader is looking for “proven validation” of a concept to help their buying decision.

   eBooks, on the other hand, are more formally structured and typically longer. An eBook often serves as an extended guide on a topic for a general audience. eBooks perform well during the “awareness” stage of a buyer’s journey where a person is trying to accumulate more information about a particular product or service. Readers are more concerned with the “problem” part of the equation and use the eBook to gain a comprehensive understanding.

8. Case Studies and Testimonials

   Used correctly, case studies and testimonials can help boost the close ratio making them a valuable addition to the sales enablement library. They focus on the benefits your customers and clients experience because of the solution your company offers. They allow you to build trust with your clients through real-world validation. They can be used for attracting and engaging new leads, building confidence during discovery and demos, and overcoming objections.

9. Email Templates

   Marketers should make sure the sales team is equipped with plenty of email templates for various stages in the buyer’s journey – including initial outreach, follow-up, check-in emails, etc. Creating a handful of well-crafted templates save the reps time and provide them with a scalable and repeatable process for reaching out to new prospects.

10. Presentation / Sales Decks

    According to Harvard Business Review, an average of 6.8 people are involved with each B2B deal making sales decks critical if you want your message to travel from the champion you met to the buyer you didn’t.

    A good sales deck should say who you are and what problem you are trying to solve. It should outline the “before” state when the prospect has a problem and then communicate the “after” state when that problem is solved, describing how you will get them from one state to the other. The deck should tell your company’s story with customized, visual content.

11. Social Media Content

    In many organizations, sales reps are engaged in social selling across platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn. This is another opportunity to share relevant content, answer questions, and help prospects navigate the selling process. To preserve the brand, marketing should develop content which is ready to be shared on social media including information about where and when it should be used as well as pertinent hashtags.

Tag or share with a friend who might find this helpful in his/her journey. Thanks for spreading the word.