In this blog, we discuss how sales enablement content ensures that reps have on-hand collateral to answer questions and address concerns throughout the sales process. This type of content also bridges your marketing efforts with those of your sales. While the former relies on content to attract and convert leads to prospects, the latter will offer helpful information at the conversion stage of the sales process.
With an 86% increase in sales wins rates on the cards, aligning marketing and sales is critical for business growth.
The benefits of creating sales enablement content
Great content is customer-centric. It talks directly to an identified audience and addresses and alleviates specific pain points that customers will have during the sales process. Effective sales enablement content does the following:
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It allows sales reps to nurture target demographics with research-based information to troubleshoot any friction points in the sales process.
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Well-researched and insight-rich sales enablement content can create brand authority and position your business as an expert in your field.
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From middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) to bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU), good content must support and guide customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey.
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Sales enablement content can help you rank higher on search engines via linking to your internal assets instead of external sources.
Sales enablement content production and best practices
From sales rep empowerment to thought leadership and higher sales, the benefits of creating sales enablement content are obvious — but how do you decide which content to produce?
Here are a few thought-starters:
Audit existing content and look for gaps
Some of your existing work can be optimised to aid the sales process. Begin by identifying the existing content that talks to specific pain points and questions that prospects may have when engaging with your sales reps. Much of your existing content may need to be tweaked before it’s ready to be deployed for sales enablement, but it’s a quicker, less labour-intensive activity than creating from scratch.
If you’d like to learn more about conducting a content audit, check out our blog here.
Engage your sales reps from the outset
Your sales reps will be the specialists guiding prospects towards conversion, so it’s critical you get buy-in before moving ahead with content creation. Moreover, their insight into common customer questions and concerns will directly inform how relevant, helpful and engaging your sales enablement content is. These early conversations will also go a long way toward aligning your marketing and sales teams, which ensures prospects are seamlessly transferred from one department to the other.
For example, including your sales team in the content creation process — and asking them what issues they are seeing from a sales perspective — will enable you to create the collateral they need. Similarly, work with them to work out what existing or upcoming trends in your industry, i.e. people shifting to e-commerce and looking for shorter sales cycles, you could write about (or prepare for).
Settle on what type of content works best for your audience
Analyse the performance of your existing content to see what your customers are responding to. Identify areas of friction in the sales process — i.e. where sales reps are dropping the ball or prospects are losing interest because they aren’t being given the help they need. The answers to those questions will help you choose content formats and populate them with relevant, engaging information.
Here are some popular content formats that have been proven to boost conversion rates.
Blog posts: The most obvious place to begin is with blog content — it’s the easiest content to create and can generate high amounts of traffic if done right. In terms of sales enablement, you’ll want to create pieces that address prospects who are actively searching for solutions that your products/services can offer.
These blog posts should answer specific questions prospects may have at this stage: what do your products do and how can they benefit me? Is your business reputable/where’s the social proof?
Video content: Our brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. Videos on social media can generate 1,200% more shares than text and images combined. In the digital age, when attention spans are short and time’s of the essence, high-quality on-demand video content that’s helpful, human and relevant could be the difference between closing sales and losing prospects to competitors.
Tyler Lessard of Vidyard notes: “In our digitally-driven world, the true measure of whether a business is customer-centric is how simple it is for people to move through the buyer’s journey. On-demand video content that provides real value and actionable solutions is one of the most effective ways to deliver a frictionless experience, from stranger to prospect, prospect to customer and – finally – to brand champion.”
Tyler further explores how on-demand video content can help move prospects to customers in this video:
Social media: You must be present on the social media platforms that your leads and prospects use. Targeting C-Suite executives? LinkedIn is probably your best bet as it's the leading platform for working professionals to connect with each other. Selling toys for children? A clever idea would be to run paid media ads on popular children’s channels on YouTube.
Bottom line: by sharing relevant content and ‘being seen’ on social media, you make your business known.
Self-service content that empowers prospects: Sometimes people want to find solutions and answers themselves. A self-service portal with a knowledge base and a keyword-enriched list of FAQs can give prospects the information they need without engaging a sales rep. By empowering prospects with the tools to self-serve, a business can reduce friction and generate trust, which makes a rep’s job easier when it’s time to engage a prospect.
Related: For more insight into why customer self-service portals are mission-critical for businesses in the digital age, check out this blog post.
Social proof: When prospects are researching, they’re looking for validation from like-minded people and reputable personalities. For this reason, you must make partner directories accessible and display customer testimonials where prospects can see them. This kind of social proof can go a long way toward creating trust, as can case studies and any supplementary material that tells your customer success stories.
From social media to content calendars, it can be difficult to know where to start with a sales enablement content strategy. Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to identify areas of improvement or channels that can be optimised to drive sales.
The team at Huble Digital would like to help.
We are a full-service digital agency that can help you take a more sophisticated approach to your customer engagement by reducing friction and closing the sales loop. Our sales enablement tools and strategies — including cutting-edge sales processes, CRM and pipeline management — will improve your team’s conversion efficiency and maximise productivity.
For more information on our sales and CRM consultancy, click here.
