Sales Enablement Content: Strategies to Drive Sales

What exactly is sales enablement content?

If you have ever tried to purchase a robot vacuum or something as simple as cereal, you know how difficult the decision can be.

In this instance, your first reaction is usually the same — look for more information to make the best decision. This is where sales enablement resources or content comes into the picture. Sales enablement content is any resource or content that

• Supports the sales process,
• Moves a buyer further along the funnel, and
• Help sales professionals be more effective at closing deals.

Because of this broad scope, sales enablement content can take many forms.

Why is sales enablement content important?

While sales enablement content can take many forms, it works to support sales teams and help customers make more informed decisions.

Here are some of the top reasons sales enablement content is vital to sales reps and your sales team:

1. Bolster the effectiveness of sales reps: First things first, sales enablement content can supercharge sales teams. It equips your sales team and sales reps with the right info and resources to communicate the value proposition of your product or service. 2. Increase the confidence of your sales team: When your sales professionals have a killer pitch deck and engaging content, they will be more confident. And confidence is key to closing sales. 3. Help sales reps work smarter: Equipping your sales reps with easy-to-access content and resources can help reduce time spent searching for information, which can streamline the sales process. 4. Drive customer engagement: Consumers today want to consume information and make decisions at their own pace. Providing them with sales content can help increase engagement and help them make more informed, more confident decisions. 5. Improve training and development: You know the sales flyer your team made for the latest product? It can also be a powerful educational tool for your sales reps. On the other hand, you can create exclusive sales training content. 6. Ensure everyone is on the same page: When you develop core messaging and disseminate this messaging, you will align sales, marketing, and other teams around a common goal. This can help reduce intra-team friction and bolster collaboration.

Sales content is instrumental in driving revenue growth and ensuring an excellent customer experience. However, creating sales content is often easier said than done. To help, we've outlined how you can optimize your sales enablement content to drive sales conversations and better results.

Understand your audience

Understanding the needs of your audience is vital for creating sales enablement content.

When you understand your audience and their needs, you will be better positioned to develop sales content that solves their problem or addresses their specific pain points. Coming from this perspective empowers you to create more valuable and relevant content, which is instrumental in building credibility and trust.

At the same time, understanding your audience can empower you to create more personalized sales content to deepen relationships and drive conversions. Understanding your audience can help you best align the content with the buyer's journey.

Defining your target audience

The first step in optimizing your sales enablement content is understanding your audience. One way to begin the process is to perform market research. Your market research should include analyzing data from many sources:

• Customer feedback
• Surveys
• Customer relationship management system
• Interviews
• Sales data
• And more

After you've developed a solid understanding of your market, you can then segment them into different cohorts based on shared characteristics, such as:

• Behavior
• Demographics
• Psychographics
• Region
• Or any other category

Identifying your buyer persona

Now that you have identified and segmented your audience, you're ready to develop targeted buyer personas.

Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer based on the market research and data you have gathered. Work to create buyer personas for each segmented audience. And your persona should include the following information at a minimum:

• Customer goals
• Customer pain points
• Customer preferences
• Customer motivation
• Customer behaviors
• Customer interests

From this point, you can effectively map the buyer's journey — from brand awareness to consideration to decision.

The goal is to map out the types of content that are most relevant to each buyer persona at each stage. Identify any current gaps in your sales content and create a plan to develop new sales enablement content that provides value and addresses these gaps.

For instance, if you know your target customer is a busy executive who struggles to find time to read, you may create concise, short blog posts, infographics, and videos.

On the other hand, you could develop case studies and white papers on topics related to the problem your target is looking to solve.

Develop your sales enablement content

Developing sales enablement content starts with your buyer persona and the ideal customer profile (ICP).

When you get it right, sales content can help drive sales, bolster customer relationships, reduce the sales cycle, boost sales, and increase the productivity of sales reps. Fortunately, you've already created the customer persona. Now, it's time to define your objectives.

Set clear objectives

By understanding your target audience, you can now define your content objectives. Ask yourself, "What do you want the content to do in an ideal situation?" Common objectives of sales enablement content include:

• Increasing lead generation
• Improving the quality of leads
• Accelerating the sales cycle
• Bolstering the productivity of the sales team
• Enhancing customer engagement
• Increasing the size of deals

Whatever your goals and objectives for sales content, it's imperative to establish them at this point. Paired with your target persona, your objectives will act like a guardrail for content creation.

Define your sales funnel

Also known as a sales pipeline or customer journey, the sales funnel is a visual representation of the stages your target persona goes through when making a purchase. While every sales funnel can be different, most will include some iteration of the following phases:

1. Awareness is when the target becomes aware of a problem, product, or service. This often happens through advertising, content marketing, or social media.
2. Interest is when your target audience demonstrates interest in your service or product and actively seeks more information. Prospects in the interest stage may contact sales reps, attend a webinar, or visit the website.
3. The consideration stage is when the target evaluates their options or compares your product with the competition's products. Prospects in the consideration stage often read product reviews, product features, and pricing.
4. Decision or purchase is when the potential customer has decided to purchase your product or service. In this phase, the prospect may negotiate contract terms or evaluate pricing options.
5. Advocacy or delight is an optional stage in the sales funnel. In either case, it's when your satisfied customers turn into brand advocates, driving repeat business or promoting it to others.

Identify the types of sales enablement content

When it comes to sales content, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. Instead, different content may work differently for different personas based on where they are in the funnel. Some of the most common types of sales content include:

• Product collateral offers information about your solution, including features, benefits, and value proposition. Examples of product collateral types of content include data sheets, brochures, and videos.
• Case studies are powerful types of content. These real-world examples demonstrate how a product or service has helped others achieve specific goals or solve problems.
• Sales slides and decks are instrumental for sales reps and help them present products or services to potential customers.
• Competitive intelligence may highlight information about the competition and strategies to differentiate your solution.
• Training and development resources can include training modules, sales playbooks, and coaching guides to help sharpen the skills of sales professionals.
• Blog posts can serve every part of the funnel, offering high-level information to very detailed data.
• Explainer videos can be powerful types of sales content. With 244.4 million people in the U.S. consuming video, it's an excellent opportunity to connect with prospects and convert leads.

Develop your sales engagement content strategy

The sales engagement content strategy is your plan of attack for developing and using content to engage your potential customers while moving them through the sales funnel. The ultimate goal of sales engagement content is to deliver relevant, personalized, and persuasive content to drive revenue growth and improve sales effectiveness. More so, your sales enablement content strategy should outline:

• The different types of content you'll create,
• The channels you will distribute the content,
• The types of topics you will cover, and
• How you will measure and gauge the effectiveness of the strategy.

How to create compelling sales enablement content?

Your sales enablement process will only be as effective as your sales enablement content. This underscores the unwavering importance of developing dynamic sales enablement content for your sales team and customers.

Fortunately, by now, you've done much of the hard work. You have identified your target audience and created targeted segmented customer personas. Now, it's time to put creativity into motion.

When creating compelling sales enablement content, you should remember to focus on the customer, keep it concise, and make it relevant to your target audience's unique needs. In addition, make sure to include the following key points.

Write engaging headlines

Whether it's a blog, flyer, case study, video, or any other sales content, one of the most important parts is the headline. On average, 8 out of 10 people will read your headline copy, while only 2 out of 10 will continue past the headline.

This means creating an engaging headline is paramount. It represents your opportunity to hook the reader and prompt them to continue reading.

Here are a few bonus tips you can use when creating engaging headlines:

• Be clear and concise by conveying the main point in a few words.
• Tap into your reader's emotional triggers with words like "shocking," "powerful," or "sensational."
• Be extremely specific to generate intrigue. For instance, instead of saying "How to Wash a Car," you could say "5 Surprising Tips to Restore Your Vehicle's Showroom Shine."
• Utilize numbers and metrics to capture the reader's eye.
• Work to create a sense of urgency with phrases like "limited time offer" and "act now."
• Try to use wit or humor to undermine the seriousness of your content.

And as with most sales and marketing teams and team initiatives, you should test, test, and refine.

Create valuable content

When creating valuable content, it's all about knowing your audience and addressing their specific interests, pain points, and motivations. You should focus on your customer — not the product or service. Work to highlight how your solution can address their needs or solve their problems. You can further improve the value of your content by:

• Delivering actionable insights, such as best practices, case studies, and tips based on real-world results.
• Employ research and data to give tangible evidence, which can help build trust and demonstrate your expertise.
• Keep it brief. Don't spend 800 words to say what you can in 300.
• Create engaging content that is easy to read and taps into some emotional element of the reader.
• Keep your eye on the customer journey and tailor every piece of content to the specific stage of the funnel.
• Be versatile with your content formats. Don't isolate yourself to one form of content. You should use and test all different types to see how your audience responds.

Use visuals to enhance your content

Coined by Henrik Ibsen, the adage "A picture is worth a thousand words" explains the importance of using visuals to enhance your content. Visuals can help break up the content and make it easier to consume.

Visuals can also simplify complex and challenging topics, making them easier to understand. While most people immediately envision pictures or photos when visuals are mentioned, there are several types:

• Graphs, charts, and data visualization tools
• Infographics
• Screenshots
• Emojis
• Interactive content
• Social media posts
• Animated GIFs
• Memes

Ensure your content is mobile-friendly

As of February 2023, 52.08% of all website visits are mobile, while only 47.92% of users come from desktops. With this in mind, it's vital to create mobile-friendly content.

Failure to do so could result in you ostracizing about half of your potential content audience. Mobile-friendly content is content that is readable and easily accessible on mobile devices. One of the most important tenets of mobile-friendly content is to use a responsive web design. Responsive websites can quickly change and adapt to the size of the user's screen.

Distribute and promote your sales enablement content

While creating great content is important, it's just as important to distribute your sales enablement content. Content distribution is getting your content in front of the right target audience.

Popular content distribution channels include:

• Blogs
• Email newsletters
• Social media platform
• Video platforms
• And more

The goals of content distribution can include attracting new viewers, increasing brand reach, and ultimately driving prospects to your site to encourage them to convert to a lead. However, you will need to define your own specific goals.

Identifying the right channels for sales content distribution

Identifying the distribution channels for your content will always be about your target audience, the platforms they use, and their preferences.

For example, if you want to engage executives and HR professionals, using Facebook as a distribution channel may not be as productive as LinkedIn. Here are a few additional tips you can use to choose the right content distribution channels or take a multichannel approach:

• Outline the types of content your audience prefers,
• Research all the different possible distribution channels,
• Learn the platforms your audience uses,
• Evaluate the suitability and effectiveness of each channel,
• Identify the types of content your audience wants, and
• Continually test and refine your content distribution strategy.

Create a distribution plan for your sales enablement content

To create a distribution plan for your sales content, you must first identify the tactics and channels that will help you drive engagement, reach your target audience, and convert.

Once you know where to reach your target audience, you can outline the ideal channels and promote your content there. Examples of distribution plan channels and promotion opportunities include:

• Organic content distribution includes using search engine optimization to improve the position of your content in search engines. It can also include sharing content on social media platforms and via newsletters.
• Paid content distribution includes putting dollars behind your content to amplify the effect. It could be sponsored content on websites, paid Google ads, or social media paid to advertise.
• Influencer marketing can be a vital cog in your distribution plan. It involves partnering with industry experts and influencers to promote and share your content with their audiences and followers.
• Syndication involves publishing your sales engagement content on third-party platforms and websites to bolster visibility and reach.

Measuring the success of your sales enablement content

After your content is published and promoted, it's imperative to measure performance. Measuring the success of your marketing and sales teams' content is vital for identifying where you can improve.

• To get started, define your goals that align with your broader business objectives.
• Identify KPIs you'll use to determine campaign success, such as engagement rates, website traffic, time on page, bounce rate, etc.
• Establish benchmarks for each KPI to determine whether you are achieving your goals or regressing.
• Actively monitor metrics to track changes and identify when progress occurs.
• Evaluate your content by looking for trends. You can also gather feedback from your sales team to learn about opportunities for improvement
• Analyze your data and adjust your content strategy as suggested, such as changing channels, revising target audience persona, or updating benchmarks.

Always update and refresh your sales enablement content

Just as the needs, preferences, and demographics of your target audience evolve, your content should do the same. More so, your sales enablement strategy and content shouldn't be on a set-it-and-forget-it cadence. You should continually update, refresh, and evolve your sales content to meet the needs of your target audience and sales team.

However, this is often easier said than done, especially when you have hundreds of pieces of content stored in different places.

Fortunately, Mailchimp's Content Studio makes it easier to synchronize, store, and manage content. Mailchimp's Content Studio allows you to manage all digital assets, including marketing files, your sales scripts, decks, photos, graphics, and more in one convenient location. It's the fastest and most efficient way to ensure your sales reps have what they need when they need it.