4 tips for Sales Enablement content that sells!

Sales Enablement is all about empowering salespeople to provide prospects with the right content at the right time to help them make the right decision. As Gartner explains, content is a critical component of the decision-making process. Yet 78% of buyers say that salespeople don’t provide them with the content they need. Touch & Sell gives you 4 useful tips to make your Sales Enablement content drive Sales!

What is Sales Enablement content?

Basically, sales enablement content is simply content that marketing produces for salespeople to help them throughout the sales process. Such content focuses on the prospect’s problems and explains how the company’s product or service can address them effectively.

As you’ll see, sales enablement content is a critical component of your sales performance. As Salesforce explains, 58% of prospects stagnate in the funnel because salespeople fail to deliver value with quality content. Of course, Sales Enablement content requires a close collaboration between salespeople (who are in direct contact with prospects) and marketers (who have expertise in both content creation and market data).

Our ongoing Growth Enablement efforts with our clients have allowed us to develop extensive experience in designing Sales Enablement content. Find out our 4 useful tips to make your Sales Enablement content drive Sales!

#1 Surveying your best customers about their challenges

This is a relatively common practice in the United States, and it’s surprisingly simple. Basically, you need to select a panel of your best customers and conduct a short qualitative study to pinpoint:

Specific topics to be addressed;
The most interesting content formats;
The specific information, content or pitch that ” convinced ” them to buy.

You want to better understand the impact of your existing content on prospects who have turned into actual customers. This approach will also help you identify upselling opportunities

#2 Always involve your salespeople when setting up editorial calendars

The siloed organization, which builds an impenetrable wall between marketers and salespeople, is a major obstacle to the company’s performance. We wrote about this in our latest white paper, “Th e Real Face of Sales Enablement“. On a more practical level, not involving salespeople in the process of content creation will lead to considerable hidden costs:

65% of content produced by marketing is never used by salespeople (Sirius Decision);
28% of content produced by marketing is not accessible to sales (Datadwell.com).

You can also go further and analyze sales calls. There are indeed conclusions to be drawn from successful calls but also from those that did not win over prospects. If you don’t have the resources to monitor sales calls, you can simply ask your salespeople for their insights on this subject. You can also create a Slack channel for salespeople to share real-time feedback with marketing as calls and customer meetings occur.

#3 Leverage your best-performing content

Not only will this technique help you streamline your content creation costs, it will also boost conversion. Here’s what you need to do:

Identify your best content based on unbiased KPIs: blog traffic, content your sales reps use the most in meetings, posts that got the most engagement on social media, etc.
Give old or obsolete content a fresh look.
If your content is up to date, you can already share it with all your sales representatives. To get their support, inform them about the KPIs of these contents.
You can also reuse your best content: refresh long-form content with a brand-new headline and executive summary, rejuvenate evergreen content by adding a news hook, turn your last white paper into 5 or 10 blog posts, etc.

#4 Case studies are a valuable part of Sales Enablement content

Several studies have demonstrated the interest of prospects and customers in business cases. For example, research conducted by The Marketing Practice and B2B Decision Labs found that prospects are more likely to be engaged with content that is backed up by metrics and case studies. Click here to read the full report on this groundbreaking research.

Make sure you document your collaborations with your partners while taking into consideration the legal requirements related to intellectual property.