Why You Need Sales Enablement Content (and Some Ideas to Get Started)

Content can make or break your entire sales process and that’s the main culprit of why many sales and marketing teams don’t tend to get along. Content is a crucial part of sales enablement as it’s basically content that enables your sales team to sell better. By equipping them with compelling resources, it can help your sales team increase sales.

Here’s why you need sales enablement content and we’ve thrown in some bonus ideas to help you get started too.

• Winning Over Leads

• Avoid Repeated Working

• Educates Potential Clients

• Establishes Your Company as an Expert

• Valuable Way to Maintain Contact With Prospects

• Ideas to Get Started

Winning Over Warm Leads

By having a bank full of useful content, your sales team will be able to dive in and pick out the content they know is going to have the most impact on their leads. Usually, by going in blind, sales teams might be offering content to leads at the complete wrong stage where the lead might not be at the purchasing decision and could be put off entirely instead.

Obviously, this works a lot better when both teams are aligned and factors such as lead scoring have been implemented through software like HubSpot. For example, both teams can agree to give prospects or leads a score depending on the actions they’ve taken beforehand.

That way, your sales team will not only put their complete focus on the high-quality leads but they’ll also know which content will be most relevant to the leads and their pain points. It’s then much easier to move the warm leads along the buyer’s journey and towards a purchasing decision compared to an initial cold call, for example.

Avoid Repeated Working

Your sales team already has enough on their plate trying to close those leads, so the last thing they need is a longer process that makes their job even more difficult. By having amazing content to rely on, it saves them a lot of valuable time without repeating the same tasks over and over again but for different leads.

Instead, with different types of content ready-made for them, your sales team can save plenty of time by jumping into the resources and quickly personalising relevant areas and sharing it to leads to build a sense of connection.

By having content on hand, it means your sales team don’t need to start creating resources from scratch and they don’t need to do the same tasks over and over again. Instead, they can focus on simply sharing the content to help close more leads.

Educates Potential Clients

It’s inevitable that prospects your sales team contact will have plenty of questions before they agree to talk to them, let alone make a purchasing decision. That’s where content produced by your marketing team can slot in perfectly, as they’ll be creating impactful resources based on buyer personas to hit every pain point out of the park.

That way, your sales team can use sales content to answer questions and provides detailed education to support their conversations when in contact with leads and prospects.

This can then have a brilliant knock-on effect on your business as a whole…

Establishes Your Company as an Industry Expert

The sales content your marketing team creates and your sales team then use go a long way when it comes to brand awareness when it’s time to sell a prospect on your product or service. When somebody has already gained some exposure to your brand, your sales team can focus on leveraging the content to solve their problems directly and dive much deeper into being the only solution they need.

The more frequently your sales team can help prospects with their problem through sales content, the more established your business becomes and the more credibility you earn. By doing this, your sales team can build a long-lasting relationship with prospects and understand the challenges they’re facing.

Through the sales enablement content, your sales team can share it to help prospects overcome their challenge. This further establishes your company as an industry expert and provides added value as word of mouth spreads.

Plus, prospects will keep you in mind first when it comes to a buying decision.

Valuable Way to Maintain Contact With Prospects

Considering your sales team will be in regular contact with prospects, sales enablement content can be used perfectly to encourage further interaction. For example, if your marketing team has developed a vault full of valuable whitepapers, eBooks and other materials, then it becomes easy to for your sales team to reconnect with prospects.

If you’ve implemented tools like HubSpot sales automation for your sales team to use, then it’s much easier for them to monitor conversations. When the time is right, your sales team can swoop in and easily share the right content with the right prospects at the right time.

Ideas to Get Started

In addition to normal training materials and onboarding documents when it comes to sales enablement, it’s vital that your marketing team is creating a library full of content and resources for your sales team to have at their disposal when they’re interacting with leads.

Some ideas for your teams to get started include:

• Informative blog posts.

• Video content.

• Case studies.

• eBooks.

• Customer testimonials and reviews.

• Interactive content.

• Email campaigns.

• Awards and recognition.

• Background and biographies.

• A portfolio of previous work.

• Newsletters.

• Sales presentations.

• Product demos.

• Comparison sheets.

• Data sheets.

• Meet the team blog and videos.

• Competitor analysis sheets.

• One-pager PDFs.

If you want more information on the types of content above and additional tips on what to focus on, head over to this sales collateral blog.

All of this might seem like a lot, but the effort from your marketing team will certainly pay off when your sales team uses the sales enablement content to their advantage. To put into perspective just how important content is, Seismic has reported the following:

• Ninety-five percent of buying decisions are directly influenced by content.

• Eighty-two percent of buyers view at least five pieces of content before they purchase.

• Ninety-five percent of those in a sales team say they don’t have enough valuable content.

As you can see, sales enablement content is extremely important. By keeping on top of the sales content-filled library, your sales team will have all of the essential information they need on-hand while in contact with leads.

At the end of the day, it makes it much easier and more efficient for them to sell and that can only happen when your sales and marketing team are aligned and working as one with one unified goal.

Now That You Know Why Sales Enablement Content is Important, Take the Next Step…

It should be clear by now that your marketing team needs to provide valuable sales content to your sales team. This content is just one part of a bigger process that is sales enablement so that your sales team can close more leads and engage buyers.

There’s a lot more to take in and digest when it comes to sales enablement, so much so we can’t possibly fit it all here. That’s why we’ve created a comprehensive sales enablement eBook for you to download to understand the process much easier.

The eBook covers a range of topics, from how you can align your sales and marketing teams, tips on increasing sales productivity, how sales enablement actually works and so much more.