Sales enablement content is a subtype of marketing content and is, oftentimes, overlooked, although pretty darn powerful and cost-effective.
Sales enablement content is the type of content you serve to warm the audience. Blogs, social media posts, ads – these are the types of content you use to communicate with people not familiar with your brand (although blogs sometimes serve the purpose of making warm leads even warmer we’ll talk about that in a bit).
Sales enablement content, on the other hand, resonates with the ones that are in the middle of a sales funnel and it should move them to the bottom. Today, we’re teaching you just that – how to create powerful sales enablement content that creates an urge within a consumer to click that buy button.
Different Types of Sales Enablement Content
Although there is no strict classification, sales enablement content typically involves:
- Blog content,
- eBooks,
- Product reviews,
- Newsletters,
- Whitepapers,
The thing is, sometimes your brand-awareness content, like blogs, can play an unexpectedly good role in nudging potential customers through the sales funnel. That’s why you should track and measure content performance, draw conclusions, and tweak content so that it fits your sales enablement strategy and ticks all of the boxes for potential customers.
We can also classify sales enablement content into internal and external content. Internal sales enablement content makes it easy to onboard new salespeople and helps them develop a successful and effective customer interaction strategy and uplevel their skills so that they can improve customer loyalty.
Blogs, ebooks, and how-to guides just to name a few belong to external sales enablement. This type of content can provide the right information to potential customers on their journey and encourage them to take action.
How to Create Sales Enablement Content
1. Make Your Salespeople Work With Your Marketing Team
Both marketing and sales teams are focused on similar goals – turning leads into customers. They are your revenue team! Thus, the head of marketing, head of content, content managers, head of sales, and sales representatives should be working together. They should share information, brainstorm, and combine their areas of expertise to create quality content, and then track sales metrics and the number of closed deals.
If you are a sales rep, you should be conducting market research, adding your keywords to a content map, and collect customer data. The marketing team should use this data to craft appealing, compelling, tailor-made content that can turn a warm lead into a closed deal.
2. Define a Sales Cycle
First, you need to define a sales cycle or sales funnel and then create content that guides potential customers through that funnel. From getting them to notice your brand to making them curious about what you have to offer, making the offer, and finally, convincing them to make a purchase, you should always have a customer-centric approach in mind.
However, you should focus most of your efforts somewhere around the middle of the funnel, because that’s exactly when customers seem to be slipping away the most. So, if you hit the sweet spot of the funnel and create good sales enablement content, you’ll successfully move potential customers through all the stages of the funnel and make them buy gladly.
3. Content Distribution and Promotion
There’s no point in creating numerous pieces of sales enablement content if you don’t attract any eyeballs to it. Push everything you publish on your blog to other channels such as social media or newsletters. You can also break down each piece of content into multiple posts and create content for the entire week or use a scheduling tool to run drip email campaigns. This way, you’ll ensure you are not missing out on conversion opportunities.
4. Reuse and Improve Content
Creating sales enablement content is a never-ending process. You should constantly keep an eye on customer feedback (you can even create and send surveys to be able to understand customer psychology better) and sales performance. Use social media metrics to track campaigns and Google Analytics to track website traffic.
If the number of sales has been rising steadily, then just keep on producing similar types of content or reuse studies and old blog posts and update them with more accurate, up-to-date information.
Bonus Tips
- Make sales enablement content highly visual. Images, charts, tables, and infographics make it easy for potential customers to find the information they are looking for straight away but also drive their attention to the points that you want to highlight. If you want to take things on the next level, use Javascript chart libraries to visualize data and create interactive charts customers typically find very appealing.
- Sales enablement content should be on a sales call checklist and, thus, should be easily accessible and available to salespeople. Sales reps are supposed to share useful info with potential customers in the middle of the call and not keep them waiting for more than a couple of seconds.
- If this is possible, create sales content that is customized and personalized to your prospect’s unique needs and wants. For instance, address some of their pain points or demonstrate how your product or service solves a problem specific to their industry. This shouldn’t eat up too much of your time while the effects of providing outstanding customer experience can make your sales go brrr.
- If you want to engage existing customers, build loyalty, and improve customer retention, create customer appreciation content. Thank you messages, special discounts, coupons, and free upgrades can truly make a difference and keep most of your customers around, long-term. You can also generate dynamic QR codes to send exclusive offers and upsell options to your base of customers, or you can use this system to create a reward program.
Summary
Both marketing professionals and salespeople should work on a sales enablement strategy to finally start closing more leads instead of just generating them. Once you create powerful sales enablement content that showcases the benefits of using your products or services, it will practically start doing all the selling for you.
Author: Nina Petrov is a content marketing specialist, passionate about graphic design, content marketing, and the new generation of green and social businesses. She starts the day scrolling her digest on new digital trends while sipping a cup of coffee with milk and sugar. Her white little bunny tends to reply to your emails when she is on vacation.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nina-petrov/
