How Content Strategy Can Support Sales Enablement

Sales is tough business. As a key pillar of any company's growth strategy, sales reps face enormous pressure. They are the strikers of the team and need the support of marketing to put points on the board and win clients.

Viewing content creation through the lens of sales enablement is a strategic way to assist sales teams in outreach and growth. Sales enablement content provides your sales team an armada of resources to deploy when connecting with potential clients. It educates, trains, and provides alignment under one company message. It guides best practice for selling with the added benefits of increased revenue, more customers, and more brand awareness in your industry. 

So, how can we implement sales enablement in our content strategy and content management? Below, you will find everything you will need to begin the process today.  

Steps To Sales Enablement 

Sales and marketing are both needed in the sales enablement process. They work closely to define the resources needed and the process of training sales personnel communicate company messages effectively. While CMOs lead on branding and messaging, CSO insights can help ensure the sales team's need are met while keeping company communications in sync.

These steps will help your marketing and sales teams collaborate in the content strategy:  

Step 1- Audit Content

You likely already have a good deal of quality content, but does it cover all bases and are your sales team using it consistently? Conducting an audit will help to highlight any pressing content needs.

Document everything you have available and ask sales what they would find most helpful with client interactions. They may have noticed gaps in the materials they use at different stages of the buyer's journey, or have suggestions for improving content's effectiveness or usability. For example, your buyers might benefit from a compelling case study to help convince their internal committee. Or sales might like a product demo deck and script to help them wow prospective clients and consistently close the deal. 

Here are some key types of content that could become part of your strategy:  

Step 2 - Refresh Customer-Facing Content

• Whitepapers and eBooks - Gated content is critical for lead generation and qualification, but it can also be used throughout the sales process to inform prospects. B2B sales team members can slice and dice content from these sources to provide a searingly relevant snippet of information to use in sales emails and calls.

• Blog Posts - You need to post consistent, pertinent, and high-quality content on your blog. Posting isn't purely an SEO strategy. Increasing your search engine rankings should be a byproduct of building a deep pool of knowledge and insight that can be used throughout the sales process. You can provide useful statistics, answers to questions, thought leadership and reframe clients' problems using sensemaking techniques. Posts can then be used as links in email newsletters and retargeting, to follow up on conversations as a point of service or courtesy, and provide reasons for individual outreach.

• Social Content - It is important to reach your customers where they spend time. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social channels offer an important opportunity to share sales-focused content and move prospects toward a conversion. Sales organisations can send links and steer prospects toward an integral piece of your marketing plan -- your curated social pages filled with relevant content.

• Case Studies - Case studies could be one of the most important pieces of collateral when it comes to sales enablement. They detail your company’s past experience and include hard data on how your services directly helped clients. What is more convincing during a sales prospecting correspondence? Saying that you could improve a customer’s outcomes generally? Or telling them you increased brand engagement by 60% for a past client, and you can do even better for them?

• Email Workflows - Pre-rolled email workflows that are matched to the buyer's journey will nurture your prospects from initial interest through to completion. Email automation allows you to stay top-of-mind while providing deciders with all the information they need to make smart choices. Behavioural triggers and content milestones - such as downloading a key white paper or registering for a webinar - help to qualify leads so sales can prioritise outreach.

• Interactive Content - Interactive content such as calculators, polls, and click-through infographics can boost content engagement and drive curiosity and learning. They can also provide valuable feedback from your leads, helping sales to understand each potential customer's requirements and motivations.

• Brochures - Brochures are still an integral piece of sales collateral that communicate your unique benefits and prime your prospects for more information from sales staff. They quickly take care of the leg work when it comes to informing on products or services, so they recognise the benefits of your service before sales personnel reach out to answer questions.

Step 3 - Augment Internal-Use Content

• Competitor Research - Your content strategy isn’t always outward-facing. Don’t forget to provide internal content that marketing and sales can use to put their heads together. Competitor analysis and research pieces inform your teams of their strengths, weaknesses, and position in the market. It gives them the intel they need to press the advantage where they can and bolster efforts where the competition is currently thriving.

• Sales Processes - You may want to consider creating content that describe the sales process in detail. Things like sales scripts can help teams check all the boxes when relaying the ways that your company can help buyers. In addition, they can create a standard for engaging, customer-centric outreach, reiterating points from your content and driving home your marketing messages. Sales training and onboarding documents are also an integral piece of your content marketing strategy, and they should let new salespeople know all the ways your content can be used.

• One-Pagers & Product Sheets - One-pagers are crucial in providing as much information as possible in as little time as possible to prospects. However, they are also important in educating and refreshing sales personnel about company products. Sales teams can use them to efficiently communicate the benefits of their services and solidify the fit of a partnership between two companies.

This is by no means a comprehensive content list, but it should get your wheels turning on which pieces of content will benefit your sales team most. 

Use Sales Content To Nurture, Qualify, and Convert 

The buyer’s journey can be an arduous process for salespeople as buyers are often hesitant or not ready for information. Map your content to follow a nurturing customer pathway toward conversion. Distribute content that will help them at every stage of the customer journey and that confronts any objections they may have about your service. Create content that gets them interested, informs them, and then solidifies their choice.

Sales and marketing teams need to work in tandem to create content to nurture leads through every stage of the buyer’s journey. Using this unified approach, your content should work to initially educate, qualify and prioritise prospects. It can then support conversion by communicating solid, tangible benefits and exactly how your services can transform businesses.

Automate Campaigns 

Combining a sales-informed content strategy with sales automation can inform your target audience more efficiently, creating more time for direct outreach. It frees up your team's time to be more strategic, creative, and engaged and reduces your sales cycle. We see automation as a means to become more human and personalised in our interactions. Creating content can fast-track the process, creating rapport and priming leads for more direct touches. 

Automating content distribution is one of the best ways to ensure that buyers receive consistent and relevant links to the content they need. It allows you customers to gain access to impeccably timed information, triggered by their individual interactions with your content and website.

Account-Based Marketing

Your ABM strategy depends on taking a nurturing approach that targets decision makers across the purchasing company. To generate a sale, you need the buying committee to reach a consensus. Create content that enables buy-in from everyone that will be a part of the buying decision. 

Sales and marketing should work together to address the needs and concerns of different departments. In addition, as you get further along in the sales process, higher positions will be looped in for their insight. This means that your late-stage content needs to appeal to the chief executives who sign off on these decisions. 

Sales Acceleration

Sales enablement also means expediting the sales pipeline. It is always in our best interest to expedite the sales process, but it shouldn't come off as pushy sales.

That is the beauty of sales enablement. It gives your prospective buyers everything they need to consider their decision sooner, meaning the sale may be in the books weeks or months faster. This cuts down on the time your competitors have to interface with your prospect, leaving them with less opportunity and you with more market share and revenue. 

Final Thoughts 

Sales enablement is a supportive process that creates a “one company” approach to marketing, messaging, and sales. It presents your buyers with an impressive and coordinated effort to winning their business and seeks to provide them with dedicated service.

1827 Marketing helps our clients to create strategic, creative content that addresses both the needs of their company and its customers. Get in touch with us to begin building a digital-first customer experience that will have a multiplier effect on your sales win rates.