The quality of your sales enablement content affects the number of deals your sales team closes, the amount of revenue you generate, and whether your sales reps hit their quotas.
It is common for startups to focus on critical aspects that can determine their success, including developing the business plan and model, funding, legal aspects like LLC formation, registering the business, and obtaining any necessary licenses or permits.
An important aspect is building a solid brand and creating a marketing strategy that effectively communicates the benefits of your product or service. However, most startups miss the mark in their sales enablement content by focusing on product features instead of highlighting the benefits and outcomes their product delivers.
Others recycle outdated, one-size-fits-all content that doesn’t resonate with different buyer personas and customer journey stages.
To create compelling sales enablement content, you need to rely on buyer insights and competitive intelligence and collaborate with sales, marketing, and product teams.
You also need to track its performance and collect feedback to know what content resonates and how to optimize it for better performance.
In this post, we’ll talk about how you can create compelling sales enablement content that empowers your sales team to close more deals faster and hit their sales quotas.
What is a sales enablement content strategy?
A sales enablement content strategy is a plan that outlines how you’ll create, publish, distribute, and manage content that provides your sales team with the knowledge and resources they need to sell your product or service effectively.
Your sales enablement content plan or strategy ensures that your content production is in line with the needs of your sales team. This alignment guarantees that there are no content gaps for every touchpoint during the sales cycle.
With access to targeted and relevant content, sales reps can better position your product features and benefits, address your prospects’ pain points, overcome objectives, and increase their win rate.
A sales enablement content strategy also helps you create a centralized repository of content assets during different stages of the sales cycle.
These sales enablement content examples include customer success stories, product demos, competitive analyses, sales scripts, and industry-specific insights.
Why is it so important to get your sales enablement content right?
Today, buyers are better informed about the products they want and expect a consultative and personalized approach from sales teams.
To close more deals, sales professionals need to demonstrate a deep understanding of their buyer’s unique challenges and provide tailored solutions to them.
Getting your sales enablement content right allows you to empower your sales representatives to complement your buyers’ existing knowledge and address any gaps in their understanding.
This guarantees that your sales reps meet buyers’ expectations by providing them with the necessary information to make informed decisions.
Secondly, content is a core component of the customer journey, and it shapes your customer’s experience.
Delivering the right sales enablement content helps your sales team guide prospects through different stages of the sales cycle, acting as trusted advisors instead of sending endless, irrelevant pitches.
Avoid providing generic descriptions of your product features. The right sales enablement content allows your sales reps to approach different sales scenarios with relevant use cases.
Now, you can highlight how your product uniquely aligns with each prospect’s specific needs and goals.
This approach helps build credibility, demonstrates value, and establishes trust from the very beginning, setting the stage for meaningful customer relationships.
How to create great sales enablement content
Creating great sales enablement resources empowers your sales team to close more deals and increase the amount of revenue you generate.
Here are some effective strategies to consider when creating sales enablement content:
1. Understand your audience
When creating sales enablement content, you need to understand the pain points, challenges, goals, and evolving needs of your prospects to ensure it’s relevant.
Do you have a buyer persona in place, but your sales team is still struggling to close more deals using your existing content? If so, start conducting post-sales debrief interviews with customers who have signed up for your product in the past three months. These interviews will help you understand which enablement content resonated during their buying journey and what was lacking.
Collect more feedback through:
- Surveys where existing customers submit suggestions for new resources they need
- Customer testimonials
- Forums
Ask your sales team about the common objections they face and content topics that prospects and customers request.
In addition to suggesting content ideas, your feedback offers more context about your prospect’s mindset and behaviors throughout their buyer’s journey.
With this information, you can identify and predict potential drop-off points and ensure you provide relevant content that addresses their needs and challenges.
2. Set clear objectives
Before creating content, identify your sales enablement needs, create measurable objectives that’ll help you meet these needs, and align them with your sales enablement strategy goals.
- What specific challenges is your sales enablement content solving for reps?
- How will it empower them to close more deals and generate revenue?
- At what stage of the buyer’s journey will they need this content?
Once you’ve answered these questions, identify the key performance indicators to validate the impact of your sales enablement content. Some of these performance indicators include:
- Better quota attainment
- Faster sales cycles
- Higher win rates
When setting these objectives, involve different teams to ensure tight alignment with your sales methodology and process.
If your sales enablement strategy is focused on challenging a prospect’s current mindset, it should focus on “pattern disruption” content pieces that highlight issues or costs the buyer hasn’t considered with their present solution or status quo.
For example, a cybersecurity vendor may develop content highlighting the true costs of a data breach beyond financial penalties, such as:
- Damage to the brand’s reputation
- Operational downtime
- Loss of customers
By mapping content objectives to fundamental sales strategy and key performance indicators (KPIs) before you create content, you can purposefully create assets optimized for measurable outcomes. The result? Eliminate the production of piecemeal, unfocused content.
3. Create engaging content formats
Sales enablement content can take different formats, each with its own strengths for different objectives and buyer preferences.
When mapping different formats of sales enablement materials, make sure that you align them with how prospective customers prefer to consume information.
Start by reviewing metrics on your internal and external sales enablement content assets.
- Which formats have the highest engagement and conversion rates?
- Which content format gets little traction?
This data provides insights into what resonates best with your potential customers.
Screenshot provided by the author
Collect qualitative feedback to enrich your existing metrics by talking to sales reps and conducting surveys. Understand the types of content that compelled buyers during their buying journey.
Use these insights to create sales enablement content formats aligned with your objectives and buyer preferences.
4. Ensure collaboration between sales and marketing teams
Effective sales enablement content requires close collaboration between sales and marketing teams.
Sales teams have useful insights into prospect pain points and objections, while marketing teams have expertise in content creation and storytelling.
Invest in a collaborative culture by establishing a cross-functional feedback loop. Doing so allows the marketing team to gather insights from sales on content needs, objection handling, and competitive gaps.
On the other hand, the marketing team should create a centralized and user-friendly content management system. Use this system to consolidate both external and internal sales enablement content in one easily accessible hub. This unified platform provides version control, ensuring sales reps always have the latest, approved content at their fingertips.
By creating such a collaborative environment, startups can ensure that sales enablement content is informative, compelling, and aligned with the sales team’s needs.
Best ways to optimize your sales enablement content for SEO and discoverability
To ensure that your sales enablement content is easily discoverable by your sales team, prospects, and search engines, here are two effective ways to optimize it for discoverability:
1. Conduct keyword research
To optimize your content, identify the keywords and phrases your target audience uses when looking for information related to your products and include them in your content to make it more visible in search engine results.
For example, Band of Brothers targets history buffs and military lovers by creating content that addresses their specific search terms. Titles like “The Weather War” or “Presidents Who Served” directly tap into their audience’s interests.
This positions Band of Brothers Tours as a trusted resource and boosts their SEO ranking for relevant keywords, ultimately driving more bookings (conversions).
Screenshot provided by the author
So, by identifying the keywords your audience uses and crafting content that solves their problems or answers their needs, you can achieve similar success in your sales enablement strategy.
Start by analyzing search queries and questions in keyword research tools and assess competitor sites and content to identify keyword gaps.
Interview sales enablement professionals, customer success team members, and customers directly. It’s one of the best ways to gather insights on common terms that they use when looking for solutions that your product delivers.
Use the keywords you collect to create keyword maps aligned with your product or service offerings and the different stages of the buying process.
When optimizing your content, prioritize content with keywords that indicate high purchase intent, such as “compare,” “pricing,” or “alternatives.”
2. Optimize content for discoverability across platforms
To improve the visibility of your sales enablement content on search engines, insert keywords that align with your buyers’ search intent. Add them to titles, headings, meta descriptions, and body content.
Make sure related pieces have internal links to create an interconnected web of resources buyers can find.
Implement Schema markup to enhance search listings with rich snippets, increasing click-through rates.
To make it easier for your sales enablement team to find the right content at the right time, optimize your central content hub for powerful filtered search and browse experiences.
You can also implement AI-driven tagging. That way, you can automatically categorize assets by:
- Product features
- Buyer segments
- Buying stage
Now, your reps can quickly pinpoint hyper-relevant materials for any scenario with a few clicks.
How to measure and analyze sales enablement content performance
Setting clear performance metrics and tracking systems to measure the success of your sales enablement content will help you make data-driven decisions for continuous improvement.
Here are three ways to do it:
1. Track key metrics
To assess the effectiveness of your sales enablement content, identify and track key metrics that align with your objectives. These metrics include content engagement rates, lead conversion rates, sales cycle duration, and win rates.
Here’s how to track these metrics:
- Content engagement rates: Track views, downloads, shares, and time spent on each content asset using web analytics or marketing automation tools.
- Lead conversion rates: Monitor how many leads specific content assets generate and what percentage converts into sales opportunities using data from customer relationship management tools.
- Sales cycle duration: Analyze CRM data to measure the average time it takes to move a lead from initial content engagement to a closed deal for different content types.
- Win rates: Track the ratio of closed-won deals to total sales opportunities for leads that are engaged with specific content assets.
These metrics provide you with insights into which content assets resonate with your target audience and contribute to sales success.
2. Utilize analytics tools
Analytics tools like Google Analytics, content management systems, and digital asset management platforms offer detailed reports on content consumption, engagement, and conversion rates.
These reports allow you to make data-driven decisions about content optimization and strategy refinement. Here are different ways to use analytics tools:
- Google Analytics: Track website traffic sources, user behavior, content consumption patterns, and conversion metrics.
- Content management system (CMS) analytics: Analyze content performance within your CMS, such as page views, downloads, and engagement times.
- Digital asset management platform: Leverage built-in analytics to check content usage, effectiveness, and impact on your sales pipeline.
3. Iterate based on performance insights
The performance insights you collect allow you to identify areas for optimization, such as content formats that resonate best with their audience or topics you need to focus on.
This iterative measuring, analyzing, and refining process guarantees that your sales enablement content remains effective and aligned with evolving buyer needs and preferences.
Establish a regular cadence to review performance data and make data-driven decisions. For example, each month or quarter, do the following:
- Analyze top and underperforming content: Identify high-performing assets to replicate success and low-performers to improve or retire.
- Assess content gaps: Look for topics or stages of the buyer’s journey lacking effective content.
- Test new formats: Experiment with different content formats based on audience preferences.
- Optimize distribution: Adjust content promotion and distribution channels based on engagement and conversion metrics.
In the era of digital marketing, educational social media posts can also serve as sales enablement content, providing valuable insights directly where prospects engage.
Successful sales enablement content: Case study
Here at Omniscient Digital, we expanded Order.co’s content strategy to include sales enablement content, which led to a 300% increase in conversions from organic traffic.
Here’s a quick breakdown of how we did it:
- We include conversion assets and landing pages with search-friendly copy.
- Searchers who signed on to these landing pages got access to the content they needed, which moved them further down the sales funnel and closer to buying from Order.co.
- We also developed targeted email sequences to nurture leads who downloaded these assets. These emails provided more content to leads that reinforced their buying decision.
- We worked closely with Order.co’s sales and product teams to understand the problems their product solved. From there, we created content that accurately portrayed the product’s value proposition and use cases.
You can learn more in the case study here.
From what we did and the results, it’s clear that with the right sales enablement content delivered at the right time to prospects and buyers, you’ll acquire more leads and generate revenue.
However, there’s no one-size-fits-all sales enablement content that works for every startup. You need to customize your sales enablement content to align with what your audience needs and deliver it in the formats and channels they prefer.
Conclusion
Great sales enablement content empowers your sales enablement team to:
- Effectively communicate value propositions
- Tailor conversations to prospects’ needs
- Overcome objections
It also streamlines the sales process, shortens cycles, and drives more closed deals. As a result, you can drive more revenue by aligning your strategy with buyer personas, sales processes, and business objectives.
If you’re wondering what types of sales enablement content you need to create or struggling to choose the right content formats, we might be able to help. Fill out this form to book a free strategy call, and we’ll be in touch!
