Hubspot's 2024 'State of Sales Report' says that 79 percent of sales professionals who use enablement content say it's important to making a sale.
The thing is, you can’t just have random pieces of content that are wildly thrown together to make an impact. That’s where having a sales enablement content strategy becomes essential for your teams.
How exactly do you put that strategy together? We’ll take you through all the steps so you have the information and actionable steps to create a truly effective strategy that will keep your buyers engaged.
Before we begin, let’s just clarify some terminology:
What Is sales enablement content?
First of all, what is sales enablement? Think back to a recent deal your team won. Remember that piece of content (maybe a competitive analysis or customer story) that helped them seal the deal? That’s sales enablement in action.
Specifically created for sales teams, it goes beyond marketing assets to offer the right knowledge, insights, and persuasive materials at every stage of the buyer journey.
Sales content is the broad umbrella term for the material and assets used to support sales conversations to help move deals along.
Sales enablement content is specifically designed to provide your sales teams with the resources, information, and sales training programs they need to sell effectively.
Sales professionals who use sales enablement content in their role are 58 percent more likely to outperform their peers.
Sales enablement content goes beyond just being assets or marketing materials. They are the foundational guidance within your sales enablement strategy.
The content is created by sales enablement teams, usually together with your marketing department and product.
Just how important is content for sales enablement, then?
Content’s critical role in sales enablement
Picture your sales team without content. It’s like a high-performance car with an empty tank - lots of potential but unable to go anywhere. Content is the fuel that powers progress. It transforms your sales reps from passive presenters into knowledgeable guides.
Through data, stories, and targeted tactics, sales enablement content provides the energy to move prospects toward decisions and closed deals.
Let’s break that down:
💡Sales support
Your content shouldn’t just sit collecting virtual dust in a folder you can’t find anymore. It’s a dynamic problem-solving toolkit for sales professionals during those all-important buyer interactions. Each asset offers guidance, anticipates common objections, and helps reps pivot the conversion in a productive, value-driven direction.
💡Creating content
Your sales enablement team has front-row seats, seeing what moves the needle within sales conversations. Unlike your broader marketing materials, this content is focused on achieving sales milestones within your specific sales process. With that lens, they can create materials that highlight “trigger points” that indicate buyer readiness or templates that speed up follow-up effectiveness.
💡Sales funnel alignment
The content you use should be mapped to each stage of the prospect's journey to really make their touch points and interactions genuinely resonate. Think about the alignment between your content marketing sales enablement strategies. Content needs to support sales in a targeted way, not just serve general brand awareness purposes.
Now you know the role content plays, let’s talk about how you can craft the best sales content.
Foundations of sales enablement content strategy
Creating a strategy for your sales enablement content isn’t just about churning out pieces of content one after another. You need to set up a plan.
Here are the components you should have when doing that:
→ Buyer persona deep dive
What are your ideal buyers' key pain points, decision-making criteria, and communication preferences?
→ Sales goals alignment
When your teams are aligned and understand your company’s goals, you must ensure the content directly helps sales achieve them.
→ Cross-functional collaboration
Working in silos can hinder your success faster than you can say B2B. Partnering sales with your product and marketing team means everyone can have a say in creating consistent, on-message content.
How do you translate these three foundational pillars into an actual strategy? Glad you asked…
4 Steps to a successful strategy
Putting together a successful strategy needs more than just great content. So, here are our steps to get your strategy looking shipshape!
Step 1: Better audience targeting
This is all about your customer, so you’ll need to build more detailed ideal customer profiles (ICP) of your target audience, like their industry, size, challenges, etc.
You’ll also need to deeply consider your buyer personas. Who are those individual decision-makers in your target companies? Put together profiles outlining their roles, pain points, goals, and how they make purchasing decisions.
Get closer to the source by conducting customer interviews with existing customers. Being able to validate your ICPs will help you fine-tune anything that’s not working. Understand their language and motivation, and then map that to how your solution benefits them directly.
This brings us to the next step...
Step 2: Mapping the buyer’s journey
You’ll want to have a visual representation of the journey to create content that speaks to the customer at each stage. Usually, you'll see this journey represented in the form of a sales funnel.
Awareness stage
At the top-of-funnel phase, your content must capture attention. You can use blog posts, industry reports, or thought leadership articles here. The content should solve a problem your buyer is having and introduce an opportunity relevant to your product or service.
Consideration stage
Now that your prospective buyers understand their challenge or problem, they’ll begin looking for solutions. The most effective content at this stage will be things like case studies, testimonials, or even ROI calculators that can show the value of your solution.
Decision stage
Now, it’s time to seal the deal. Use assets like pricing proposals, detailed product comparisons, or a demo to help make the decision-making more straightforward for your prospective customers. Personalized and persuasive emails to address any objections can provide the final nudge toward a well-informed purchase decision.
When you truly understand how your content aligns with the customer’s journey, you’ll be able to get the most effective materials to your buyers. But what comes next?
Step 3: Feedback is key
Your sales enablement teams should have dedicated times to check in regularly with salespeople. This is a great way to get input from reps to identify the most relevant content areas and highlight performance gaps.
A great way to gather feedback is through surveys. Sending them regularly to your sales teams to learn how useful or relevant your content is. Then, you can move on to creating any missing materials that would facilitate sales conversations.
Sales enablement can also gain valuable insights into the content that would be most helpful by shadowing on sales calls. This can help identify bottlenecks much faster than other methods!
But what are the most effective types of sales enablement content that are must-haves in your toolbox?
Step 4: Types of Sales enablement content that drive change
We talked about the right content at the right time for your buyers. But what types of sales enablement content are the most effective at driving sales success?
- Case studies don’t just tell; they show. These are real-world examples of how your solution directly benefited your customers.
- Competitive battle cards are easy-to-digest breakdowns of your competition. These outline their strengths and weaknesses and provide effective counters with targeted messaging your sales team can use.
- Competitive analysis playbooks are a more in-depth version of battle cards used when dealing with a specific, more prominent competitor.
- Sales scripts and email templates provide teams with messaging that is already aligned and vetted by sales enablement.
These four steps aren’t an exhaustive list, and as you execute your strategy over time, you’ll see emerging patterns of which content gets you the best results. That means you’ll need to continuously monitor.
Here’s how:
How to measure sales enablement content impact
Your sales enablement team needs to analyze usage and engagement metrics to figure out what’s working and what isn’t.
So, here’s what you should be doing:
Analyzing usage and engagement metrics
You'll have access to valuable data insights if you have a solution like emlen and marketing automation tools.
- Track the content your sales reps are actively using and sharing with prospects.
- View open rates, click-throughs, and time spent engaging with shared sales materials.
- Measure asset download rates to get a broader understanding of the most popular topics.
Track your content’s impact on deal progression
Is your content helping push the buyer towards a purchasing decision?
- Use your sales enablement platform and CRM to see if and when certain pieces of content contribute to moving deals along and helping close.
- What is the trigger content that shifts a prospect’s interest? Was it a specific case study or battle card that resonated most?
Get direct feedback from your sales reps
They do the legwork, so find out what they’re discovering!
- Gather feedback on specific assets to assess their usability, effectiveness in overcoming objections, and overall quality. Be ready to refresh your existing content!
- Get them involved in a collaborative process to help them feel invested in creating the best materials for their interactions.
A/B testing
For high-visibility content like landing pages, you should test different versions by varying the headlines, visuals, or messaging to see which performs better.
You should be analyzing and adjusting iteratively because content strategies evolve continuously. What didn’t work today might work in six months.
Also, always be adaptable. Different customers react differently at each stage of the journey.
Most importantly, don’t forget to celebrate your wins! Finding the content that resonates the most with your buyers builds a knowledge base and will boost your team’s collective efforts.
Now, we should talk about sales enablement content best practices.
Sales enablement content best practices
Why is having a set of best practices even necessary? A set of standards provides the backbone of a consistent, buyer-focused sales strategy.
The standards help drive efficiency, generate revenue, and provide the tools for your sales team to succeed. In their Sales Trends Report, Hubspot found that 17 percent of sales professionals said that content enablement is one of their top focus areas for 2024.
You’ll see an impact on sales performance. Having relevant and well-crafted content gives your sales representatives a way to build better relationships. This directly translates into higher engagement, a smoother sales conversation, and shorter sales cycles.
You’re building the groundwork for efficiency and scalability. A centralized content hub via a dedicated sales enablement platform means not spending time searching.
Your Sales and marketing teams' alignment doesn’t have to be a distant dream. Through a streamlined process, you’ll eliminate miscommunication, and your marketing team can create assets with the buyer’s journey in mind.
Ultimately, you’ll stand out as a company with an empowered, knowledgeable sales team.
Sounds good, right? Here is our list of sales enablement content best practices:
→ Keep things interesting
Pepper your content with stories, data, and visuals to ensure dry topics don’t bore your buyers.
→ Keep it relevant
Don’t just create content for the sake of it. Make sure each piece of content has a clear purpose and speaks directly to your buyer’s needs.
→ Objections as opportunity
What are the most common roadblocks in your sales cycle? Create content that helps your sales team overcome them with confidence.
Now you know how to create your strategy. You also understand how to measure the impact of that strategy and how having best practices can solidify your goals. So you’re good to go, right? Not quite.
→ Managing and optimizing sales content
There is no “set it and forget it” when it comes to your sales content strategy. Sure, you’ll have some evergreen assets, but you will probably add content consistently. That means you’ll need to tame what you have.
Here’s what we suggest:
Tools and systems for sales content management
Tools and systems for sales content management
Sales enablement tools are varied and cover a broad spectrum of uses. We wouldn't be us if we didn't talk about emlen's sales content management hub. The platform is intuitive and user-friendly.
Content is tagged with relevant metadata, allowing for efficient searching and access – meaning your teams can quickly find the content they need to close deals.
Plus, you'll have company-wide alignment on content assets, ensuring the sales team only sends out approved materials.
Now, your teams can get your buyers the content they need when they need it. You’ll also have company-wide alignment on content assets. The sales team will only send out assets that have been approved and uploaded to the hub.
emlen also offers built-in analytics, eliminating the need to switch tools for insights. You'll have access to data like which assets people are viewing, how long they viewed them for, and how many pieces of content they viewed.
Regularly monitor this engagement data to optimize your content strategy.
Measuring content effectiveness and ROI
There are quite a few platforms when we're talking about measuring content effectiveness and ROI. Tools like Google Search Console can break down things like impressions, clicks, click-through rate (CTR), and position.
GSC data highlights opportunities to improve your content, leading to increased impressions, higher rankings, and ultimately, a boost in ROI.
Another tool is Semrush, the Swiss army knife of SEO and marketing tools. You can analyze your competitors, perform keyword research, and continuously monitor your content.
Semrush provides a comprehensive view of how content directly translates into website traffic and brand visibility – ultimately impacting lead generation.
Where do we go from here?
Future sales enablement content trends
Looking beyond 2024, you’ll see AI maturing, which means you can expect further content personalization for specific buyers and situations. Tech will also take center stage as sales enablement platforms automate content recommendations and analytics for even greater efficiency.
Your road to revenue growth through sales enablement content
When you create great sales enablement content, you give your sales teams the knowledge, tools, and confidence to navigate buyer conversations and win.
A solid sales enablement strategy isn’t a static document; it evolves alongside your business and buyers.
Through continuous adjustment and optimization, you’ll ensure that your sales reps always have the most impactful resources at their fingertips.
If you’re eager to start streamlining your content management, gain data-driven insights, and create seamless experiences for your sales reps and buyers, reach out to our emlen team for a free demo.
