How to Create Lead Converting Sales Enablement Content
Last update: 8 June 2023 at 11:53 am
Over a period of time, as the markets flooded with new entrants and bigger corporations started emerging, it was understood that one needs to create valuable content for the entire sales funnel instead of focusing on a few phases like discovery and engagement.
Among all phases, the decision-making process is among the most crucial parts of the sales cycle where your business either converts a lead into a paying customer and ensures long-term success.
This instilled the need to understand the customer journey and buying process on a side-by-side basis to throttle up conversions. Sales enablement tools soon became a common requirement for the marketing departments across businesses, and sales reps also started getting involved in developing sales enablementcontent.
Now, this is one of the basic reasons why sales and marketing teams need to be in sync regarding their respective efforts. Let us now understand how content marketing can be optimized for sales enablement in this mini-guide.
Impacts On Sales Enablement Content Strategy
To begin with, sales enablement refers to catalyzing the conversion process, and it goes way beyond sales scripts. It can be meant for both your sales rep and your customer since the buyer’s journey would be in a phase where the more important, long-term value-generating aspects are considered.
In essence, sales enablement content gives your leads a reference point to assess how well your product or service conforms to their requirements.
This could be in the form of a blog post, customer testimonials, product sheets, success stories, or any form of high-value content that helps them gain insights regarding why you are the ideal provider among all other competitors.
It all starts with a review of the existing content with the involvement of your sales staff. Having a fair idea of your customer’s journey will give you a clear starting point since you would be already putting in content creation efforts to generate leads.
The audit will give you an idea of which aspects help effectively engage your audience at various stages and buyer personas. Read our website audit checklist post to help you get started.
Based on these learnings, you would come up with a number of parameters that work in your favor, the aspects that don’t work, and factors that tend to reduce your sales conversions.
These are all valuable insights, but they are focused on what works and what doesn’t work for your marketing and sales team. However, it is obvious that you will need internally-focused insights to develop your sales enablement content strategy.
Sales And Marketing Teams In Sales Enablement Content Strategy Building
Internal documentation and communications are among the most underrated sources for creating sales enablement assets. Let us understand it with a very simple example:
If a significant chunk of your leads abandons their buyer journey at a certain point, you can use internal documentation to understand the customer interaction. This will, in turn, help you identify the need for creating content that benefits sales reps and the overall selling process.
It can be easily identified from the talking points where customer pain points aren’t being adequately addressed by your content strategy. Initially, they should be highlighted in your internal documentation for your content marketers.
It would help them create content that fits into the criteria of sales enablementplatforms and addresses the trust deficit faced by your customers.
The areas where your customers are not able to comprehend the feasibility of your product or service are the pieces that you need. This again brings us to the basics of content strategy:
Not all pieces are created for attracting leads.
Some are intended to help your customers understand how your brand would help them with post-sales client servicing, what are the terms and conditions as a customer, while others may focus on cost breakdowns.
Such requirements usually surface in the form of unaddressed concerns, and your marketing and sales reps can easily point them out. Your content marketing manager should sit down with your sales team to document such issues, and hence, you can build a proper strategy to develop sales enablement content.
You can also decide to work with a qualified content marketing agency in the UK or in your area to help you with this task.
Sales Team Moderators For Sales Enablement Content Strategy
It is obvious that your sales reps are the final users of your sales enablement content which makes them the ideal candidates to finalize the approval of your content marketing efforts.
Once you are done with your informative blog posts, infographics, comparative analysis, case studies, along with other types of sales enablement material, you may also involve your marketing department to analyze its feasibility for respective platforms of your sales funnel.
But, don’t hurry it up, as you may have team members of all experience and proficiency ranges, including new sales reps. Note down their opinions as well as how they impacted the customers’ decisions to make the purchase.
Here, we would like to advise you to even reach out to prospects that no longer want to make a purchase and try to understand what was missing.
This can be a game-changer since your dissatisfied prospects can teach you a lot more than analytics and brainstorming sessions. It is also noteworthy that there are slim chances of even converting these dormant leads since they might appreciate your efforts and learn about your offerings in the process.
However, don’t pursue it as the main goal behind the activity and focus on the learnings since it would be much more profitable in the longer run.
Sales Enablement Content As A Permanent Part Of Your Marketing Efforts
A piece of advice we would like to give to our readers is to not treat sales enablement content creation as a one-time job. Since the market, your customers, your product, and even your organization evolves with time; it is necessary that you update your sales content in a timely manner.
This can be in the form of minor tweaks and additions based on the feedback given by your customers.
Inviting participation from your sales reps will also give you a second opinion since it isn’t wise to blindly trust what your leads have to say.
The insights from your sales reps regarding conversation agendas can be more helpful since they actively persuade the customers to make purchase decisions, and you can include the same aspects in your sales enablement content.
Keeping The Sales Process At The Center
Before we end this article, we would like to stress the fact that the sales process remains at the core of these exercises.
It has been experienced time and again that content creators and sales reps end up working on the technical aspects of the content rather than bridging the gap between a customer’s perception of what they want and how your product/service can be helpful in the process.
Therefore, you should come up with an objective-oriented work process where your content development team optimizes the sales enablement material for the end-users, i.e., customers with active contributions from your sales reps.
Wrap Up
Sales enablement content development and management isn’t a mammoth task, but it does require one to approach the process in a systematic manner.
These content pieces are designed to meet the buyer persona and factors that trigger purchases instead of being perfect in marketing terms. At times, you may need to leave some errors in that aspect in order to make it more relevant to the customers.
This could be using a different unit of measurement or using localized slang for a technical term. We hope this mini-guide helps equip your sales and marketing departments with the right set of content pieces so that you can achieve conversion rates.