What is sales enablement content?

No seller should work alone — they require the support of marketing teams that can enable them with the content that engages prospects. Sales enablement materials are critical for reps to confidently communicate the value of a product and demonstrate their industry expertise. Sales content is both internal and external facing; internal sales content is aimed at educating employees, while external content showcases a company’s products or services to prospects.

Sales enablement content examples

What is sales content? Sales content can cover everything from foundational persona documents to product training, sales scripts, and customer-facing marketing. Here are a few examples of sales enablement collateral you’ll want to consider for your team:

Persona documents

To communicate effectively, sales reps need to understand a buyer’s motivations, needs, and pain points. Buyer personas equip reps with research and insights on each target audience, allowing them to connect the dots on how a product solves a buyer’s challenge and helps them achieve their goals.

Product training

Product training, such as product marketing one-pagers, manuals, and use case demos, delivers information on features and benefits, as well as context on how a company’s product fits into the broader industry.

Competitor research and analysis

Battle cards and competitor marketing materials help reps understand the market and set them up to better communicate product differentiators or persuade clients to switch.

Scripts

To scale outreach while maintaining consistency, call scripts, demo presentations, and email templates get your sales team on a consistent path. Standardizing this type of sales enablement deliverable ensures a strong brand message and makes it easier to update them in the future.

Customer-facing materials

These assets provide education on an industry challenge or topic rather than overtly promoting your products. Whether it’s a blog post, eBook, or video, injecting thought leadership into your sales enablement assets drives engagement with prospects.

Pitchdecks

Sales pitch decks are presentations that communicate an organization’s product or service value, features, and benefits to buyers. Pitch decks are often created by marketing teams in collaboration with sales teams to ensure that content is relevant and effective. These presentations can be created using tools such as PowerPoint or Google Slides and should be customized for specific buyers and sales scenarios.

Case Studies

Case studies are detailed accounts of how a customer has successfully used a product or service to solve a problem or achieve a goal. These are often created by marketing teams and can be used by sales teams to demonstrate the value of a product or service to prospects.

Product Sheets

Product information includes detailed descriptions of a product’s features and benefits, as well as any technical specifications or requirements. This content is often created by product teams and can be used by sales teams to educate prospects about a product.

FAQs

FAQs, or frequently asked questions, are a collection of common questions and answers about a product or service. These are often created by customer support teams and can be used by sales teams to address common concerns or objections from prospects.


Did you know?

81%

of B2B marketers find a documented strategy beneficial because it aligns team members around goals.

What’s a sales enablement content strategy?

A sales enablement content strategy lays out why you’re creating content (goals and audiences), what you’ll do (formats, tactics, schedules), and how you’ll measure impact (metric-based benchmarks). A content strategy is most effective when documented. This allows you to track progress, update as needed, and align stakeholders. The Content Marketing Institute found that 81% of B2B marketers believe a documented strategy is beneficial since it aligns team members around goals. 

Why is a sales enablement content strategy important?

Sales enablement content benefits seller confidence, prospect engagement, and bottom-line revenue. Here are just a few of the ways content can support your business: 

  1. Improve the sales process: 57% of the buyer’s journey happens before a prospect reaches a rep. Sales enablement content can prime the prospect with information and education before they reach the rep, ensuring that reps are ready to come out of the gate strong when they connect with the prospect for the first time. 
  2. Enhance go-to-market alignment: A sales enablement content strategy ensures that every rep works off the same information, including clear audience analysis, product definition, and strategic brand messaging. Organizations with strong alignment are shown to deliver “38% higher sales win rates and 24% faster revenue growth.” 
  3. Increase seller performance: Sales content helps reps address challenges and offer solutions, as well as improve the efficiency of the process by providing templates and scripts that reduce manual effort and increase the scale of their outreach. 

Sales Content Reimagined

Explore the Microapp

What does great sales enablement content include?

Not all content is created equal. Effective content creation for sales enablement requires a targeted approach that considers the needs of your audience and communicates a consistent message with clear and concise language, engaging stories, and data-based evidence:

  • Tailor content to the persona and buyer’s journey. Use examples and language that are relevant to each buyer’s needs. Content that’s tailored to a specific audience and their stage in the funnel is more likely to get a response and build trust with your prospects. 
  • Bake consistent, repetitive messaging. Before writing anything, make sure to identify your core messages. Highlight these clearly throughout the piece. Repetition ensures that your message sticks and is remembered by readers as a key takeaway. 
  • Use clear and concise language. Straightforward language is easier to read for busy buyers. Content should be quickly digestible, with sub-headings and short paragraphs.
  • Include engaging stories. Use engaging stories to draw in your prospects. Including examples and customer stories will help them envision themselves using your product.
  • Build in data-based evidence. Prospects look for validation, so don’t hesitate to include statistics and studies from reputable, recent sources.

How to create a winning content strategy

It’s time to put your strategy in place, and while it might not always be a linear process, there are critical steps to creating a strategy that delivers results. 

1

Audit existing content

Review your organization’s existing sales enablement content, and identify which assets are still relevant and usable. Some may just need an update, while it may be time for others to retire.

2

Analyze usage and performance

Take time to review sales enablement content analytics to see how it’s used and how it performs. If you don’t have a tracking tool in place, you might survey your sales team for anecdotal feedback.

3

Talk to sellers

Gather feedback from your sales team on their biggest challenges and what types of content might be most effective for them. 

4

Prioritize customers

The primary goal of your strategy is to meet the needs and pain points of your audience. Frequently ask yourself, “Is this content valuable for our customers?”

5

Create a scalable and repeatable process

The key to an effective, long-term program is developing a consistent and efficient system for creating and distributing sales content. This includes a means of producing content, as well as infrastructure, like sales enablement content tools, that make content discoverable to sellers.

6

Organize and store content easily

Nothing is worse than docs that get passed around over email or lost on a personal Google Drive. As your content program grows, make sure you invest in infrastructure, such as a sales content management tool, to manage sales content.

7

Enable sellers

Provide sales the tools, training, and resources they need to effectively use sales enablement content. Don’t forget to establish a way for them to give feedback.

8

Evaluate metrics and performance over time

Implementing a reporting/tracking system for your content will allow you to understand its performance over time and make informed decisions on when to create new content or retire what’s not working.

How to develop sales enablement content

  1. Develop a content strategy: A sales enablement content strategy lays out the goals, audiences, formats, tactics, schedules, and metrics for creating and measuring sales enablement content. A documented strategy aligns team members around goals and allows tracking and updating as needed.  
  2. Gather feedback and insights: Feedback from sales teams and insights from content analytics can help identify the biggest challenges and the types of content that might be most effective for sales enablement. 
  3. Collaborate across teams: Sales enablement content is most effective when it’s created collaboratively by teams across the organization. By working together, these teams can ensure that the content is relevant, effective, and aligned with the needs of both the sales team and the prospect. 
  4. Use enablement tools: Sales enablement platforms offer tools for creating, organizing, storing, and sharing sales content in one central location. This ensures sellers can easily find, personalize, and share relevant content with buyers at the right time. 
  5. Evaluate and update: Regularly evaluating the performance of sales enablement content and updating it as needed can help ensure that it remains relevant and effective over time. 

How to organize sales enablement content

Sales enablement content should be organized so it’s easy for sellers to find, access, and share the right assets with buyers at the right time. A sales content management system can help with this by providing features such as:

Content Library

This is a centralized repository that stores and manages sales enablement materials. Sellers can browse, search, and filter content by criteria including product, industry, persona, stage, or language. Content can also be tagged and categorized for easier navigation and discovery.

Content Recommendations

A feature that suggests the most relevant and effective content for each sales situation based on data and insights. Sellers can receive content recommendations within their CRM, email, web browser, or directly from the platform. Content recommendations can be based on factors like buyer profile, behavior, intent, and engagement.

Content Personalization

Sellers need to be able to customize and tailor content for specific buyers and sales scenarios. Sellers can use templates and dynamic fields to create personalized content in minutes. Content personalization can help increase buyer engagement and trust by showing that the seller understands their needs and challenges.

Content Analytics

This tracks and measures the performance and impact of content across the sales cycle. Sellers can see how buyers interact with their content, such as how long they spend on each page, what sections they skip or revisit, and what actions they take after viewing the content. Content analytics help sellers optimize their content strategy and follow-up actions based on buyer feedback and behavior.

Ready to do more with your enablement content?

The Seismic Enablement Cloud™ is a unified solution that streamlines creating, managing, and distributing sales enablement content. At Seismic, we provide the rights tools that enable sellers to find, personalize, and share memorable content with prospects or customers, including: 

  • Content management: Organize your content in one centralized location, and let your reps search for materials in an always-current content library.  
  • Content personalization: Reps can easily personalize content and deliver a targeted message to prospects based on their persona and stage in the buyer’s journey. 
  • Content distribution: Send content faster, while maintaining compliance – helping alleviate the workload on reps and enabling them to scale. 
  • Content analytics: Track the performance of sales content and access detailed analytics on its usage and effectiveness.

Discover Seismic’s sales content management capabilities, or get a demo.