By Nicky Cappella, Content Strategist
Introducing new customers to your product (and making additional sales to existing customers) is fundamental to your short- and long-term success. To maximize revenue, companies want to provide their teams with all of the tools needed to close a sale. This may include information, content, social media posts, customer testimonials, and more.
These tools are known collectively as sales enablement, and companies that fail to use content as part of their sales enablement strategy are missing out on a huge opportunity. Content can help sales develop long-lasting relationships with customers, providing valuable insights into customer challenges, concerns, and pain points to drive meaningful conversations.
Read more: 4 Chief Benefits of Sales Enablement.
There are several ways that a business can support sales and help them to be successful. These include training current employees, onboarding new employees, identifying customer pain points and challenges, improving the customer experience, and finding opportunities to upsell and cross-sell.
Content is often viewed as a marketing function that helps guide leads through the funnel until they are handed off to the sales team. But content strategy can be incorporated into sales enablement activities and bridge the gap between marketing and sales.
Several different types of content can be used to help the sales team meet their goals. When planning your sales enablement strategy, be sure to consider the value of the following.
Of course, nobody wants a sales team reading directly from a script rather than having a genuine conversation. But providing some sample questions to structure the dialogue and then having an organic exchange within that structure can ensure that every conversation is valuable and builds trust between brand and customer.
A case study tells a story, informing prospective customers about how a company similar to their own solved a challenge similar to the one they are facing, using the product or service being offered. Case studies can be powerful content for sales enablement because they:
Read more: What is Sales Enablement?
A well-designed, visually engaging one-pager can motivate a potential customer to become an actual one. One-pagers can serve a few different purposes; some are directed toward describing the product or service in a specific manner, and others focused on differentiators between the company and its competitors.
Like eBooks and white papers, premium content is an excellent way to generate and qualify leads. Just gate the content behind a form, and require users to enter pertinent information to download the material. However, these can be useful sales enablement tools as well. A salesperson can send the ungated PDF to a potential client, providing the kind of in-depth information or reference material that can be difficult to cover on a call.
Customers love video content, with the amount of time people spending watching videos online increasing by 100% year over year.[i] It also supports data retention, with people reporting that they retain 95% of the information consumed by video. Creating video content is a good way to break down complicated ideas or provide customers with a short demo of your product in an engaging and informative manner. Again, while videos are often used in marketing, they can also be of value to sales – helping to qualify and convert leads.
Content marketing is a critical part of marketing strategy, but it is important to sales as well. Building content into sales enablement can help break down barriers between sales and marketing and bridge the gap during lead handoff. And content benefits sales in many ways, providing valuable materials and actionable insight that can be used to guide customer conversations and build deeper, lasting relationships between customer and brand.
Sources
Social Media Week, “2020 Video Marketing and Statistics: What Brands Need to Know,” October 2019.