The best sales enablement content to prioritise

The backbone of any successful sales enablement initiative is great content. By providing sales reps with the content they need to convince prospects and customers, the marketing department can make a tangible impact on the company's bottom line. In this article, we'll look at the most effective types of content you should prioritise.

Our definition of sales enablement is this:

An iterative process provides a company's sales organisation and salespeople with the resources to become more relevant to buyers and close more deals. These resources can include content, software tools and training that assist in effectively selling products, solutions or services.

 

So, as the name suggests, sales enablement is the process of enabling your company's sales reps to improve the speed and quantity of their deals. To do this, you give them content they can use to answer prospects' and customers' questions, explain the benefits of your products or solutions, and promote your company as a trustworthy and knowledgeable partner.

All of the content you produce can probably be useful in some stage of the sales process. But if you're looking to take a more formalised approach to sales enablement, you should focus on creating these types of content first.

Sequences and email templates

Sales reps often spend a significant amount of time sending emails. Follow-ups, reminders and meeting invitations, mostly. It may not take too much time to send a single email, but it all adds up - especially if they're emailing lots of different customers, each of whom has other challenges and are in different stages of the sales process.

To make life easier for reps and ensure their emails are relevant and interesting for the recipients, you can create email templates that they can quickly adjust with the correct names and send off. This saves them having to create a great email from scratch every time.

You can even use automation to make things smoother - HubSpot's sequences tool, for example, allows you to create a chain of emails that can be sent semi-automatically. If a rep needs to send a follow-up email to the contact after a meeting, they can choose to start the sequence for that contact. This will automatically personalise and send the first email and subsequent follow-up and reminder emails that might be needed. This allows your reps to focus on more important things than sending the fifth follow-up email of the day.

Case studies

If one of your sales reps has already secured a meeting with a new prospect, you've already done a good job of attracting and converting them. However, actually deciding to buy from your company is a much bigger decision for them.

For this reason, it's essential to have some case studies at your disposal. Being able to see how your company's product or solution has solved a problem for a similar company is highly convincing. Without a real-world example from a case study or something similar, the prospect will find it difficult to take the leap and become a customer. Case studies are hard to create, much harder than a simple article or content offer - but they're worth it. So if you don't have any case studies yet, get in touch with your best existing customers and see if you can get the ball rolling.

Pricing information

Lots of B2B companies are reluctant to give away any pricing information before the final stages of a sale. Providing information about prices openly on the homepage is unthinkable for many. It's understandable - some companies are worried about revealing their prices to competitors, and in the B2B world, deals are often so complex and varying that it's difficult to put a solid price on an individual product or solution.

Pricing for some of our services is available on the 'Buy' page

However, it's a fact that B2B buyer expectations are becoming closer to how they are in B2C. This means that pricing information needs to become more accessible. Imagine going to a supermarket to do your grocery shopping and finding the shop didn't display any prices. Chances are you'd walk out. 

It's not quite like this in B2B yet, but we may get there soon. Prospects will be more comfortable approaching you and booking meetings if they receive an indication of how much a partnership will cost them, and they'll appreciate the transparency and trust you show by providing pricing information openly. More and more B2B companies are making this kind of information public - so if you don't want to get left behind, it's time to start yourself. Even if you can't set a fixed price, your prospects would benefit from some example deal that would at least give them an indication.

Whitepapers and eBooks

Detailed, knowledge-rich content like whitepapers and eBooks are perfect for technically-minded prospects who want to know everything about the implications of your product or solution before they buy. In guides like these, you can delve into the nitty-gritty of your offering and the problems it solves much more than you could in a standard sales presentation.

B2B products and solutions can often be complex, and the buyers that sales reps deal with will often have technical backgrounds and high levels of experience in their industry. For these types of buyers, detailed explanations of the benefits your products and solutions bring are vital. So it's important that reps can have a piece of content like this ready at a moment's notice.

Checklists and templates

Content like checklists, templates, and other practical resources can be used by prospects to better understand their company's needs and challenges. In a sales enablement context, they're a great conversation starter. A sales rep can complete the checklist or template together with the prospect as the basis of a discussion, or leave it with them and schedule a follow-up to discuss their learnings at a later date.

To get an example, download our customer journey map template - it's a tool that our prospects can use to map out and analyse their customer journey more effectively. 

In B2B sales, it's important to establish yourself as an expert. With a resource like this, a prospect can discover challenges and problems they never even knew they had - which will instil trust in you as a future partner.

For more knowledge, tips and guidance around sales enablement, make sure to take a look at our in-depth sales enablement guide. It'll tell you more about how to build a sales enablement strategy practically and how you can accelerate it with data.