Sales teams, to be effective, need to know a few things. The value and cost of the products and services they promote, the pain points and expectations of the prospects, and the nuances of the lead nurturing and conversion process.
All this information empowers salespersons to identify high-value prospects and effectively convert them into loyal customers.
That’s what sales enablement content helps with.
Sales enablement content is learning and educational material that aids teams in making a better case for their offerings and personalizing pitches as per the needs of their prospects.
Whether it is training new reps about the sales enablement software or helping a buyer make the purchase decision, these support resources can serve various purposes. This usually depends on the organizational needs.
In this article, let’s look at different types of sales enablement content and how you can create them quickly to boost your conversion rates.
Depending on the audience, you can segment sales enablement content into two broad categories:
Internal support documentation for your salespersons can include videos about the different sales enablement platforms you use (CRM, revenue intelligence, meeting notetakers, etc.), standard operating procedures (SOPs), and ideal customer profile (ICP).
These help sales teams onboard new members and complete the relevant action items efficiently.
Simply put, sales enablement content is crucial for maintaining uniformity across all processes, ensuring alignment of efforts with company goals, and accelerating training.
It’s a good strategy to create sales enablement templates that can be reused or modified based on the use case. This can improve workflow efficiency while still giving sales teams room to customize their approach.
You can use a combination of text, images, and videos to create internal sales enablement content, particularly when creating training modules.
For instance, you can mention and explain the action items required to complete a task in a video and then complement it with a checklist. Similarly, infographics outlining processes can be a nice add-on along with sales playbooks.
It is essential for teams to choose the right format for these content pieces for maximum efficacy. We have dived deeper into this below in the “The best format for sales enablement content” section.
When purchasing something, particularly SaaS software, buyers tend to have a lot of questions. It is also quite common in the B2B marketplace that leads and prospects have a few conversations with the sales reps before making a purchase decision.
These questions can be about the value provided by your offerings, how your products work, and how your business charges its customers. Answering them aptly, through sales enablement content, plays a key role in nudging your prospects to open their wallet.
Your external sales enablement content strategy can be further categorized into TOFU (Top of the Funnel), MOFU (Middle of the Funnel), and BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel) materials, each serving a specific purpose in the buyer's journey.
TOFU content, such as blogs and infographics, aims to attract and inform potential customers. MOFU content, including case studies (targeting specific use cases or applications) and webinars, nurtures leads by providing deeper insights into the product and its benefits.
BOFU content, like testimonials, competitor comparison articles (or feature comparison tables), and detailed product guides, helps close the sale by addressing any final concerns and showcasing the product's value.
Here too, you can create content in text, images, and video formats.
As we discussed earlier, you can combine multiple formats within one content type. For instance, a case study article can have a video testimonial. Similarly, blog posts can feature infographics and templates.
And this is where it can get tricky.
Within each type of sales enablement content, there are several kinds of content pieces you can choose from. On top of that, you can combine different formats (text, image, video) to create each of them.
So, which format(s) is best for which kind of content?
This brings us to the next section.
Choosing the right format helps businesses maximize the impact of their team learning and lead learning resources. The content, when relayed through the right medium, can be more engaging resulting in higher engagement and knowledge retention.
We have kept the classification the same for easier understanding. Here is a comprehensive table for your quick reference:
Let’s dive deeper into them.
Sales playbooks, email (or message) templates, and training modules are three key resources that teams use internally. This educational content is used to onboard new team members, set standardized practices, and streamline operations.
These are all-in-one, comprehensive guides that contain strategies, scripts, and best practices for the sales team. The best format for these is text. Of course, you can add multimedia content within to enhance its usability as needed.
Text allows for faster creation, easier sharing, and effortless maintenance. Moreover, parts from text guides can be copied to create custom checklists, templates, etc., which can improve productivity.
Email templates ensure consistent sales practices throughout your organization. These messaging guides are more frequently updated than anything, considering the need for personalization at each stage of lead nurturing.
Here, too, text format can be the most effective. To enhance productivity even more, teams can store the templates in their email marketing tools rather than as documents in a drive.
Training modules educate and upskill your sales reps. These include courses, video tutorials, and quizzes. The breadth and scope of this type of sales enablement content depend on what your team needs training on.
Commonly, this includes product knowledge, ICP, and workflow manual. They help sales teams understand customer pain points to pitch the product in a desired way with the tools available.
Leveraging the video format can give you the best results with training modules.
Videos are more effective while introducing new concepts or explaining complex topics — something that training modules do. The visuals and narration in educational sales enablement content allow the learner to get the hang of things pretty quickly.
Consider explaining how you can create a new list to manage leads effectively on your CRM to a new sales rep. Creating a screen-recorded training video where you walk them through all the steps will be the most effective method.
It is short and shows all the steps the learner needs to which contributes to a pleasant learning experience.
This content establishes authority, proves that your products work, and helps prospects get value from your offerings.
These highly detailed documents are created to enhance the credibility of your brand. Whitepapers explain the industry challenges and their solutions in the context of the offerings of their brand.
As they can also be used as lead magnets, the best formats for whitepapers are text-heavy downloadable PDFs.
This sales enablement content proves that your offerings work as intended in the real world. Typically, they explain how your product helped an individual or organization solve a particular problem with the impact it made.
You can create case studies in different formats. Short articles on the web, downloadable PDFs, and videos are prevalent formats. Videos can be most effective in this regard due to their visually engaging nature, but they may be expensive as you need to interview the customers.
This type of content can be quite effective as it helps prospects visualize using your product and getting the desired value as per their use cases. Such demonstrations make your product appear more relevant and allow your prospects to visualize using it.
Since they ‘show’ how to do things or how things work with your offerings, screen-recorded narration-based videos can be the ideal format for this.
For instance, a demo video explaining Notion’s AI features can help leads visualize themselves adopting the product into their workflow:
The video is only 46 seconds long, which can encourage viewers to watch it attentively till the end. Leveraging text or presentation decks can make the content lengthier and boring while reducing information recall.
Although recording your screen and explaining how your product works to your customers or describing how to use a tool to your internal team is simple, converting them into professional-quality sales enablement content can be challenging.
Teams need to add special effects like pan and zoom, remove background noise, and cut out irrelevant portions to enhance the learning effects. These make both internal and external sales enablement video content more credible and, hence, effective.
On top of that, these videos should have branded intros and outros for consistency, subtitles for accessibility, and background music for engagement.
Making all those edits to raw footage can take anything between hours and days.
Clueso, an AI-powered video creation tool, can do that for you in minutes.
After you upload the screen-recorded video to the platform, it will automatically add pan and zoom effects to highlight action, write a script from the original audio to give an AI voiceover, and insert other elements like intro, outro, subtitles, etc.
Sales teams, with Clueso, can create the most effective sales enablement content — training and product demo videos — within minutes.
Interested? Let’s get you started.
Making a feature-by-feature comparison of the available options can help SaaS buyers choose products more suited to their needs. This is also a great opportunity for businesses to differentiate themselves from the competition and highlight unique selling points.
The competitor comparison content, ideally created in the tabular or infographic format, helps prospects quickly go through lots of information. Moreover, they can easily share this within their organization to speed up collective decision-making.
Here are the three typical oversights that can make your sales enablement content less effective and ultimately diminish its ROI:
After identifying their root causes, we share some quick tips you can implement today.
As we briefly mentioned above, busy professionals, such as B2B buyers, can spare a few quick minutes to try and understand how a particular product or service may help them. It can be counterproductive to send them detailed whitepapers or long-form explainer videos.
Long-form sales enablement content can be useful in the right conditions — when the prospect asks for it. However, sending them earlier in the nurturing process may confuse them and burden them with too much data which can reduce the conversion velocity.
This is also true for internal sales enablement content. Sales reps can learn quickly when the training videos are shorter and explain one concept per material. Longer lectures or live sessions may tire out the learners which can reduce engagement and knowledge retention.
A better strategy is sending bite-sized information as the audience needs it.
For instance, the Notion example video we mentioned earlier is great for introducing a feature and the value it offers for the end user. If the lead asks further questions about the efficacy of the LLM used, the sales rep can send over a detailed whitepaper containing all the relevant information.
Similarly, for learning resources for sales teams, you can always complement how-to videos or checklists by providing or linking related material at the end.
Personalizing sales enablement content makes them more relatable and understandable to the audience. This is crucial for enhancing engagement and driving learner action, whether it is nudging a lead to sign up or training a sales rep to handle support tickets.
Considering learner’s needs while creating sales enablement content can include action items such as:
Keep in mind that there are two kinds of feedback: direct and indirect. Direct feedback refers to the information you collect via surveys and interviews. Indirect feedback is more about observing how your audience interacts with the sales enablement content.
For instance, do they watch the videos completely? How often do they return to some documents?
Monitoring these engagement metrics can help you assess the effectiveness of both internal and external sales enablement content, which brings us to the next common method.
Effective explainer content helps SaaS teams streamline workflows associated with internal sales operations and lead conversion.
B2B SaaS businesses can look forward to faster and more consistent employee training that makes the sales reps more confident when approaching leads. The metrics that will help you track the impact of internal sales enablement content include:
Similarly, prospect-faced sales enablement content can enhance engagement and build better relationships. To track their performance, you can keep an eye on the following metrics:
Sales enablement content helps businesses train their employees and nurture leads to conversion efficiently. These materials come in different forms such as case studies, how-to videos, SOPs, and tool guides.
While creating sales enablement content, it is important to avoid overwhelming the audience with too many or irrelevant points and promote microlearning. This is crucial for maintaining engagement and driving learner action.
Moreover, it is essential to consider the needs and preferences of the learners while creating the content to ensure their usability. To know whether your sales enablement content is effective, teams should monitor relevant metrics that reflect well-trained sales reps and streamlined conversion pipelines.
Running a sales enablement content strategy for B2B SaaS can get resource-intensive due to manual editing tasks. To produce sales aid content faster, teams can use AI automation for such action items.
Clueso produces professional videos and docs for sales enablement within minutes from raw screen-recorded educational footage. The platform makes edits like adding zoom effects, giving studio-quality AI voiceover, etc., for videos and writes concise steps with GIFs for docs instantly.
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