Any product or solution you build can be sold only if your sales reps can advocate for its value. Without enough collaterals to share and engage prospects with, they won’t be able to do that efficiently.
Here’s an interesting stat by Seismic:
78% of the buyers claim that the salespeople do not provide them with the relevant content they need.
While you spend a lot of time creating content to attract and engage prospects, it is equally important to educate your salespeople about what is available to them. They need to be equipped with materials that will help them close deals faster.
This is where sales enablement comes into play. Let’s take a closer look at why you need it and how you can create it.
Why do you need sales enablement?
Sales enablement influences the decision-making of your prospects. While your sales reps run to the product team every time a prospect has questions that go beyond their knowledge, the chances of closing the deal become thinner.
Creating content that answers all the right questions is a key step towards solving this problem. It is crucial that your sales reps have access to these materials, as 82% of the buyers go through at least five pieces of product material before they decide to make a purchase.
What kind of material should you create?
There are two aspects to creating sales enablement content.
- Content that helps the sales team engage better with prospects and thereby improve their productivity, such as a sales playbook.
- Content that your sales team can share with prospects to influence the decision-making process.
Let’s take a look at each of these.
Content for the sales team:
1. Buyer persona and Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) documents:
To sell more effectively, your sales reps must understand who they are interacting with, their pain points, job titles, the goal of their business, etc.
Buyer personas and ICP documents give the sales team a peek into the minds and lives of potential customers. Without this information, they won’t be able to empathize with the prospect, which is a key trait for a sales rep.
Here is an example of a buyer persona –
2. Calling scripts:
On one hand, there are sales reps who talk for hours and do not listen to the prospect. On the other, there are reps who don’t know how to talk to the prospect, both of which are equally bad for business.
Calling scripts act as a guide to initiating contact with the prospect, carrying the call forward, and ending it fruitfully. In the case of cold calls, the script should help them start a conversation and keep the prospect on call.
While creating the calling scripts, make sure it includes the key points around different topics that might come up while interacting with a potential customer.
3. Objection handling:
When your potential customers voice out concerns about the product, the sales team must be quick to gratify them with the right answer.
This is where the material for objection handling comes in handy. It should contain a list of possible reasons a prospect might have against buying the product, for example, it’s too expensive, doesn’t have a particular feature, competitors’ product is better for us, etc.
Along with this, it is crucial to have scripts that will help your sales rep handle all these scenarios.
Related Article: 10+ Sales Objections and How to Handle Them
4. Email templates:
Email is the second-best way to engage with prospects next to phone calls. Provide your sales team with email templates for different points in the sales journey. This can save them a lot of time that is otherwise spent agonizing over framing emails that can catch your prospect’s attention.
A CRM software with email management system, makes it easier by allowing you to create and store email templates, share templates within the team, grant access to marketing materials, customer information, and so on. It also gives insights into how each email is performing through email open, click, and bounce rates. With these insights, you can tweak emails that are not doing well.
5. Social media messages:
A good sales strategy should include different ways in which you can get in touch with the prospect, including social media.
Give your sales team tips and templates on how to engage with a prospect through social media channels such as LinkedIn and Twitter. Some of it may include how to share relevant blogs and infographics to your prospect, comment effectively on their posts, compose InMails that can get a response, hashtags to use, etc.
6. Competitor research and analysis:
When there are a lot of key players in the market, it is important to educate the customer on how you are different from the others. And to do this, your sales team has to know what they are up against.
A competitor research and analysis document is a key sales asset that will help them understand who your competitors are. The material should highlight why and how your product stands out from the competition. It should also explain the aspects your competitors are better at, and how you position your product with respect to that.
7. Product cheat sheets:
Product cheat sheets act as a quick reference when your sales reps are stuck in doubt while interacting with prospects. It should also be a quick go-to space where people can gain knowledge on specific topics around your business.
It should essentially provide an overview of the target industry, highlight the best features of your product/service, and how customers benefit from it.
8. Pricing guidelines & negotiation:
You’ve almost bagged the deal, but just before signing the contract, your prospect wants to go over the terms and conditions once again. At this point, your salesperson needs to buckle up to become a negotiator. And you need to equip him/her with the materials necessary to make it a win-win for everybody.
Make sure to give your salespeople a standard pricing guideline with the price breakdown of every product you sell. Every time there is a change in pricing, the guide must be updated, and your sales reps must be notified.
They must also be trained to handle negotiations for different scenarios, and must be aware of the process workflow, points of contact within the organization to handle negotiations, etc.
Content for the Buyers (provided by sales):
9. Product comparison guides:
“Why you? Why not them?” — Every salesperson faces this question from prospects. They want to know why you are a better choice.
The competitor research guides that you provide to your sales team educate them about the other players in the industry, including their strengths. But the comparison guide you share with prospects must shed light on what makes your product stand out from the lot. This has a significant impact on the prospect’s decision-making process.
A side-by-side tabular comparison or an infographic is an effective way to structure the guides, as it will be easy to share and understand.
10. Case studies:
Case studies are hard evidence of how your company adds value to businesses that have chosen your product or service. This is a fantastic material to share with prospects who are in the decision-making phase, as it affirms the credibility of your product.
It is a customer-centric material that should talk about a challenge that a business faced, an effective solution provided by your product, and the end results of using it.
11. Webinars & product demo decks:
Webinars and product demo decks are wonderful resources for internal and external training.
Sales reps can use these videos to understand the product better. They can also share it with prospects to quickly resolve their questions, as the chances of a prospect watching videos are higher than that of reading lengthy material.
12. White paper:
White papers are valuable to both marketers and salespeople. When these materials are gated, they have the power to attract new prospects. These can also be used to persuade buyers in the decision-making phase.
13. Testimonials:
Nothing can speak as strongly as a testimonial from an existing customer who has benefited from your product. Testimonials showcase that you’re familiar with the industry, you are able to cater to specific needs from different prospects, and can give them results that make them loyal customers.
If your prospects see praise for your product from other businesses in their industry, they will strongly consider picking your product.
Now that you have the material you need, what’s next?
You can create all the sales enablement content your business needs, and hand it over to the sales team. But are you sure it will be used effectively? The sales enablement team is responsible for creating a sales training strategy for the new members of the team and should also conduct regular competency development training for all the sales reps.
You can measure the benefits of sales training by comparing how productive your sales reps have become over a period of time.
As a part of sales enablement training, salespeople need to know how to find customer details and relevant resources for each prospect. A CRM acts as a hub for the sales content and gives you much-needed insights on the effectiveness of the sales team and the sales enablement content created for them.
Design illustration by Prasanna Venkatesh Bhupendran
