11 Types of Influential Sales Enablement Content 

Sales reps that genuinely connect with prospects and foster positive interactions are twice as likely to hit their targets. To do that effectively, they need content.  

And we’re not talking about marketing content like blog posts or newsletters. After all, sales reps never use 90% of marketing content.  

While some of that may be due to negligence and poor communication, a lot of it is due to the fact that sales reps need content made for their particular needs.  

This is called sales enablement content. That is, content that addresses challenges and answers prospects’ questions at every stage of the sales cycle.  

In this post, we’ll go over sales enablement content examples and how your team can use them to nurture more qualified leads to the finish line. 

Let’s start with some basic definitions. 

What is Sales Enablement Content?

Sales enablement content is any resource, insight, or material created to help your sales team win and convert more customers.  

It’s the kind of content that helps reps answer prospects’ questions comprehensively without wasting time or causing unnecessary friction in the funnel.  

Adopting a strong sales enablement content strategy for your business will allow your sales team to: 

• Explain your product or service’s ROI. 
• Show how your products or services are better than the competition. 
• Demonstrate the real-world success of your solutions. 

Great sales enablement content provides sales reps with everything they need to deliver a positive customer experience — and increase their win rate.  

11 Examples of Effective Sales Enablement Content

What follows is a rundown of some of the best sales enablement content types for driving leads down the funnel.  

1. In-Depth Blog Posts

The goal of a search-optimized blog post is different than a sales enablement-focused post (though their utility may certainly overlap). 

Posts written with SEO in mind are all about capturing web traffic through search volume analysis and keyword research. 

Sales enablement posts are especially designed to help propel prospects throughthe sales cycle.  

One of the best ways to create high-value blog posts is to answer questions your prospects and customers ask. 

And because sales reps interact with these potential customers, they’re in the perfect position to convey the most pertinent questions from prospects. 

Task your reps with making a log of all the common questions they receive from prospects. Whether they’re objections, inquiries about products or features, or fact-finding questions. 

Then, relay those questions to your marketing or sales enablement teams and produce short, 500 to 750-word FAQ-style answers to those questions. 

Once you reps are equipped with these posts, they can pass them along to prospects without needing to re-explain or reanswer concepts over and over. 

2. Case Studies

Case studies serve as proof that you can deliver what you promise. Research shows that 92 percent of customers consult testimonials before making a buying decision. 

When a customer purchases your solution, they’re not actually buying your solution. They’re buying a better version of their work life.  

Without wading too deep into buying psychology, the basic idea is that the customer is the hero of the story, not you. 

Therefore, when you demonstrate how a previous client found success using your product or service, prospects can see themselves in that customer’s shoes. They begin to imagine how their lives could also be improved by your solution. 

And every new customer is a potential case study. In fact, one customer’s testimony could be worth a dozen more customers down the line (if the case study is compelling enough). 

So what are the keys to a compelling case study? A few things: 

1. State the problem. 
2. State the impact of the problem on the organization. 
3. State how the organization found your solution. 
4. State how the solution fixed the initial problem(s) the company was facing. 

It’s vital to use hard and fast figures wherever possible in case studies. For example, rather than saying your solution saved the prospect “tons of time,” say your solution “reduced work hours by 75% per week.” 

Also, be sure to include as many direct quotes from the customer. Hearing from the customer in their own words increases the likelihood that prospects will relate to them and take action. 

3. Whitepapers

Whitepapers aren’t opinion pieces. They’re data-backed and comprehensive. The insights provided by whitepapers are great for convincing customers and educating your sales reps. 

A whitepaper allows you to position your brand as a thought leader, enabling you to win prospects’ trust.  

Whitepapers are also essential for selling the skeptics within the prospect organization. These are the folks that: 

• Aren’t convinced there’s a real problem to be solved. 
• Want data-backed answers to questions. 
• Don’t trust the efficacy of your solution. 

Whitepapers, when researched and produced well, help overcome all these objections (and lend authority and credibility to your brand). 

4. Sales Scripts

Sales scripts get a bad rap, but they’re some of the cheapest and most effective tools you can implement to significantly boost your close rate. 

Going into a call without a plan is, in fact, a plan — and it’s not a very good one. Experienced sales reps are free to go off-script if the situation calls for it, but having some rails to run on for those “off” days is a real help.  

And most sales scripts aren’t written word-for-word like a Shakespearan play. Rather, they’re bulleted lists of talking points and potential objections. 

For example, you could have a general sales script for cold calling and cold emailing, and a special flowchart-style script for addressing objections. So if the customer objects on price, you can have a whole section dedicated to overcoming price objections. 

5. Product Sheets

Product sheets are one-pager documents that summarize the entire unique selling proposition (USP) of your product or service. They provide the answers to critical questions so they stay top-of-mind during the course of business. 

These questions include: 

• Who’s the ideal user of your product or service? 
• How does your product help the customer? 
• What does it do? 
• How much does it cost? 

Detailed product sheets can come in handy when a sales rep first meets a prospect, or when you’re onboarding new reps and they need a succinct description of your product. 

6. Explainer Videos

Explainer videos are short, engaging and informative videos that use multimedia to explain your product or service. 

They’re some of the strongest converters when it comes to sales enablement content. 

Even in our bite-sized, attention-deficient culture, over 50 percent of customers watch explainer videos all the way through. That’s impressive — and significantly higher than the retention rate of most corporate videos.  

And the beauty of it is that you don’t have to appear in the video. Some brands go for the “talking head” aesthetic, but others use animated characters or a simple screenshare to explain their product or service.

7. Proposals

It’s hard to call a proposal “content,” but it technically is a critical piece of collateral at the bottom of the funnel.  

I know this seems obvious, but you should not be rewriting entire proposals every time you get a new customer. If you don’t have a proposal template — and one that all your reps are working off of — you need to remedy that ASAP. 

A proposal template outlining the key deliverables in your product or service will not only save you time, but help keep the language, formatting, and brand identity consistent across your entire sales team. 

8. Sales Battlecards

Sales battlecards — in addition to having the coolest name of any content — are powerful resources for showing prospects the unique edge you have over your competition. 

They are one-page documents or graphics, usually in tabular format, that compare your product’s features, services, or pricing to one or more competitors.  

Sales battlecards help boost prospect win rates in 71 percent of businesses that use them. If you’re in a highly-competitive vertical, they’re a great way to overcome objections. 

9. Onboarding Content

For many businesses, return customers are far more valuable than new customers, and are critical to maintaining a low customer acquisition cost. 

In this case, making the initial sale is just the beginning. Then comes the challenge of getting the customer fully integrated and bought in into your solution. 

This is where onboarding comes in. Many companies have onboarding specialists, which may be essential for highly-technical products or services.  

But for companies who don’t have that (or can’t afford it), onboarding content can fill in the gap. 

Onboarding content can come in many formats and largely depends upon your industry and product or service. 

They can be screenshare videos or even physical product demonstrations. You’ll also want to make sure the customer knows where to go if they’re stuck, whether that’s a self-help knowledge base or customer support contact. 

10. Customer Personas

I don’t think anyone would disagree with the idea that understanding your customer is one of the most valuable things you can do as a sales professional. 

When you lose sight of who your target customers are, your strategy falls apart. 

This is why it’s so essential to develop robust customer personas for each and every customer “type.” That includes various players within prospect organizations (such as stakeholders, gatekeepers, and internal advocates). 

Compiling these personas will take time and lots of qualitative data. It’s important to go as detailed as possible, answering questions about: 

1. Gender, age, and geographical location 
2. Motivations and pain points 
3. Common language or industry terms 
4. Firmographic data (their position within the organization and job title) 

It’s often handy to have one or two page PDFs of each persona, complete with a “pretend” headshot. 

This is definitely some next-level futuristic stuff, but you can go to this site and download free headshots of “people” created by an AI system that composites facial features from across the internet. 

11. Webinars or Recorded Demos

Especially in the software or digital services world, most prospects want to see the demo in action before purchasing. 

And while live demos are great for answering questions, they take time and resources to conduct. A less committal and scalable stepping stone is a pre-recorded webinar or demo. 

These webinars are often long-form videos (anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour) with a voiceover set to a slide deck.  

Unlike an explainer video, the goal is not to entertain with colorful animations and snappy graphics but to do a deep-dive of your entire product or service. 

While doing anything live adds more complexity, in-person demos or webinars give sales reps the ability to answer prospect questions on the fly, as well as custom-tailer the presentation to their specific needs. 

This pre-recorded demo can then act as a stepping stone to a live demo for hesitant prospects. 

How to Manage Your Sales Enablement Content Effectively

We hope you’re excited to start producing some sales enablement content that empowers your reps and earns you more business. Before you dive in, here are some best practices to keep in mind.  

Centralize All Assets

The primary reason for creating sales enablement content is to empower your sales rep with the information and resources they need to engage and convert customers quickly. 

Therefore, you’ll want to ensure your team can access the content by storing it in a central location, accessible remotely from any device anywhere, be it a computer, smartphone, or tablet. 

Make Personalization Easy

Even in organizations that track and create sales conversations methodically, sales reps will still have their unique style of engaging with prospects. 

Not every rep can use the same content as effectively as the next — and that’s where personalization comes in.  

Some organizations segment their sales reps based on who they sell to, what they sell, and the strategies they use to sell it. 

A better and more effective strategy is integrating sales enablement content with CRM data for relevant customers. Or, leveraging an AI-powered sales enablement platform like Accent Technologies, which recommends content to reps based on contextual clues.  

Track Content Usage

Do you track the efficacy of your sales enablement content? If you don’t, you’re missing out on critical customer data that may save you a bundle in content production down the line. 

To better measure and understand the effectiveness of sales enablement content, track and optimize every piece you deliver. 

Then, analyze the data across multiple dimensions. Start by asking yourself these questions: 

1. Of all our content types (video, text, slides, email), which performs the best? 
2. Is there any correlation between the success of a particular content type and the prospect’s vertical? 
3. How is content performing across the funnel stages (ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu)? 

These will help you see the clear content winners (and the content you should stop promoting and wasting your time on). 

Then, you can prune the weak content and double down on creating more content that actually leads prospects down the funnel.  

Use the insights collected to help you curate optimized content in the future. Of course, you’ll want to use content with a higher engagement rate as a model for future pieces. 

Top 5 Sales Enablement Platforms

Accent Technologies

Sure, we’re biased, but we truly believe we’ve created the world’s most powerful sales enablement platform.  

Accent allows you to capture, refine, and score buyer-seller interactions automatically. 

The platform leverages AI to enable you to share the right content with your sales reps to guide their next move throughout the sales cycle. 

What’s more, your sales enablement management can get the insights they need to help sellers identify opportunities and improve performance. 

BigtinCan

BigtinCan promises to usher users into a new era of sales enablement. This agile platform enables you to develop highly personalized experiences unique to your brand. 

With BigtinCan as your sales enablement content solution, you can help your sales reps prepare, engage, track and continually improve your customer’s buying experiences via three of its hubs — learning, content, and engagement hub.    

Highspot

Highspot is touted as an intuitive sales enablement platform that combines customer engagement, training, content management, actionable analytics, and contextual guidance. 

Besides helping your sales team improve customer conversations, Highspot also seeks to empower your reps to deliver a seamless buying experience that drives retention and customer satisfaction while growing revenue. 

Seismic

Seismic uses powerful content intelligence and analytics to let your sales team prove and enhance their impact on your company’s bottom time while helping you identify what’s bringing in the money and what needs adjustment. 

The sales enablement platform also promises to equip your sales reps with the knowledge, messaging, and content personalization tools to enable effective buyer interactions. 

Showpad

Showpad is a comprehensive sales enablement platform designed for marketing teams that want to generate more sales and revenue fast. 

The platform offers your sales representatives the tools to deliver the right content to prospects. In addition, it equips them with the skills and conversation insights to optimize your sales team’s productivity and create a positive marketing impact. 

With 1,200 + customers in over fifty countries, Showpad has everything you need to effectively deploy and adopt sales enablement content. 

Final Thoughts

Sales enablement content helps reps guide prospects through the funnel faster and more effectively. 

As outlined in this post, there are several inexpensive ways to create powerful sales enablement content, possibly with resources your team already has on hand.  

The best sales enablement content makes work easier for the sales team and helps support the company’s overall goal, which is to win and convert prospects into customers. 

The quest to develop a solid sales enablement content strategy starts by choosing the right sales enablement platform. 

Next Steps 

Accent Technologies is the first and only SaaS company to bring together SALES AI and CONTENT MANAGEMENT in a true REVENUE ENABLEMENT PLATFORM. We provide both sales and marketing with better visibility into the performance of their teams.

This drives revenue through intelligent recommendations for complex sales scenarios and provides the data for rich analytics that power better coaching, forecasting, and long-term customer support. Learn more about our solutions or REQUEST A LIVE DEMO to see it in action.