Every sales person wants to close more deals and meet or exceed their revenue targets. How effective they are in their selling is of course largely dependent on their skills but also on the support they receive in form of resources. These critical resources make the foundation of your overall sales enablement efforts. Enabling your sales team with the right research, content, training, tools and data that they can use to interact, engage and sell to your prospects and current customers more effectively is important to increase your win rate, shorten your sales cycle, minimize costs and make high-quality sales.
Before we explore various kinds of sales enablement content you can leverage for your e-commerce business, let's quickly see what and why should you care about sales enablement.
What is sales enablement?
There are many definitions of sales enablement. Some believe it's about providing their sales teams with the right content at the right time so they can pitch their products and services to customers but I think it’s not just about the content and it certainly isn’t about pitching your offerings. Today’s modern B2B buyer’s don’t want the traditional selling approach, they want you to add value and deliver a great buying experience. That superior purchase experience involves not only providing them with critical information in a timely manner, but a strategic, efficient coordination of all your selling systems - processes, practices, tools and technologies. If done well, sales enablement -
Helps your sales reps sell effectively
Creates a more involved, participative and aligned relationship between your marketing and sales teams
Helps your buyers have a more meaningful purchase experience
Helps you provide an outstanding customer experience
Impacts your top line and bottom line revenues positively
Typically, in most organizations sales enablement is owned by the head of sales but it is both sales and marketing teams that have to work together to produce useful, relevant, audience-focused content and experiences.
Now let’s look at some of the important content pieces that your sales team can use to better interact and engage with buyers that can drive more sales.
What kind of sales enablement content should you create?
1.Competitor Analysis
Your market space has direct and indirect competitors competing for the attention and business of your prospects and current customers. In order to succeed, your sales reps must know critical information about them, their offerings and strategies. Not only that, they have to know how you fare as compared to them, what your strengths and weaknesses are, where your threats and opportunities lie, and what your value propositions are. Knowing these will help you tailor an effective sales strategy, while arming your sales reps with critical information they need to interact with buyers and customers. For example - your direct competitor shares the same target customer - Retailers, and you both help them create omnichannel consumer experiences using, composable, API, headless technologies, a thorough competitive analysis can help you differentiate and stand out.
2.Sales Battle Cards
Battle cards for sales are useful for your reps during various stages of the buyer’s journey. Created from all the competitive intelligence you gathered for your comp analysis, they are an effective way to have important pieces of information that will help build your value in the eyes of your customers. Your reps can better field objections and help clarify how and why you are better than your competitors. Champions on the buying team need to build a compelling business case to convince decision makers and your reps can use vital information on these cards such as - features, benefits, cost of implementation, customer service, ROI, customization - to help them in their efforts.
3.Product Demo Videos
58% of buyers think of product demos as a useful information source during their buyer’s journey. With more buyers beginning their research journey digitally and preferring to meet with customers much later, having a product demo video showcasing the strengths of your offering is a great way for your sales to introduce your technology offerings to your prospects. You can have these on your website which is a key stop for buyers and customers alike while engaging with your brand.
4.User Reviews
45% of B2B buyers look at user reviews while considering a potential technology supplier. Besides encouraging your current and past customers to post reviews on third party sites such as Trust radius, customer testimonials shared on your website, case studies, email campaigns, newsletters can help sales in their customer acquisition and retention efforts.
5.Pre-call Checklists
We all know preparation is the key to success. And sales reps are an important channel buyers use for clearing doubts, issues and seeking clarifications. Before your sales call, knowing essential information about your prospect is critical to make the call/interaction meaningful. Knowing details on - industry trends, brand issues and concerns they are facing, competitor information, potential objections that could come up, the person you are going to talk to will help you be prepared and navigate conversations better (86% of future customers take the time to listen if their salesperson can provide meaningful insights about their business
6.Blog Posts - B2B buyers ask your sales reps many of the same questions before making their decision, so why not create blog posts around them. Sales reps can share these as they try to engage and interact with them, saving themselves time. Blog Posts are also an effective way to show your prospects that you understand their industry and business. It’s an opportunity to showcase your expertise and educate. Write or talk about commonly faced challenges and how you can help solve those for them. For example, your buyer is still considering whether they should migrate from a legacy system to a modern ecommerce system, think of all the questions they would want answers for - architecture, features, microservices, reliability, security and so on. You could make posts around each that they will find useful.
7.Case studies - 20% of b2b tech buyers find case studies to be useful as they gather information on suppliers. They want to see if you can help solve their challenges and achieve business results they are looking for. By showing before and after scenarios as well as value/ROI figures, you can show how you have successfully helped others in their space navigate through issues, scale and grow their business.
Of course sales enablement content is more than just these 7 ideas. There are other assets such as - sales decks, email templates, product sheets, product comparison, white papers to name a few that are equally useful at various points during the buyer's journey. The idea is to help sales have more targeted interactions with your buyers and provide them with a customized experience. The customers need confidence in your ability (not just as a technology vendor) but as a partner they can rely on and the relevant content can help demonstrate that.
