Close More Deals with Effective Sales Content

If a perfectly good product isn’t selling well, there’s a high chance it’s because the sales reps aren’t equipped with effective sales enablement content to draw in prospects.

Teaching your sales team how to curate effective sales content, like brand one-pagers, informative sales decks, blog posts, and video ad posts, can help create a unique brand identity and reinforce your product’s plus points within the mind of a prospective client. 

Different forms of sales content exist to facilitate prospect customers at different points within the buyer journey. In this article, I will go over helpful business tips and tricks to help you create effective sales content that will facilitate your prospect at different points throughout the sales journey.

Understand The Pain Points of Your Sales Team

Pain points are problems that need to be solved, which is why it’s crucial to know exactly what they are. to understand the problems hindering your marketing team’s progress, reach out to them for more information.

A great way to identify pain points is to schedule a discursive meeting with the entire business marketing and sales team. If you can’t do this, send out a survey form for them to fill in.

Regardless of which method you choose, here’s a list of content sales oriented questions to ask your team:

• What is the biggest challenge your team is facing at the moment? Are there other businesses or strategy and sales teams within your industry that have found an effective solution to it?
• Have prospective buyers given helpful sales strategy feedback that needs to be implemented?
• Does your marketing team feel adequately equipped with effective tools that allow them to create the right content for boosting sales (this includes text ads, video content (like short user review videos), sales enablement posts and related computer technology, digital marketing, and data collection software, etc.)?
• Does the team have any new sales and marketing ideas to overcome existing challenges?

Once you’ve understood the challenges your sales and content marketing teams face, you can work on finding effective solutions that will ultimately help boost sales performance. Be sure to conduct further conversations with your internal sales and content heads. This will allow them to stay in the loop of things and encourage them to work harder when creating content that will add value to your brand.

Do Your Research into Competitors and the Market

Knowing how your competitors optimize their sales content process can help you boost your own business’s content marketing skills. Use their work as an example. Once you’ve understood your competitors’ marketing techniques and analyzed their sales enablement content, you can draw inspiration from it when working on your own marketing content.

If you’re too busy to do this, encourage your content marketing team to go over competitor sales enablement content examples instead. After all, they’re the ones who are going to be creating content for you, so it would help if they were acutely aware of the competition.

Utilize Case Studies and Customer Research Content

A good marketeer is familiar with what the prospect wants and will create sales content to help the prospect understand why buying a certain product is beneficial for them.

Sales case studies related to your company are an excellent way to let your prospect audience know about how other users employed your product to find a solution to their problem.

They hence qualify as effective customer research content, which is one of the most beneficial sales content types.

In this way, sales case study content can also serve as an effective form of social proof while giving buyers an authentic perspective from someone who has already used and benefited from your product.

Consider creating a content blog section on your brand website. You can compile content about different success studies here, making it easier for prospects to access them.

If your prospect finds that these case studies successfully highlight how your product can be an effective solution to satiate their existing need, they’ll be more likely to buy it.

Create Different Content for Different Use Cases

It’s important to tailor your sales content to match the requirements of your audience. We call this “sales enablement content.”

Sales enablement content can take many forms. Popular sales enablement content types include sales decks and one-pagers about your company. The idea is to select company-oriented marketing and sales content to choose from, each of which is suited to a specific purpose or point within the buyer’s journey.

Understanding how to produce effective sales and marketing content will allow your marketing team to strike sales conversations with potential clients while backing the discussion with the appropriate, related content.

You’ll find more information on effective sales enablement content creation and tools below…

Build A Killer Sales Deck

A sales deck is a detailed slideshow or PowerPoint presentation explaining key information and sales content related to a specific product or service, as well as your company.

Sales deck content comes into play when a client is keen on learning more about your product or service and has agreed to create time to meet with the sales team of your company for a detailed product presentation.

Your sales deck’s content should try to explain everything in thorough detail while especially focusing on how your product or service can solve the client’s problem. However, after concluding the presentation, your sales and marketing team should allow time for these potential customers to ask questions if desired.

If you’re dealing with highly specialized customers that want to know exactly how your product or service can help them, consider adding unique sales slides tailored to such client-specific content.

For example, if your business sells tiles and your customer is a homeowner, urge your sales team to add a content slide about why your company’s tiles are an excellent choice for indoor home applications. This type of sales content will significantly differ from a slide created to pitch the same product to industrial buyers who want tiles for their warehouse or factory walls.

In other words, remember to tailor the sales deck content to your buyer personas – we’ll discuss this in further detail soon.

Produce One-Pagers

One-pager are an excellent sales content tool for when your team is working in the negotiation phase and needs a compact sales brief to convince the client and seal the deal.

True to their name, one-pagers are just a page long and cover all the important aspects of your product, service, or business/marketing strategy. This form of sales content should be brief yet impactful and filled with essential data while avoiding fluff words that deviate from the content’s aims.

Remember, one-pagers are one of the most important types of sales enablement content, so use a formal, encouraging tone (the content should not read like a blog post!)

Sales reps typically send out one-pager content to clients to help save time. Emailing a single-page sales enablement document takes under a minute, whereas explaining the same content over the phone would take significantly longer.

In this way, sales teams can reach out to multiple clients simultaneously without having to schedule explanatory phone calls or meetings individually. Multitasking tools like this one can help to remarkably speed up the sales process and your team’s performance.

Understand Personas

Before creating sales content, you should know exactly who you’re creating it for. On that note, I’d encourage you to first understand all the different prospects’ personas you can expect to meet.

Each buyer persona will require unique sales content tailored to prove how your product can offer solutions to their existing problems.

Hence, you’ll also need to tap into each persona’s existing needs (or problems of theirs that need solutions).

So, for example, the problems (and respective solutions your product can provide) will be different for a consumer who lives in an urban setting and has related urban problems, and a rural consumer who has a relatively different set of problems defined by where they live.

To summarize, an in-depth understanding of customer personas will allow your team’s salespeople to provide the appropriate sales collateral materials that are best suited to different prospects and can highlight how their specific problems can be solved with the help of your product.

Use Social Proof

The average B2B buyer is more likely to buy products or services backed by social proof, which is an indirect form of sales enablement content.

One of the best ways to circulate social proof insights as sales content amongst prospects is by reaching out to popular digital influencers and commissioning them to post user reviews of your product or service on social media.

Marketing teams sometimes create their own social proof content, too, by encouraging past users to leave a product review on either the company website or a popular third-party seller platform, like Amazon.

You can also repost these reviews onto your brand’s website or weave them into blog posts to add value to the content.

Some brands in today’s competitive industry like to create posts about user-generated star reviews (on a 5-star scale) and share these across their brand’s social media platforms.

5-star scales are easy for prospects to identify and understand, making them one of the most effective types of content a sales collateral developer could create. They add value to the product’s reputation and convince buyers to choose your product over competitor options.

Remember, the customer will first conduct independent research regarding the product before reaching out to sales teams. Hence, most of their initial opinions about the product or service will come from social proof sources.

So, if your prospects find adequate positive social proof insights to support your product or service, they’ll be more likely to reach out to your team or make the purchase directly.

Understand the Impact of Your Content

An excellent way to understand whether or not your marketing content has proved helpful is to look into your company’s sales trends.

You can monitor sales trends and the behavior of prospects by keeping track of website clicks, products sold, and ad interactions.

Your new selling techniques are likely working if you can identify a positive shift in user demand or interactions.

If no such trend exists, it might be time to have a word with your salespeople and content team about their selling tactics. Encourage your sales reps to revise the existing sales enablement or create new marketing content if needed.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, if you wish to improve your brand’s marketing content and boost the sales process, I’d advise you to first look into any challenges your sales team faces and work towards overcoming them.

Once this is done, you can move towards creating new, optimized types of content that your salespeople can use to convince any potential customer that your product will add value to their lives.

You should also employ social proof insights when creating sales content and make it easy for prospects to access popular success stories through your website.

Be sure to also remind your content creation team to develop sales enablement content that reminds B2B prospects about how your product can solve their problems. For this, sales reps must first understand the existing buyer personas.

Furthermore, as long as you remember to keep in mind that a product’s sales process and content creation methods should be designed in a way that facilitates the buyer’s journey, you’ll be more likely to come up with the type of content and sales materials that support this idea.