Content marketing is one of the best ways to connect with your consumers. But if you want to close deals—and make it easier for your team to do so—you need to add sales enablement content to the mix.
Good sales content answers your audience’s questions, communicates your value, and increases conversions—improving sales efficiency and shortening sales cycles overall. But not all sales content will help you achieve these goals. Many marketing teams are disempowered because they’re disconnected from sales or don’t have the full view they need to make content sales that really works.
This is a problem we’ve seen plague both our clients and our own company. Luckily, we also know how to address it. So, if you want to increase your conversion rate with sales enablement content, we’ve assembled a few of our best tips to do it successfully.
5 Strategies to Increase Conversion Rates with Sales Enablement Content
Remember: Successful sales enablement isn’t about finding the perfect deck template. It’s about understanding your audience and effectively communicating your brand story to them. Here’s how to translate those insights into good sales content.
1) Zoom out of your view.
Marketers have a ton of power to create content that seriously helps the sales team boost their results. Unfortunately, marketers also often have tunnel vision. Any of these issues seem familiar?
- You only focus on content for the marketing portion of the buyer journey.
- Your marketing team is totally siloed from sales.
- You have a bad relationship with sales.
No matter the cause, it’s a huge problem. If you want to create sales enablement content that supports both your customers and your sales team, you need to understand the end goal and optimize your buyer journey to get customers where you want them to go.
If you want to win, start with the end in mind.
In marketing, all roads must lead to Rome. So determine what Rome is, then reassess your buyer journey to make sure you’re leading people in the right direction.
Tip: Map your buyer journey to identify what messaging people need to hear at what stage. In general, you want to start with more emotion-driven messaging at earlier stages, then switch to more logic-driven messaging as they get closer to sales. Note: Pay special attention to where you need to bridge the two. The handoff between marketing and sales can be notoriously rocky, so work together to make it a smooth transition.
2) Talk to your happy clients.
If you want to know how to reach people effectively, talk to the people you’ve successfully served. Find out what drew them to you, what stood out throughout the buyer journey, what selling points or interactions made them choose you over the competition, etc. You can also ask them about perceived weaknesses or opportunities to improve. Not only does asking them these tough questions give you better insight into their experience but it also demonstrates a commitment to improving it (something they will appreciate).
Remember to ask both current and previous customers for a more complete picture.
Tip: Send out surveys to customers post-purchase. You should also conduct internal postmortems to review customers’ experiences and identify ways sales enablement might address weak points or better support the sales process.
For example, although we have diligently crafted marketing personas for our ideal customers, in the last year it became clear that clients were coming to us for different reasons than we thought. After deep-diving into their initial Contact Us submissions, we identified three common reasons they were reaching out. We used these insights to refresh our brand messaging framework (including tagline, value prop, and story pillars), update our sales enablement, and infuse our content with those selling points at different touchpoints. Had we continued to focus only on what we thought they wanted, we would have missed a huge opportunity to serve their needs.
3) Spy on the competition.
Pablo Picasso once said, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” The same goes for marketing. Again, it’s easy to get stuck in your own brand loop.
- Sometimes you’re so busy you can only focus on the task at hand.
- Sometimes you’re so immersed in your brand you can’t be objective.
- Sometimes your content simply feels stale.
But if you want to stand out from the competition, you need to step outside your bubble. Translation: You gotta go creep on your competition.
Tip: Use our free template to do a competitive analysis of your competition’s deep-funnel content.
- What are their selling points?
- What key phrases do they use?
- How do they present their information?
This insight can help you strategically position your brand and sales enablement content to create a stronger impact.
4) Spend more time on sales enablement content than any other content.
Does that statement give you a knee-jerk reaction? We get it. As marketers, we’re so focused on top-of-funnel content, creating those big, flashy pieces to grab people’s attention. Sales enablement content is often an afterthought or a bare-bones effort.
This is usually because marketers are overburdened or siloed from sales. Either way, this issue often plays out in one of two ways.
- Marketing ends up telling a very different story than sales, so customers feel lost and confused once they cross the bridge.
- Marketing makes big promises that sales can’t deliver on, so customers feel bait-and-switched.
This is why it’s so important to create a seamless hand-off from one stage to the next. But, more importantly, because sales enablement content is your final tool to dazzle clients, it needs even more attention to get it just right.
Tip: Take a critical look at your existing sales enablement content to identify ways to improve.
- What selling points are you emphasizing?
- Are you speaking the audience’s language (addressing their pain points, problems, needs, wants, desires, etc.)?
- What objections can you proactively address?
- How can you appeal to their logical side?
- How can you increase your credibility?
To make this content as strong as possible, circulate it to multiple stakeholders (including sales and marketing) for insights, then take a fresh pass to incorporate those notes.
Don’t Let It Stop There
Sales enablement content is one of the best tools available–but only if you know how to create and use it effectively. Here are some things to keep in mind as you move forward.
- Expand your idea of what sales enablement content is. Sales enablement content is so much more than case studies, testimonials, or product guides. Find out about the 5 types of content you should create.
- Break down walls between marketing and sales. Start with regular meetings to get your team on the same page, and follow our tips to build a bridge between sales and marketing.
- Use data insights. Analytics can help you measure the effectiveness of your content, so track metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to understand what resonates with prospects.
- Create a content library. Ensure your team always has access to the tools they need by creating a sales enablement library. (Most importantly, assign someone to keep it up to date.)
But if you’re one of the many marketers asked to do more with less, and you don’t always have the time and resources to create the sales enablement content you need, consider bringing in a partner to take some things off your plate. You can start by finding out what it’s like to work with us. We’ve helped hundreds of clients optimize their buyer journey, and we’d be happy to turn your content into the conversion tool you’ve been waiting for.
