The Essentials
There are five essential pieces of sales enablement content you should always be ready to share with prospects. Here’s what you need and, most importantly, how to modernize them so they feel fresh and compelling to prospects:
1. Company Overview
Your company overview exists for one reason: to help prospects buy into your vision. As Forrester reports, “the first vendor to communicate their vision to value wins business 74% of the time.”
Whether you create a well-designed two-pager or a company overview video, focus the content on what the business does, how you do it and why you exist. (For help defining these three brand messages, check out Simon Sinek’s TED talk). If you get too bogged down in product features and company statistics, you lose the opportunity to sell them on the overall vision.
2. Product Sheets
You should have one product sheet for every product or service you sell and additional product sheets for any bundles you offer. As prospects increasingly look for personalized experiences, you want to be able to share product sheets that speak to exactly what they’re looking for—not overarching product sheets where only the first page and third pages are relevant.
These product sheets should include:
- The overarching problem the product exists to solve
- The traditional (and less effective) approach to solving this product
- 3 – 5 specific pain points customers are experiencing
- 3 – 4 top benefits of the product
- List of product features
- Something to establish credibility—either through including a few reviews, success statistics or logos.
You want this to be a comprehensive document you’d be happy for your prospect to spread widely around the organization.
3. Competitor Comparisons
These documents tend to solely focus on side-by-side competitors features. If prospects were simply making purchasing decisions based on feature comparisons, this approach would be fine. But as the Forrester research shows, selling the vision to value is what most motivates people to buy beyond feature or product information.
Be sure to either include a paragraph about your company vision—and how it better aligns with your customer’s top priorities over your competitors—at the top of this document or make sure this sheet never goes out without the company overview.
4. Use Cases
Use cases are arguably the most undervalued piece of your sales enablement kit. While few companies take the time to create them, they’re enormously powerful in helping prospects understand, step-by-step, how your product fits into their most important workflows and addresses their specific challenges.
We recommend mapping out each of your target personas and creating at least one overarching persona-based use case and 1 – 2 scenario-based use cases.
5. Case Studies
The key to creating case studies in 2019 is to explore how to tell the same story you always have—we had great success with X company and we’ll have great success with you, too—but in a way that’s more compelling and modern than traditional (boring!) case studies. Can you turn it into an infographic? An interactive page on your website? A beautifully designed one pager?
While it involves a bit of work upfront, you also want to build as many use cases as you can. This will help create a more personalized experience for prospects and better help you sell your product.
The Differentiators
Finally, here are two additional sales enablement pieces that’ll help you differentiate your customer experience from competing brands and more quickly build trust with prospects:
6. Industry Research
The purpose of content marketing is to create content that’s useful and applicable for customers so they get to know and trust a brand before buying. Once a novel and unique approach to marketing, it’s now expected.
One of the best ways to do this is by providing useful industry research. Your prospects make business decisions each day based on the state and health of their industry. If you can share research that a) makes your product an easier sell and b) is a referenceable resources they can continue to come back to, you’ve just leapfrogged the competition.
7. Industry-specific Articles
In the same vein as industry research, you should have a few recent, industry-specific articles on hand to share with prospects. These articles tend to be crafted for two specific audiences: the doers and the decision-makers.
Doers want tangible, action-oriented information. They gravitate towards “How To” articles and listicles that help them do their day-to-day jobs better.
Decision-makers are looking at things from a more 30,000 view and appreciate articles that focus on the state of the industry, trends and commentary from other thought leaders in the space.
Your marketing team should be generating content for both audiences already. When you’re gathering information for a prospect, find 2 – 3 recent articles most relevant for them (doer or decision-maker) and their industry to add to the mix.
Any other sales materials you find are essential to include in your sales kit? Let us know what they are below.