How to Create Sales Enablement Content that Closes Deals

Your sales team needs content to close deals. More specifically, content that enables them to address buyers’ concerns, provide in-depth product information, and prove why your product is more suitable than others in the marketplace.

Gartner includes ‘Content’ as one of the key categories in its Sales Enablement Framework. Though the importance of sales enablement content is evident, 78% of the buyers claim that the salespeople do not provide them with the relevant content they need.

The problem is that a salesperson barely has time to research, design, and create the enablement content needed to address buyers' pain points and concerns. Naturally, sales teams spend more time on calls than content.

In this piece, we’ll first identify the right type of content you need for sales enablement and then, help you create them by collaborating with various teams.

Alright, let’s get started.

What is Sales Enablement Content?

Sales enablement content refers to the content salespeople use to address prospects' concerns, answer product-related questions, and convert interested buyers into customers.  

As we mentioned earlier, your sales team needs to send the right content to the buyers at the right time based on their buying journey so that they can close the sale successfully.

“58% of pipelines stall because sales reps are unable to add value to buyers.”

- Salesforce.

In most cases, sales teams work with marketing, specifically, content marketing teams to create the necessary enablement content to close deals. But you don’t have to just rely on the marketing team to come up with sales enablement content. We’ll see how to create such content by collaborating with different teams including product and customer success.

First, let's identify the right type of content you need for enablement.

Essential Types of Sales Enablement Content

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to deciding the right type of content you need to sell better. So, let’s work together to identify sales enablement content for your business needs.

a. Ask Your Buyers:

Sounds obvious? But many sales teams don’t spend time identifying the content types that are effective in helping buyers make the decision. Certain sales content management platforms indeed offer analytics to help you see how each sales asset is performing. But they can’t predict if you’re any missing essential pieces of content.

So, try running a simple survey among your buyers to identify the content that would enable sales.

Here’s an example from marketingcharts.com:

b. Insights from Sales:

No one can understand the content needed to close deals better than the salespeople talking to customers—day in and day out. So try to analyze the sales calls, especially lost deals, to identify what content would’ve turned the story around and helped you close the deal.

It’s not easy to go through hours & hours of recordings, pin down the questions, and identify the exact content that’s needed. All too often this means no one ends up doing it.

There is a better way: Use Grain to capture and share the questions and content ideas from your customer call with the right team via Slack or a preferred work tool.

For instance, we have created separate Slack channels like #voice-of-the-user, #feedback, #sales, etc. to just drop the Grain highlights as soon as the customer-facing team captures them. Here’s an example:

c. Mapping Content to the Customer’s Journey:

Put yourself in customers’ shoes and try to come up with all the possible questions and objections while going through the buying journey. Now, audit your existing content to see if you’re missing any important pieces of content that could prevent buyers from completing the journey.

Based on your ICPs (ideal customer personas) and pricing plans, you can come up with multiple buyer journey maps. It’s important to have different journey maps as the questions and sales content requirements can vary. For instance, sales assets and documentation needed to land an enterprise client will look completely different from the assets you need to close a mid-sized business.

We hope at this point, you’ve discovered and prioritized the content your sales team needs for running an effective sales enablement program.

Sales Enablement Content Examples

If you don’t need examples, feel free to skip this section and move on to the next to learn how to create enablement content for your sales team.

After talking to your customers and sales team, and mapping the customer journeys, you’re likely to end up with a list of content to create and share. If you need help prioritizing, start with the most important assets including:

• Product Cheat Sheets (spec doc)
• One-pagers
• Case Studies
• Competitor Research and Analysis Materials
• Battle Cards
• Pricing Guidelines
• Video testimonials
• Sales playbooks
• Product explainer videos
• Product sell sheets
• Customer Personas

How to Create Sales Enablement Content

You can create enablement content from different sources:

• Customer call recordings
• Product documentation
• Existing Customers
• Customer success materials
• Marketing content
• Internal knowledge base

From Customer Conversations

Sales enablement content should talk to only one person—your buyer. Rely on customers to capture the questions and objections and identify content that could enable sales.

As we briefly discussed, your sales call recordings could be a great place to gather insights and figure out the gaps in your sales content. We have seen sales reps running customer lunch-and-learn programs where you casually hang out with a customer over a Zoom call to get a peek into their worldview.

To make the most out of your sales calls, you need to learn how to capture the important moment and repurpose the conversations into useful assets. Let us explain a bit more and show you how you can do this. Because you may or may not have detailed product documentation in your company but you’ll always have tons and tons of sales calls.

Step 1: Sign up for Grain

For the uninitiated, Grain helps you capture & analyze prospect conversations to improve your sales process, create enablement content, and align your team around the voice of the customer.

It’s free to get started and very affordable to upgrade when you are ready to create multiple sales enablement content from your customer conversations.

Step 2: Import your customer calls directly from Zoom cloud

Sidenote: Ensure you’re using Grain to record your upcoming sales calls so that you can capture important moments while you’re on the call. And, there’ll be no need to upload manually once the call’s over. Grain automatically uploads your Zoom calls and you can access it anytime. ‍

Step 3: Create sales enablement content

Once you import, Grain will automatically transcribe your calls. Open any recording and select the text in the transcript to create a short highlight clip—capturing the key moment or insight you'd like share. Voila! You now have an asset ready to share with your prospects. You can share the highlight clips individually anywhere or stitch them together to create a video story.

There are several types of content you can create via Grain.

a. Product Walk-throughs:

You can turn your demos into a product walk-through Story (a reel of Grain highlights) and send it to your prospects and customers. It saves you a ton of time and makes it easy for your prospects to share internally.

b. Follow-ups:

Sales calls can last anywhere from 30-mins to an hour. So, the important insights you have shared and answers to your prospects’ questions are typically spread throughout the call. Create a follow-up Story with a reel of important moments (captured as Grain highlights) that could help your prospects to take away the essential info.

They don’t need to watch an hour-long recording, just a Story that lasts a few minutes.

c. Video Testimonials:

You can capture video testimonials while on the Sales call that could be shared/embedded on the marketing landing page. Take a look at our page for example.

d. Training Material:

Create a feedback Slack channel where sales reps can capture and share the best moments from calls to help each other out. It could serve as training material for newly onboarded reps or existing reps can collaborate to better their responses.

Managers can also offer clear feedback and help their teams handle customer objections better. ‍

Content Types:‍

From your customer conversations, you can create:

• Sales scripts
• Video testimonials and Stories
• Product feature walk-through
• Objection Handling
• Onboarding Content

From Product Documentation

Product documentation often has bottom-of-the-funnel content including product specification docs, product comparison charts, and under-the-hood technical details. While they aren’t meant to be shared externally, with some help from the product team, you can repurpose them into sales assets to level up your product knowledge and equip yourself to handle technical questions from savvy prospects.

You can share the content with interested prospects as well. So, search and find your product documentation and look for ways to use it to better your sales enablement process.‍

Content Types:‍

From product documentation, you can create:

• Product Cheat Sheets (spec doc)
• One-pagers
• Product Comparison Charts
• Pricing Guidelines

From Your Existing Customers

Truth be told. Your customers didn’t just rely on the content from your end to swipe the credit card. Many would’ve evaluated different products in the market, their pros & cons, and then made the call.

And, that’s a good thing. Why? One, your customers trust that your product is best suited for their needs. Two, they can help you understand what stood out in your product that eventually made them take the deal.

Some of our customers shared their research and evaluation sheets that helped them to upgrade their plans and pay for a year upfront.

So, you can create highly relevant assets by learning the evaluation process of your existing customers. Even If they aren’t willing to share the research documents, they’d love to openly share their feedback and why they become a customer. It's 100% authentic and prospects couldn’t ask for a better asset as it’s from someone who was in their shoes.

Content Types:

With the help of your existing customers, you can create:

• Product Comparison Charts
• Competitor Research and Analysis Materials

From the Customer Success Team

Customer success teams have the chance to talk to some of your best customers and learn what worked for them and how they used your product for different use cases. In other words, the customer success team can get you written customer recommendations, detailed case studies, new use cases, and more.

They often create and maintain content to enable new customers to become familiar with the product and leverage it to its full potential. So, you have the opportunity to source content that suits late-stage prospects.

Again, it’s important to ensure you’re repurposing and adapting to make it a winning sales asset. Don’t just re-use the existing content.

‍Content Types:‍

From your customer team, you can create:

• Product specifications
• Written testimonials
• Logos
• Case Studies and Other Customer-Centric Content

From Marketing Content

Though content marketing and sales enablement have different goals, there’s an overlap in content. Some of the existing content marketing content can be used for sales enablement—with slight modifications.

For instance, a blog post can serve as educational content to help buyers get an overview of the problem that your product addresses and why it’s important to act now. But to make things coherent, you can convert it into a pdf (one-pager) and then share the link. This way it looks like a dedicated sales asset than a random blog post and becomes more accessible.

Analyze your content marketing data to identify the top-performing content that fits your needs. For instance, you might be looking for a whitepaper that explains your product in-depth and the content marketing team could help you pick the best one based on data. ‍

Content Types:‍

From your marketing content, you can source:

• Informational blog posts
• eBooks and Whitepapers
• Case Studies

From Internal Knowledge Base

This is pretty self-explanatory. Every company tends to have an up-to-date knowledge base to help new employees learn more about the company, its vision, products, policies, and more.

You can rely on a knowledge base to create sales enablement content as well. While it depends on the company, you’ll be able to gather company profile, ICP documentation, templates, and a lot more.

Content Types:

From your knowledge base, you can create:

• Company profile
• Competitor Research and Analysis Materials
• Logos
• Buyer personas and ICPs
• Email templates

Next Steps

If you think it’s a lot of work to collaborate and repurpose the content sourced from different teams, start with the most impactful assets. For example, we showed you how to use your customer conversations to create a handful of sales enablement content. It’s already available and you can use a tool like Grain to spin out content in minutes.

Another option is to hire a sales content manager. Companies have started hiring a dedicated content person just for the sales team to continually create enablement content by collaborating with different stakeholders and teams.

The best time to act is now. Your sales team needs more content to accelerate the pipeline, close more deals, and hit the revenue targets.