Sales Enablement content — a game changer
Sales enablement is the fastest-growing search term and discipline in the B2B marketing and sales space. In fact, Google searches for “sales enablement” have been growing at 51% per year, year over year.
According to G21, sales enablement has experienced a 343% increase in adoption within companies over the last five years.
G2 also reports that when a company has implemented sales enablement tools, content, and processes, they’ve had some pretty remarkable results:
- 15% improvement in the results for lower-performing salespeople
- 31% improvement in sales messaging
- 76% of organizations who’ve implemented sales enablement in their companies see an increase in sales of between 6% and 20%
Though sales enablement is more than just content, including the tools and training as well, the content is a critical piece, maybe the most critical piece. Properly written sales enablement content can deliver a number of benefits to your company and your prospects, whether you purchase tools and training or not. Just having the content gives your sales team a competitive advantage.
Sales enablement is a special skill within the copywriting and content writing world, so when you decide to hire someone to help your sales team improve their response rates and generate more revenue, make sure they’re specifically trained on sales enablement. I am.
How does sales enablement content differ from marketing content?
Many sales reps only have marketing content available to them to use with prospects. And much of the marketing content is useful and helpful. For instance, case studies and testimonials do a great job of providing social proof to prospects that your product or service has value. However, marketing content is one-to-many communication.
The kind of content your salespeople really need
What your salespeople need is one-to-one communication, and yet, most salespeople are not trained to write effective content. And it’s very time-consuming, taking them away from direct selling tasks.
Salespeople need:
- Cold outreach emails that work by “warming up” the contact
- Cold call scripts that break the ice and open the door to conversation
- Follow-up emails that engage
- Battlecards to help with consistent, effective messaging about features, benefits, competitive advantages, and responses to objections
- Well-crafted elevator pitches
- One-sheets that provide technical product details in a benefit-focused way
- Sales decks that tell their product story and help with focused, effective messaging
- Proposal templates that use best practices to persuade and convince
When salespeople have effective cold outreach emails with “makes sense” calls-to-action, for instance, it’s been shown to result in up to a 30% increase in response rate. That’s a sizable increase in the number of leads and should result in a sizable increase in sales conversions and revenue. A good sales enablement content copywriter can help sales teams deliver those results and more.
Your salespeople will still need marketing content like case studies, white papers, brochures, blogs, videos, and other valuable collateral, but they need to get their foot in the door with the prospect first, and sales enablement content allows them to do that.
How can a copywriter be more effective than a seasoned sales rep?
There are always top sales performers on every team who instinctively know what to say and how to say it to a prospect to get them to engage. However, according to Xactly Corp4, the average tenure for a salesperson today is 18 months… yes, 18 months. It’s hard to develop a lot of expertise and savvy in that amount of time.
Moreover, even seasoned sales reps can have a hard time explaining what they do and how they do it in a way that helps others replicate their success. The beauty of effective sales enablement content is that it doesn’t rely on the length of tenure or a huge amount of sales savvy. That’s because effective sales enablement content uses a combination of psychology, testing for what works, and good persuasive copy skills.
I know what works and what doesn’t, and with proven processes for eliciting organizational knowledge, can write extremely effective messaging and content for your sales team.
And in doing so, I help your sales team:
- Spend more time on sales and less time writing by giving them pre-written cold outreach and follow-up emails.
- Use more effective messaging with prospects by providing well-crafted features and benefits copy, responses to objections that position your product positively, and call scripts that open more doors.
- Generate more leads from cold outreach by using proven communication techniques that generate higher response rates.
- Ultimately, close more sales and hit revenue targets more consistently.
What would a sales enablement content project look like?
When you decide to work with me, the first thing I will likely do is set up a discovery call. During that call, I’ll get as much information as I can about your product or service, the features, and benefits of that product or service, who your chief competitors are, and what advantages those competitors might have. I will probably ask to have either your sales director or one or two of your most effective salespeople on the call.
I’ll ask you what your sales process is, what kinds of pushbacks and objections prospects typically raise about your product or service, and what supporting marketing materials exist (like case studies, white papers, etc.).
Once I have that information and understand what your goals are for your sales team, I’ll ask where the gaps are in the team’s ability to get leads and meet sales targets. With that information, I’ll propose one or more packages of sales enablement content your sales team can use to close those gaps. When your team gets the content pieces back, they can use them for cold and warm outreach, follow-up, sales calls, and sales closes.
What can I write for you today? Give me a call at 239.297.3638 or email me at ginny@ginnypeterson.com — Ginny Peterson, your professional freelance sales enablement content copywriter.
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