Tonya Vinas, Director of Content Strategy
I have never met a marketing professional who is satisfied with their sales enablement strategy. Results could always be better, and sales and marketing are never entirely aligned.
What makes for a good sales enablement strategy?
A good gut-check for comprehensiveness is the SiriusDecisions Sales Enablement Leader Priorities:
- Talent acquisition
- Sales onboarding
- Sales enablement functional design and development
- Ongoing learning and development
- Sales communication
- Sales asset management
Although this list might look daunting, sales communication is a lever that’s easy for most marketing people to pull and make meaningful progress. Isn’t getting people to engage in two-way engagement the role of Marketing already?
One way to improve sales-enablement content is to add fresh content packaging. Here are some format ideas to consider for your internal sales enablement communication and content:
Podcasts: Podcasts continue to grow in popularity in content marketing. Why not in sales enablement content specifically?
Podcasts offer a new and easy way for sales team members to consume information about new product and service features, thought-leadership talking points, and any other timely and relevant critical information. Sales people tend to travel a lot, and podcasts can be downloaded and consumed at their pace.
Influencer content: A habit most of us have picked up from digital content consumption is cultivating go-to knowledge sources. Influencer content hooks that habit into a content plan by bringing an influencer perspective to buyer messaging.
The same method could work in sales. Is there a product specialist with a particularly eloquent way describing the product’s value proposition? What about a sales team member who excels at social selling?
If you can identify someone who is passionate about a topic that sales people need to know about, evaluate them as a potential influencer to include and/or drive sales-enablement content. Be sure to use social promotion, too, in internal channels.
Videos: I know what you’re thinking. Videos cost a lot and take a long time to make. That’s true, and the sales-enablement video projects I have worked on have mostly been tied to big sales events. However, have you ever thought about using quickly produced videos to embed in or associate with other content?
These could be instructional videos that communicate the importance of an upcoming sales and marketing initiative and the critical role sales will play. It could be a sales manager explaining strategy, or even a heartfelt introductory video that sets out your team’s goals for sales-enablement content. (It can be hard to work on alignment when you don’t know one another.)
In additions to these, consider interactive content, personalization, nurturing and other “content ideas” that could freshen up your communications to the sales team. Consider this: Televerde surveyed 200 sales leaders who sell B2B products or services and found that 37% cited a lack of communication is one of the biggest issues preventing better alignment between Sales and Marketing.
Interested in seeing some sales enablement content samples? Reach out to our Director of Marketing, Steve Voith, to schedule some time to chat and get some ideas.
