Great sales content drives conversations—and results. To keep sellers ahead of the competition and hitting their targets in 2024, they need access to the most timely, relevant, and impactful sales enablement resources.

In many organizations, a sales enablement team drives the creation, distribution, and management of sales content. This content falls into two types: 1) customer-facing collateral that sellers will share with buyers and 2) training assets, best practices, research, and tools that are for internal use.

All this content needs to be easy to consume and reusable across the sales organization. It’s not enough to simply make assets available, sellers must know how to use these resources. Teams that know what’s working—and what’s not—can improve sales content to be even more effective.

What Is Sales Enablement Content?

Sales enablement content is specifically created to empower sales teams with the tools and resources they need to sell more effectively. It includes training materials, product information, competitive insights, and conversation guides. This type of content equips sellers with the knowledge and skills to engage prospects confidently and close deals faster. 

Sales enablement content is strategic and focused on supporting sales reps throughout the entire sales cycle. It ensures that they have access to the right information at the right time, helping them deliver relevant messages to prospects. By bridging the gap between marketing and sales, it aligns both teams, ensuring consistent and effective communication with potential buyers. 

Why Sales Content Isn’t Used

If you’re in sales enablement, training, product marketing, or content marketing, that’s what you do: crank out the sales content. But sadly, research shows that 60-70% of it is never used (SiriusDecisions). Why is that?

There are several reasons:

• Sellers don’t like the content and think it’s too long, short, high-level [fill in the blank]
• Sellers don’t know there is new content and keep using old, familiar pieces
• Sellers can’t find new content when they need it
• Sellers don’t know how to use content or understand its value in the sales process

There’s a way to overcome all four of those issues. Step 1 is to collaborate more closely with your sales team to develop content they’re going to want to use. Step 2 is to make it easily accessible. Step 3 is wrapping each new piece in a layer of knowledge to show how and when to use a new asset. But before you do any of those things, you have to figure out what type of sales enablement assets your sellers need.

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Sales Enablement Content that Drives Deals

Download The Complete Guide to Sales Content Management to learn how to organize, manage, and activate content that accelerates sales.

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17 Top Types of Sales Enablement Assets

Here’s a list of the top formats of sales enablement assets, and what each is good for. The list is divided into internal content for training sellers and external content for use with buyers.

The other thing to remember is that content in 2024 is not a once-and-done thing. Yes, you can launch that baby out into the world, but you’re going to have to revisit each piece of content over time and decide if it’s still relevant and useful, if it should be retired, or if the messaging needs to be updated based on current company positioning, competitor challenges, or customer needs.

Your company’s baseline sales enablement assets will depend on your product, industry, and market. There’s a huge array of options available to drive buyers through the funnel to close. Here are the core assets to start with.

External Sales Enablement Content – For Use with Buyers

1. Presentation Decks
Now that 80% of selling is virtual, it’s essential to have a well-crafted slide deck to convey your offering. The length can depend on the complexity of your solution, but it should tell the story of the challenges you help buyers overcome in an engaging and logical way that reinforces your positioning. Your deck will typically include every scenario, which enables reps to choose the slides that fit a particular prospect.

2. Product One-Pagers
A one-pager provides a high-level overview of a product or service. This helps sellers present the features and benefits of your solution to the buyer and address general pain points and challenges.

3. Product Sheets / Data Sheets
A product sheet describes the technical features and specifications of your product or service for buyers and serves as a reference point for sellers if they’re asked to explain them.

4. Solution Briefs
A solution brief describes how your product or service solves a specific customer challenge to help sellers explain the value of your offering.

5. White Papers / eBooks
Long-form assets such as white papers and eBooks are top-of-the-funnel content that promote your company’s thought leadership on a topic that’s important to your industry. They can present proprietary research, industry trends or predictions, or an in-depth explanation of an issue or challenge. These are great engagement tools that enable sellers to offer value to a prospect in a helpful, relevant, and useful way.

6. Case Studies
Case studies present the situation, challenge, solution, and results of an engagement with your company. They are useful for prospects in the consideration phase because they provide a third-party endorsement of your solution.

7. Customer Success Stories
These present real-world use cases and results to help sellers provide proof of product performance to prospective customers.

8. Testimonials
Written or video testimonials offer first-hand endorsements of your product or service. These help build trust and credibility among late-stage buyers. Work with customer-facing teams to identify customers for testimonials, success stories, and case studies.

9. Explainer Videos
A short (under 2-minute) video that describes your product or service and positions it as a solution to buyer challenges. These are great tools for your company site and for sellers reaching out to new prospects.

10. Webinars
A webinar is an online event hosted by your organization and broadcast to a select group of invited attendees. Webinars are a great way to highlight the expertise of your internal SMEs, customers, and partners. Recording the sales webinar creates an asset that can be repurposed for blog post recaps and snippets to share with prospects. You can also add them to your site for on-demand lead generation and use them internally for sales training.

Internal Sales Enablement Content – For Use by Sellers

11. Sales Script / Discovery Call Script
The sales script accompanies your deck and equips your sellers with a set of talking points, guidelines, and leading questions to help them present your product or service with clarity and consistency. This may also include strategies for each stage of the sales cycle to help sellers overcome objections and move buyers through each stage.

12. Product Demo Script
The product demo script walks your sellers through a demonstration of your product features and benefits to help them do a deeper dive into the specifics of your product or service.

13. Email Templates
Email templates help sellers communicate consistently, send emails at high volume, and build trust with prospects. They can be personalized based on the prospect’s pain points and industry. The key is to make it easy for sellers to customize the template.

14. Sales Playbooks
These are comprehensive internal-facing guides that show the most effective way for reps to sell at each sales stage.

15. Battlecards
These concise, internal-facing documents establish a company’s competitive differentiation. They’re designed to help your sales team gain a firm understanding of a competitor’s offering, as well as key sales messages, essential information about your product, and value proposition. Reps use battlecards to handle objections in deals against specific competitors.

16. Win / Loss Stories
Unlike case studies (see below), win / loss stories, best captured on video, are for internal use. These are a way for sellers to explain how they won or lost specific deals. They enable you to capture, share, and preserve valuable customer and competitor intel for other sellers and new hires.

17. Buyer Personas
These documents describe different buyer types to prepare sellers to help uncover and solve customer problems. Each persona represents a typical customer. Profiles can include background, age, gender, job description, decision-making power, personal interests and aspirations, and other details that provide a better understanding of the customer.

How to Develop Effective Sales Enablement Content

Developing effective sales enablement content requires a clear strategy and collaboration between sales and marketing teams. By following these key steps, you can create content that empowers your sales team to engage prospects more effectively and close deals faster. 

1. Identify Sales Goals: Start by understanding the specific sales goals your sales team wants to achieve. Whether it’s shortening the sales cycle, increasing deal sizes, or improving win rates, knowing your goals will guide your content creation efforts. 
2. Collaborate with Sales Teams: Work closely with sales reps to identify their pain points, frequently asked questions, and the challenges they face in the sales process. Their insights are critical to developing content that is both practical and relevant. 
3. Understand Buyer Personas: Define and study your buyer personas to ensure the content addresses their needs and challenges. Tailoring content to the buyer’s journey ensures it resonates with prospects and supports meaningful conversations. 
4. Audit Existing Content: Review current sales and marketing content to identify gaps and opportunities. Assess what’s working, what’s outdated, and what needs improvement. This step ensures you’re not duplicating efforts and are instead enhancing what’s already available. 
5. Create a Content Strategy: Develop a strategic plan outlining what content is needed, the format it should take (e.g., case studies, videos, or guides), and how it will be distributed. Prioritize content that aligns with key stages in the sales funnel to provide timely support to reps. 
6. Leverage Technology: Use sales enablement platforms to organize, manage, and distribute content. This ensures that sales teams can easily access the content they need, when they need it, from a centralized location. 
7. Measure and Optimize: Track the performance of your content by measuring how frequently it’s used and its impact on sales outcomes. Regularly gather feedback from the sales team and adjust content as needed to keep it relevant and effective. 

Delivering Relevant and Effective Sales Content

At its core, sales enablement is the ongoing process of maximizing revenue per rep, by ensuring sellers convey the right concept using the right content throughout each stage of the buying process.

Sales enablement maximizes every point of engagement salespeople have with buyers and improves the experience they provide. It also helps organizations streamline and shorten sales cycles by improving buyer interactions.

When you empower your sales team with the right training, sales assets, coaching, and tools, they simply have the ability to sell more effectively and efficiently. Use this list of content to brainstorm the right assets that will accelerate growth, boost revenue, increase your client base, and drive long-term success in a volatile world.

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Sales Enablement Content that Drives Deals

Download The Complete Guide to Sales Content Management to learn how to organize, manage, and activate content that accelerates sales.