Overcoming Sales Enablement Challenges with Interactive Content
On average, each of us creates 1.7MB of data every second. At that rate, 90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years. That means there’s a lot of information out there and having your message stand out to buyers is harder than ever before.
To break through the noise, successful brands are using resonant storytelling to deliver compelling buyer experiences. This requires a deep understanding of the needs of the customer, their key challenges, and creatively framing up your business’s value proposition in a way that resonates with your target audience.
It’s essential to unite your marketing and sales teams in delivering the most compelling stories throughout your buyer journey.
Marketing and sales teams both want the buyer to:
- Engage with content throughout the entire funnel, not just the top
- Move through their journey faster
- Take action to become a loyal customer
Success depends on solutions that support the creation of compelling buyer experiences—powerful, “no code” capabilities that make it easier to transform static content into immersive experiences that inspire buyers to act.
The Sales Enablement Challenge
Enablement practitioners have a similar challenge reaching their audience as marketers and sellers do. They also need to actively breakthrough internal noise and inspire their audience—sellers—to act.
Given rapidly changing market dynamics, organizations must adapt continuously. That translates into a lot of change, which leads to the need for a steady cadence of communication, education, and training for go-to-market teams. At Seismic, we leverage the power of our own platform to streamline this communication. Interactive content is a vital piece of the puzzle.
We use interactive content to support our efforts across three key stages of the seller journey:
- Onboarding
- Ramping
- Upskilling
Stage 1: Onboarding
For onboarding, interactive content excels at helping new employees learn key concepts, product information, and processes. Psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered in his research that information is quickly forgotten—roughly 56% in one hour, 66% after a day, and 75% after six days.
Keep in mind, that study was conducted in the 1880s. Just think of how much worse our rate of forgetting is now with an even greater number of distractions and amount of information to consume. Many of us have heard of the dreaded “death by slides” and this is one of the reasons that we opt to use interactive content whenever possible to educate our new hires.
New sellers typically hear from many different people across the organization as they onboard, so we must differentiate the delivery of our enablement material for it to be absorbed and retained. With interactive content, we’re able to make our presentations stand out, simple to use, and we flip the conversation, allowing our new hires to participate in their own learning and inspiring them to want to learn more.
Stage 2: Ramping
As sellers get busy, it can be a struggle to keep them engaged. At this point in their journey, we use interactive content to entice our new hires to continue building their knowledge and skills as they ramp. Examples of material that is particularly powerful in an interactive format include demo skills, cold calling scripts, cheat sheets, and even sales process training.
One way we have leveraged interactive content at Seismic is by creating an engaging microapp about our sales process and methodology, which we rolled out at the beginning of this year during our sales kick off (SKO). That microapp became our sellers’ first stop when they had questions about the new process and methodology, and became an integral way for us to drive seller compliance and sustained usage over time.
Stage 3: Upskilling
Even experienced sellers need to stay up to date and on brand. We use interactive content to inform them about the latest messaging and provide assets they can use as sales tools. We have begun to use interactive content as a key part of the enablement process for quarterly product launches for our go-to-market teams.
We also create playbooks for individual capabilities. Our marketing team has also used our platform to create many introductory presentations and pitch decks to help our sellers deliver compelling experiences for our buyers.
Using Interactive Content to Empower Enablement
Just as sellers must stand out with their buyers, enablement practitioners must stand out with their go-to-market teams to help them continuously develop and grow as sellers. At Seismic, interactive content has been an immensely helpful tool to empower our enablement team. They use it to inspire the sales teams we support to learn more and be better sellers and better ambassadors for our brand.
Learn More
What other methods have you used to stand out in enablement? You can learn more about interactive content at seismic.com.