How to Build an Effective Sales Enablement Content Strategy
For most marketers, the content gap isn’t a myth or a vague statistic. It’s a measurable tax on revenue.
New data from SugarCRM reveals that for mid-market companies alone, the operational friction between teams leads to $5.5 million in preventable churn, and that number is rising every year. The problem isn’t a lack of effort. It’s a lack of a cohesive sales enablement content strategy that maps to the reality of modern buying.
According to Gartner, 61% of B2B buyers now prefer a completely rep-free buying experience. So, in the tiny window of opportunity when buyers do engage with a seller, your sales reps can’t afford to waste time searching for a case study or fumbling through a generic slide deck. They need the right asset, at the exact right moment, to win the deal.
What Is a Sales Enablement Content Strategy?
Sales enablement content provides sales teams with the resources needed to effectively engage prospects and close deals, and a strong sales enablement content strategy helps align sales and marketing teams so marketing content actually meets your sellers’ needs.
Unlike broad brand marketing designed to generate awareness, enablement content is audience-centric, meaning it’s engineered to overcome specific objections and move a deal from one stage to the next.
Sales enablement content strategies should address every type of content sellers need, from external-facing assets, like case studies and email templates, to internal-facing training, like battlecards and playbooks.
Why Does a Sales Enablement Content Strategy Matter?
The old model of creating high volumes of generic content is broken. According to a Forrester survey, 53% of revenue teams reported that less than half of their sales enablement collateral is ever used by sellers. That represents a massive drain on budget and resources.
One reason this waste is happening is because the modern buyer has fundamentally changed. Your buyers are self-educating, spending the vast majority of their journey without a sales rep in the room. When they finally do engage, your reps have immense pressure to deliver value immediately.
By shifting to a dedicated enablement strategy, you eliminate this friction, ensuring sellers have the right assets to deliver tailored messaging the moment a buyer asks.
Learn More: Explore the ins and outs of sales content management.
How to Develop a Sales Enablement Content Strategy
Structural problems can’t be solved with more folders and vaguely labeled PDFs. To move from chaos to clarity, marketing teams need a rigorous operational framework.
Step #1: Understand Your Target Audience
Marketing teams can’t guess what sales teams need anymore. They must identify key buyer personas and map the specific struggles of buyers throughout the sales cycle.
To do this:
- Analyze Use Cases: Don’t build vague product decks. Instead, build specific decks for specific situations and pain points, such as a deck to convince a CFO in a given industry or a deck for technical security reviews.
- Listen to the Sellers: Sit down with your sales leaders and get a clear picture of which assets will most effectively reduce ramp time for new hires, and which assets they’ve seen reps struggle to use. Open communication is crucial. After all, think of how many more calls a rep can make if they save even 5 hours a month searching for the right content.
When you anchor your strategy in real-world data rather than assumptions, you stop building generic content and start building precision revenue tools that sellers are eager to use.
Step #2: Audit Existing Content
Before creating anything new, it’s crucial to assess the mess.
Look at what content you already have and:
- Review for Relevance: Is your content library filled with outdated assets from 2021? If it’s old, archive it.
- Gather Feedback: Identify the people on your sales team who aren’t afraid to point out what isn’t working. They can be one of your best sources of data to identify useless content and gaps in your current library.
Remember that a smaller, high-quality library is infinitely more valuable than a sprawling archive of outdated files. If sellers trust the repository, they will use it; if they doubt it, they will ignore it.
Step #3: Create Relevant and Engaging Content
Enablement isn’t just about handing over a PDF. Great sales content needs context.
To make content that sellers actually want to use:
- Align to the Sales Journey: Ensure you have relevant content for every stage of the sales process, from the top of funnel blog posts to bottom of funnel ROI calculators. A healthy mix of case studies, playbooks, competitive battlecards, and email templates ensures your sellers have the tools they need to close deals.
- Keep It Bite-Sized: In our modern, mobile-first world, 60-minute training videos are dead. Break your internal enablement content into short modules so sellers can consume it between calls.
By respecting their time and context, you ensure that sales teams actually engage with your content and the assets you make survive the transition from the marketing folder to the live sales call.
Learn More: See the types of sales enablement assets sellers actually want and need.
Step #4: Align Sales and Marketing Teams
Friction usually happens at the hand-off. The best way to break down silos and ensure consistent messaging is through communication and collaboration.
To start fostering better alignment between marketing and sales:
- Find a Visionary: Appoint a dedicated lead, like your product marketing manager, to bridge the gap between marketing creation and sales execution.
- Asynchronous Alignment: Use digital tools like short videos to pitch new content to the sales team. For instance, you can record a 60-second explainer video so sellers have full clarity on how, where, and why to bring that asset to a call.
True alignment isn’t just about agreeing on a message in a meeting; it’s about ensuring that message travels intact from the boardroom to the buyer, without getting lost in translation.
Learn More: Get your teams on the same page with our guide for sales and marketing alignment.
5 Tips for Driving Revenue with Sales Enablement Content
Defining the strategy is only the first step. To keep the engine running and ensure it actually impacts the bottom line, marketing teams need to implement some operational best practices.
- Centralize the Source of Truth: Implement a dedicated revenue enablement platform. This ensures assets are version-controlled, easily searchable, and accessible on mobile. Don’t forget to give assets expiration dates. If a competitive battlecard hasn’t been updated in six months, it’s likely doing more harm than good.
- Measure Impact, Not Vanity Metrics: To optimize your strategy, you need to track the right metrics and understand how content influences actual revenue. Using digital sales rooms (DSRs) lets you see exactly which slides a prospect viewed and how long they stayed. You can also see what pieces of content led to real sales. Use that data to inform all content decisions: what to make and what to toss.
- Use the Language of Your Customers: If content sounds like marketing copy instead of a sales conversation, it’s likely to fail. Using conversation intelligence (CI), you can review sales calls to find the exact phrases, objections, and pain points your prospects use and inject them directly into your assets.
- Personalize at Scale: Your salespeople need flexibility. If you lock every slide in a deck, you run the risk of sellers going off script and building their own versions to meet their prospects’ needs. Let sellers have room to personalize but give them a strong foundation to start from.
- Close the Feedback Loop: Don’t let feedback be a one-way street. If a piece of content isn’t working, you need to know immediately so you can optimize or archive it. One way to encourage feedback is with a dedicated channel in Slack or on your enablement platform where sellers can rate and review assets. Use those insights to iterate quickly and efficiently.
Optimization is an on-going project built through daily discipline, turning a static library of blog posts and PDFs into a revenue engine. When you manage content with care, relevance, and rigor, you stop guessing what works and start replicating what wins.
Push Your Sales Enablement Content Further
A well-crafted sales enablement content strategy is vital for ensuring your sales team has the tools they need to succeed in a market where buyers are increasingly independent.
But, you can’t scale your content strategy using legacy folders and email attachments. To truly enable a modern hybrid sales force, you need modern tools. Revenue enablement platforms combine content management, learning, coaching, and digital sales rooms to help your teams deliver consistent results.
Ready to stop the friction and start the revenue? Learn how an all-in-one enablement suite can empower your team to close more deals.
