What does your sales cycle length say about your sales pipeline?

If it’s taking too long to close a sale, then it goes to show there are clogs in your pipework that need fixing.

About 58% of pipelines stall due to sales reps not being able to add value.

One way brands are hastening their sales process is with the use of a content strategy. This consists of writing blog posts, developing videos, marketing on social media, and more.

Roughly 54% of salespeople are able to track closed deals back to social media engagement. This goes to show the effectiveness of social media when you’re using the right content marketing strategy to attract target audiences.

But how do you go about using content marketing to become more efficient at sales?

With sales enablement.

Let’s take a closer look at how you can build a content strategy that enables your sales team.

What is Sales Enabled Content?

It’s a pretty much exactly how it sounds – content that enables sales. In other words – it’s content that helps close deals.

Imagine having nothing but warm and hot leads contacting your sales department ready to buy. All because they were properly educated about their problem and how your product or service can help them – thanks to your content.

That’s how it is when you’re using a well-planned content strategy. But what should you include in your content plan to enable sales?

Well, you can include a mix of:

• Case studies
• Email campaigns
• Informative blog posts
• Interactive content
• Print materials
• Customer testimonials

The idea is to help your visitors flow through the sales funnel. In order to do this, you need to provide educational content. In-depth articles are a great way to shed light on their problem and how your product or service is the solution.

Offering enough pieces of content to answer all of their questions and ease their fears will help them move to the consideration stage. At this point, you can share testimonials and case studies to prove you’re the right solution.

By the time they contact your sales department, they’re already sold.

Next, let’s take a look at how you can create a content strategy for sales enablement.

Review Internal Documentation

This is one of the most overlooked assets you can use to build the foundation of your content marketing. All of your internal documents, such as product guides, training materials for processes and systems, and company overviews can be useful.

You can use all of this to help your content team better understand your business its products and services, and how things are run. It’ll also help them to understand the sales process.

With these insights, you can also create content to help consumers better understand the company and its products or services. Content writers can place this information inside of articles and blogs to address questions your audience may have.

Talk with the Sales Team

What better way to learn how to enable sales than to get advice from your sales team? It’s critical that they are included within the content planning stage.

They can give you information regarding your customers that no one else can. For example, their common questions and concerns. They spend hours upon hours each day talking to prospects and customers.

So they can deliver a ton of insight into what topics to cover to better help your audience. If you can address these issues in your content, they can skip through all the questions and get right to close the deal.

Sales enablement is all about aligning content marketing with your sales teams. The goal is to help both your customers and the sales department get to the bottom of the funnel.

It’s recommended that you have regular meetings with both departments to brainstorm content ideas.

Continue Improving Sales Content

Like with anything in business, your content strategy needs constant improvement. So after you write and publish content for your audience, this isn’t the end of it.

You have to continue collaborating with the sales department to identify new trends and shifts. For example, the company may expand into a new market and will have a different group of customers to cater to.

This will require a different approach to the topics of the content and maybe even the tone and voice you use. The last thing you need is for your content to become stale, outdated, and irrelevant.

Your sales team is on the front lines and will be able to give the content team a heads up on these changes.

Deliver Content Based on the Customer’s Journey

As we mentioned in the beginning, a sales enabled content strategy should include pieces for every stage of the funnel. You have your informational content for the top of the funnel, which will cater to the newcomers.

This can include how-to articles, checklists, how-to videos, and whitepapers.

Then in the middle of the funnel, you can use email marketing to keep your audience engaged. Then to nurture them out of the consideration stage to the decision stage, you can include content like FAQs, product demos, samples, and case studies.

Once they’re considering your product, you can seal the deal with end-of-the-funnel content. This can include customer testimonials, coupons, and live video demos.

Again, working together with your sales team will allow you to create content that best suits your customers’ needs.

Developing Your Content Strategy

Ready to improve your sales pipeline? Then it’s time to start planning your content strategy. Gather your content writers and sales teams to begin the brainstorming.

If you need help, you can always enlist the help of digital marketing experts.

But whatever you decide, stick to your plan, do lots of testing, and continue making improvements!

Do share your feedback in the comments section below. If you have any queries about what content strategy can work best for your sales cycle, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected].