What are the most important sales enablement materials?
What do you prioritize? I’m going to give you the top five items here, but you have to adjust this answer depending on what you understand about your target persona: Where do they get their info? What do they like to read/watch? How often are they going to possibly come across your marketing materials?
For now, let’s take a quick dive into — what I know — are usually the top five you want to have available for physical or digital consumption:
1. One-Pagers / Landing Pages
Maybe it’s my own content background, but I see a lot of similarity between these two kinds of materials. This will get straight to the point you want to prove. You can explain a given product, a specific feature, or make a case to a specific market right away.
Remember there is a chance to tell a story here, one that can even branch off from your main narrative. Think of this as the side plot in a movie: There is more going on than just the main character and story. There are different arcs happening around that, just as each of your customers will have their own stories to tell and problems to solve.
2. Buyer Personas, Sales Personas, Marketing Personas, etc.
There are a few ways to say ‘know your audience,’ but in my opinion very few good ways of describing how to create a workable target persona. Coming from the B2D world especially, many teams don’t go as far as they can when describing the specific type of user/developer/software engineer they are selling to.
Consider the contrasts between each of and among all three of these targets: database engineers, infrastructure engineers, and machine learning developers.
Dan works on databases, Irene on infrastructure, and Max on machine learning. A standard developer persona might describe any given software engineer as focused on automation, simplifying deployments, and being able to use multiple tools at once. But break it down and you’ll see that generic description isn’t going to get you far:
- Automation: Dan and Irene want to automate their workflows, but Max is focused on how to automate things. Max is going to consider tools for creating automation, not simply a tech stack that allows automation.
- Deployments: There are heavy differences between data models, infrastructure layouts, and MLOps.
- Balancing multiple tools: Dan needs to pull from multiple databases at the same time, Irene needs to provision multiple tools at the same time, and Max has to ensure neural networks are running smoothly.
This is just an example and even an oversimplification of each of these roles’ responsibilities—we haven’t even gotten into other pain points and goals!
3. Case Studies
NOT to be confused with use cases. Someone has to vouch for you. It does not matter how well worded and eye-catching what you have to say is. You want a paying customer to testify to your value.
This makes your product real. There is a logo to point to and a face to put on your audience’s identity.
The target reader is going to identify more with other customers than with you, so give them the option to relate to someone who is using your product and telling their own story.
4. One Explanation Video
Don’t hesitate either. Anyone visiting your website will much prefer to hear a 2:00 minute video to surveying your ‘Home,’ ‘About Us,’ and ‘Product’ pages to get a quick understanding of what you do.
While a quality video might take a while, the tools exist now to visualize a script very quickly. An initial video will go far in making your company interactive right off the bat.
Obviously, don’t stop there. Create more. Rethink and remix whatever vids you produce and look for ways to make them better. But if you are at the very beginning, something a little better than scrappy will serve you well for the short-term.
5. Competitor Comparisons
You can make headway immediately by visually comparing what you offer to what the competition has. While a value proposition is essential to have before you get into any of these materials, you’ve got to contrast it with the lesser value your rivals have.
The easiest way to illustrate this is with a chart. Use color, symbols, and short text to make your point immediately. In my experience working on any product or sales content, I have always advocated moving an existing head-to-head table to the top of the page. It’s immediately digestible compared to sentence-by-sentence formatting, and there is literally no introduction (paragraph) needed.
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Keep Making More Sales Enablement Materials!
Don’t stop with five. Hell, double back and reread these materials every few months to consider either updating them or producing newer, parallel content. And remember, my ranking here is arbitrary. What you need might be different.
But make a plan as quickly as possible and execute it. Get these things to press and on the streets.
Don’t delay by being too much of a perfectionist. You are only launching your product marketing and sales enablement initiatives here – there will be more right around the corner.