The goal of sales enablement is to provide your sales team with the resources they need to close more deals. In order to sell your product or service effectively to customers, you may need content, tools, knowledge, and information.

It is an approach a business takes to ensure sales have the resources they need to be successful.

The Old School Sales Enablement

Traditionally, sales enablement has been a bottoms up approach. Depending on your product or service, you create a lot of pdfs: case studies, whitepapers, ebooks, etc., or blog posts covering how-tos, comparisons, value propositions, etc.

As soon as you have a bunch of sales collaterals, blog posts, and calculators, you then place them on a Google Drive for Sales to access. 

And that’s it. Using these, your sales team will be able to target and close more deals based on their needs. 

Sales Enablement has always been mostly focused on the bottom of the funnel (BoFu) content. Literally, every single piece is about your business and how it is the best thing ever. Put bluntly, out and out it’s a shameless brag!

Today's buyers lack the attention spans necessary to engage with content. Long-form content pieces and traditional sales presentations are typically me-centric and one-size-fits-all. Reps are forced to present, rather than personalizing content to engage buyers.

There is little visibility into what sellers use or send to prospects or customers, so it is hard to determine whether the content is effective or utilized.

Value-First Sales Enablement

Your typical B2B buyer has already visited your website and seen your content such as case studies, white-papers, etc. In other words, the things that you are planning to send them may already have reached them.

Here is a stat for you -

Fundamentally, you need to start thinking about how you can add value to your buyers. Information about you does not constitute the only source of value creation.

In addition to thinking about your sales enablement beyond what reps send by email, you should pay close attention to social media channels like Linkedin, TikTok, Instagram, etc.

Mindset Shift To Content

Traditionally the focus for sales enablement has been exclusively about the content directly about their product or service. However, to transition into value-first sales enablement, you have to stop thinking about the “me-content”, and start thinking about creating value in every interaction with the buyer.

Remember, today’s buyer is smart. You don’t need to oversell your offerings to them. That is an old school approach, which is deemed as very salesy. Think about things that will create a jaw dropping impact on a potential buyer. 

The content you create for this type of approach goes beyond just information about your business. 

Switching into value-first sales enablement is to switch to the following types of additional content:

1. Content that is category and/or industry specific

2. Content that is personal and/or thought leadership focused

There is a huge advantage to expanding your sales enablement beyond the content of your own product and services. 

Category or Industry Related Content

The easiest way to leap forward your sales enablement is to find topics related to your industry or category that are of interest to your buyers. Do not worry about your business not being mentioned in any of these content categories. 

The whole point is to educate your audience on subjects they may not know about or that are relevant in their daily work to make them smarter or save them time.

Suppose you are pitching the VP Marketing at a company that specializes in Artificial Intelligence in the imaging field, and you read a Gartner report about the competitive environment. Your prospect would then benefit from a sales collateral created based on Gartner's findings you collected after reading the report.

Clearly, nothing to do with you, but a solid value to your buyer.

Personal or Thought Leadership Content

Most people think this point is about creating thought leadership content and sending it to your prospect. However, this is actually about making your prospect look like a thought leader to their personal and professional networks.

Bamboozled? Don’t be…..

Here is an example of how this works -

Sales and Marketing comes with the plan that every prospect that is currently sitting in early stages of the sales funnel will need a push to move further in the process. 

The plan is to create a research study which is an opportunity for your sales team to reach out to select prospects and ask if they would like to share their insights for getting published into this unique research paper.

This is now engaging prospects at a very personal level, and making them feel good about themselves.

Keeping Social Media In Your Mind

Modern sales enablement needs to think beyond the traditional email and PDF formats. It’s important to understand where on social media your buyers are, and how you get your content in front of them. 

Have a look at this image below -

Social media is a great source of influence over the target audience for any business. Repurposing content and creating a library of short video clips play a big part in sales enablement. 

Here is another stat for you:

If you are a company doing a podcast, make sure you are also recording the video. Then you can cut out 4 to 5 clips from your full episode and create a library of videos that anyone in your sales team can use. This is a powerful way to enhance your brand footprint as well as empower your sales team.

In order to maximize the impact of sales enablement content, it is important to consider which channels and formats to use. By that, I don't mean that content needs to be omni-channel. Pick the top channels that work for your target audience, and make sure your content is optimized for those channels.

That’s all for today. Now go work on your sales enablement and let it do the work for you!