Best Sales Enablement Content Tips for Remote Selling
How to Create Sales Enablement Content for Remote Selling
8 Tips for Successfully Engaging Prospects You Never Meet
With the upheaval of 2020, many companies were forced to quickly and unexpectedly pivot to remote selling. After the initial growing pains associated with that protocol change, a good number of those companies have decided to move forward indefinitely in this new selling landscape.
If your organization finds itself in this situation, here’s what you need to know about sales enablement content today.
8 Keys to Successful Sales Enablement Content When Selling Remotely
Remote selling is playing more of a role than it ever has before for organizations. Here are eight key elements to keep in mind when developing your sales enablement content to support those efforts:
1. Put The Customer First
In every piece of content you create and in every strategy, system, or process you implement, start with your buyer and work backward from there.
More than ever before, you need to thoroughly understand your customers. Research who they are, but also do a deep dive into their core challenges, needs, goals, and desired outcomes.
The goal is to drive engagement with that buyer from the initial point of contact all the way through the buying transaction and beyond. (Learn more about the ins and outs of account management here.)
Even if, for example, a potential customer signs up for a demo, don’t lead that interaction with you and your product. Have a conversation with them. Understand their needs and why they’re considering you. Then you can tailor the content you provide during that demonstration to best resonate with them.
2. Create Experiences for Your Customers
When you’re creating content for potential buyers, keep their desired outcomes and goals in mind. Aligning to these will help ensure your messaging is relevant and impactful.
Once you’ve ensured that’s done, enhance the impact of your content by making it experiential. Interactive, immersive experiences simply create a more lasting impression with potential buyers.
(Need inspiration? Check out these incredible experiential marketing campaigns with tips for how to implement this kind of effort into your own brand.)
It’s important to note here that experiential selling doesn’t have to be a massive in-person undertaking. Creating an experience can absolutely be done remotely. Interactive presentation tools, such as LivePreso, demonstrate this well. Rather than a dry standard PowerPoint presentation, you can incorporate your value messaging, knowledge, and insight into a platform that lends itself to better visuals, more engagement, and more interactive elements.
Thinking even a little outside the box can create an experience that differentiates you from your competition and promotes an engaging, immersive interaction with a prospect.
Again, though, never lose sight of your customers in this process. Always think about what kind of experience your specific customers want and how your content can get them there.
3. Lead with Value
People today are exhausted with product pitch, and they’re also experiencing “Zoom fatigue.” (It’s real. Just ask Stanford.) Couple these two things, and it’s a recipe for disengaged prospects and ineffective selling.
How can you combat this? Never lead a conversation talking about your product. Especially in early-stage conversations, people don’t want to hear about how great you are or how your features or services outperform the competition.
What you’re saying could be 100 percent true, but people are not responding to that kind of selling today. Rather, people crave value, education, and insight. They want to know how they can solve real problems they’re having.
Rather than overtly selling to prospects, provide your value-focused messaging. (At this point, you’ve put in the research and should know what will be valuable to those potential clients.) Get their heads nodding, and then seamlessly lead them to your product or service as a potential solution.
4. Focus on Video-Based Content and Other Visual Mediums
Content is everywhere today. You’d be hard-pressed to find a successful company that doesn’t have a website, produce blogs, host a podcast, or put out some form of content into the digital landscape.
With so much content created every day, it’s easy for it to become white noise. Differentiate your content by focusing on more visual elements. If you’re giving a presentation, for example, don’t fill the deck with paragraphs of text. Use a few carefully selected, impactful visuals to get your point across and to resonate with your prospect.
If you can incorporate video-based content, all the better. This tactic can be used throughout the buyer’s journey, from the initial point of contact all the way though the sale and beyond.
Remember, video-based and visual content must still align to overarching best practices. That means the content should still align to your value messaging, it should still be educational and informative in form, and it should provide an immersive experience for the viewer.
5. Focus on Customer Outcomes
Content always needs to be created with the customer in mind. In particular, make sure you’re thinking about their desired outcomes. Use what you’re seeing in your market or vertical to assess where there’s value to be offered. Then position your content to deliver on that value and to get prospects closer to their outcomes.
6. Be Consistent across Platforms
There’s a prevailing opinion that email is somehow outdated, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with more traditional communication platforms. You just have to ensure the messaging you’re delivering through those platforms is highly centered on value and aims to provide an interactive, immersive experience.
Maybe you’re using LinkedIn or some other social tools. Maybe you’re putting out blog posts. Whatever the platform, be consistent in your messaging, be committed to value, keep your customers’ outcomes in mind, and seek to differentiate yourself.
7. Draw Them in with Story
When you see a movie, think about what happens in the very beginning. It’s usually something exciting, unexpected, or moving. It serves as the driving force to propel the rest of the movie forward. Replicate this model in your own content.
Think about your communications throughout the entire buyer’s journey as a movie. In this context, how are you going to make a big initial impact? How are you going to draw prospects in quickly from the very onset? The first content connection with a prospect matters, so think about how you want to start that conversation.
When you’re storyboarding, think about the value piece, think about customer outcomes, and think about how you can incorporate bold, eye-catching visuals.
8. Training Your Reps
Content essentially falls into two buckets: external and internal. All your external content is client facing. These are the pieces that are provided to prospects and clients. Internal content, though, is just as important to sales enablement.
Training your reps about how to deliver value messaging and to productively approach conversations in a remote selling landscape is key. You can have the best content possible, but if your reps aren’t enabled to deliver that content successfully, you won’t see any headway with prospects.
In addition to the coaching and training programs, also make sure you’re enabled with the technology you need for reps to quickly and easily access all content—both client-facing collateral and just-in-time training material.
(Looking for some potential sales training platforms? Check out what companies like SalesHood and SPARXiQ are offering.)
The way people sell has changed—potentially forever. Even when some companies go back to the office, remote selling is poised to be an increasingly relevant and impactful factor in the selling landscape. If your organization is thinking about adopting sales enablement technology to facilitate remote selling, make sure you’ve implemented your structured digital strategy first. Once you’ve done that, please feel free to start to narrow down your technological options using our quick, free, simple sales technology selector tool.