Putting together your sales enablement starter kit

Sales executives are known for their charisma and their ability to talk Arctic-dwellers into sending purchase orders for ice. But in the real world, most prospects know what a sales spiel is, and will have their guard up. Pure charisma often just doesn't cut it. Sales reps need additional weapons in their arsenal, and that's where marketing comes in. Good marketing enables sales team to improve their win rates. Whether it's providing powerful visual aid, unleashing killer statistics, or providing a positioning framework that grabs mind-share and increases messaging consistency, marketing can turn the tide for sales. In this blog, let's take a look at the key marketing assets that help drive success in sales enablement.

Sales decks

Sales decks are among the most fundamental marketing assets that every business, big or small, leverages. Good decks help sales teams connect better with prospects and help them demonstrate the value of your offering.

There is no one deck that fits all situations however. There should be a range of sales decks for different purposes, and depending on the different stages of sales cycles and customer personas. This will be a recurrent theme in this blog.

For instance, a discovery deck helps sales executives in initial engagements, enabling sales person to engage with the person on the other side and to figure out what their need is. It enables prospects to ask the right questions, understand challenges, and gauge the expected business value.

A full-fledged product/solution deck should be used for a qualified lead. These decks should be modular so that sales reps have access to a range of slides but can pick and choose the ones that speak to the particular prospect best. This customization should be mapped to the stages of the sales cycle, drawing on CRM data.

Competitive battlecards

Battlecards are key tools in helping prospects understand the comparative advantages of using your products over the competitor's. They serve as powerful visual aids for the sales executives and provide key information to the prospect at a glance.

These list out the differences between you and your competitors, and help position your product as superior.

Sales executives must be armed with battle cards for each of your competitors so that at any point, if a prospect mentions one of them, the sales rep has the resources to counter that line of thinking immediately.

The 'quick dismiss' section is particularly useful in this regard. For this section, marketers need to prepare key statistics or disadvantages of the competitor's offering that makes it a no-brainer to use your product rather than theirs. It creates an instant negative impression of the competitor in the prospect's mind and knocks them out of the race early.

In addition to having battlecards for individual competitors, it's also helpful to have a master battlecard that provides a quick overview of the differences between your product and those of a few key competitors.

Bear in mind that battlecards shouldn't just be feature-to-feature comparisons. That approach might not succeed in giving the prospect a sense of the big picture. After all, a good product is greater than the sum of its features. On paper, you and a competitor may have the same features but the business value delivered by your product might be greater. Marketers need to ensure that this value is captured in the battlecards.

Messaging templates

By creating messaging templates for sales executives, marketers help shorten sales cycles. This means that sales reps are not scrambling to write emails and Linkedin Inmail messages from scratch each time. Besides the advantage of time, marketers are also able to craft a better, well-honed pitch that is aligned with the product's positioning and other aspects in a way that sales people might not be able to, especially if they have to suddenly create something on the fly. For instance, when prospects reply to a sales person's email, it might be critical for sales executives to respond immediately. Having a message ready to go with minimal customization is a great help in these situations.

Brochures

Companies often tend to have that one brochure that they send out for all their needs. But businesses need to break out of this pattern and intelligently craft several versions depending on the context.

Professionals hunting for jobs are told to tweak their resumes to fit the role that they are applying for. In this scenario, the job hunters are not bending the truth or altering facts. They are just prioritizing information so that the points most relevant to the role surface faster when reading. This makes them stand out as more ideal candidates to the HR team.

Similarly, it helps to have a master brochure but it is also important to develop several versions based on industries and functionality. This makes the brochures more relevant to prospects and they have increased confidence in your offering.

Demos

Demos serve a key role in familiarizing prospects with your product in a way that other collaterals simply cannot match. A good demo video navigates through the product's functionality in a clear and accessible way. If you are able to demonstrate ease of use and business value through a video demo, the sales executive has a much easier time converting the prospect.

For software products, a demo account is a powerful way of showing the product in action. A demo account will come across as a more direct way of showcasing the product than a demo video. However, rather than leaving it up to luck for the customer's demo going smoothly, one should have a script wherein one pre-planned run of the product. this eliminates the risk of any sudden

Case studies

Customer stories are arguably the biggest assets for salespeople when talking to prospects. These are collaterals that turn conversations into conversions. They demonstrate that the product is capable of delivering business value and that others are reaping the benefits of it. They convince the customers that they are not taking a road less travelled, but a well-travelled path that others have found to be fruitful and drives actual business outcomes.

Named case studies are naturally more valuable than anonymized case studies, and there's nothing quite like having a recognizable name linked to your product. However, many companies may have policies in place that prevent them from revealing the names of vendors and partners for case studies. In such cases, it's best not to reveal too much about the client in case it becomes obvious who the client is. Case studies should give a sense of the scale of the operations of the client organization and the challenge, and contextualize the offering.

There's nothing like a case study to increase faith and confidence in your product. This is even more true if it features hard numbers or a killer metric. Whether it's increased cart size by x%, savings by y%, or ROI growth by z%, a good statistic can be your foot in the door.

Keeping sales teams in the know

All organizations want their departments to be in sync and to be working in perfect alignment with each other.

It's especially true when it comes to sales and marketing as they are essentially two sides of the same coin. Marketing assets are tools for sales people to enhance their performance. This is why sales teams need to be in the know of all developments regarding marketing assets. Did the website undergo an important change? Did the master battlecard get updated? Sales reps need to be aware of all these changes.

This is where internal newsletters help. It ensures that salespeople are aware about all the latest updates regarding assets and also any product or feature roll-outs. Having a centralized repository for all assets is also vastly beneficial in helping sales reps access the right files and versions. Click here to read our blog that tackles the subject of asset awareness among other key factors essential to the success of your sales enablement efforts.