7 steps for creating, packaging and delivering sales enablement content for high consumption.

In my last post I talked about the five steps product marketers can take to make the sales enablement content more effective. In that post I had also talked about looking at sales enablement along three dimensions – content, process, and technology. Today I want to share some thoughts about the process dimension i.e., how sales enablement content should be created, packaged, and delivered for high consumption.

In general, the consumption of sales enablement content at most companies is below par. Typical reasons include content that is not very well packaged, weak delivery methods or too much content.   Here are the seven steps you can take to make the enablement content quality better and increase its consumption rates.  These techniques come from my prior experience as CMO, head of product marketing or head of revenue operations at several companies.   The steps are as follows:

• Sales content needs to be targeted. Don’t send everything to all the sales reps.  Decide who will benefit from this (sales reps, SDRs, sales specialists, overlay sales etc.) and send the content only to them.  If you are using a sales enablement platform to deliver the content, make sure your consumer channels are well defined/segmented in the platform, so you push the relevant content to the right channel, so it is seen by the right people.
• Sales content needs to be relevant.  Make sure it answers the five basic questions – what it is (capabilities), why it matters (customer problem and value), why now (why customer should care about it now rather than in future), who else provides it (competition) and why mine (how my offering is differentiated in value).  The more you can create and package the content along these lines, the more it will help prepare the sales reps to answer customer questions well, and, the more interested they will be in consuming your content.
• Sales content needs to be succinct. Don’t put more information in front of them than they have time to consume. Reps want to maximize their time working on their deals.  Be succinct with your content, a picture is worth a thousand words.
• Sales content needs to be frequent. It’s better to drip feed relevant content every week than give them a big blast of content once a month. Make sure you follow the above three rules when drip feeding – targeted, relevant, and succinct. Create a two-month running calendar of events for enablement and publish it to all stakeholders, so sales reps and other stakeholders can plan accordingly to attend your enablement sessions on the calendar.  
• Sales content needs to be delivered via multiple communication methods and people.  Don’t just rely on content to be pushed via a sales enablement tool such as Highspot or Showpad to people’s laptops. I have seen weekly ‘15-minute webinars’ hosted by a regional VP of sales on a product topic (positioning, demo etc.) or a rep discussing ‘how they beat the competition and won the deal’ do well.  Use a tool such as Showpad to automatically surface relevant content in your CRM system, based on the sales stage of the opportunity.  That is an effective method of delivering the right content to the right reps at their time of need. Supplement these techniques with short ‘custom’ weekly emails (no links) that gives them bite-sized information continuously.  Have your CEO profile a couple of wins (with some meat on the information, not just a list of logos) in their quarterly updates.  Bring a customer on your weekly 15-minute webinar once a month on why they selected your solution and then reinforce their story with some of your own product positioning/messaging. 
• Sales content consumption needs to be fun.  Gamify it with fun prizes to increase consumption rate of the content.  Have a fun question buried in each content. Create a leaderboard based on responses to that fun question. Get everyone talking on internal chat boards about gamification.
• Sales content effectiveness needs to be measured.  You will say this is obvious. Use the consumption metrics – what % of sales force consumed content and which reps did not view the content.  But go a step further.  Identify the type of content that is not being consumed, and ask the sales teams – why?  Have your sales reps present the content back to their manager, identify the gaps and coach them.  Use lagging indicators such as time to close a deal for new rep or late-stage pipeline created for a new product launch to improve the enablement process.

Hope this helps.  When I ran revenue ops, the challenge always was – how to ensure the content is packaged well, how much should be push vs. on demand vs live, how much time to spend on enablement every week in the first two months of the quarter, how to deliver to make it fun and engaging, and how to ensure that the content gets consumed by the sales reps.  Some of the techniques mentioned above helped me deliver good results on enablement.  I have also successfully used these techniques for my clients in my consulting practice to build effective sales enablement content for them, as well as work with them to improve their content delivery processes. If you have any questions, please message me on  https://www.linkedin.com/in/applicationsmarketing/