Creating sales enablement content—and more importantly, increasing internal adoption and revenue—isn’t easy!
We’ve already written about the four major keys to establishing a channel marketing campaign. But educating effectively (the second point on our list) is perhaps the most important aspect of channel marketing.
Without proper content that speaks to both channel sales reps and their customers, it can turn into a disjointed game of ‘Telephone’ – mixed messaging and inaccurate information, filtering down all the way to the end customer.
Increasingly, we think sales enablement content should adopt a similar approach to B2C messaging.
To clarify: B2B (business-to-business) messaging historically speaks to company decision-makers, and are generally focused on long-term relationships. B2C (business-to-consumer) messaging is typically shorter-sighted, centering on a single message or pain point to easily deliver the company’s highest-level feature or benefit. Most brand-centric companies have adopted a simplified B2C message, typically in the form of memorable slogans – think Geico or Subway, for example.
If it’s indeed true that the average human has an attention span of 8 seconds, why are sales makers treated differently when it comes to sales enablement content? Sales reps are humans, too. Oftentimes, they’re over-inundated with content to learn from a variety of sources. This is especially true for distribution sales teams tasked with selling a range of competing products from multiple manufacturers, all with differing agendas, product positioning, and spiffs/rewards.
Streamlining the most important messages simply and effectively – similar to B2C tactics – raises product awareness and increases adoption for B2B initiatives. We recommend serving sales enablement content in bits and pieces that recite important highlights so it’ll be easier for them to retain and adopt. As we all know, repetition is the key to learning.
We’re not suggesting that thorough, in-depth sales enablement materials aren’t worthwhile. We just think they should be served alongside content chunks that everyone is familiar with nowadays – those that are bite-sized and snackable.
Using a “bite-size B2B” strategy, it’s sensible to develop a family of sales tools – it could be any combination of short videos, PowerPoint documents, battle cards, comparison charts, or other forms of content.
Sales assets can be steadily “dripped” into consciousness with emailed reminders about fresh and valuable content.
Another option is to deliver the entire suite of assets at once, allowing the rep to fully immerse themselves and share the content with their customers accordingly. But oftentimes an overabundance of information can lead to analysis paralysis.
In any case, increased engagement and adoption means sales reps will have more knowledge about your product, which leads to more sales and potentially mitigates competition.