Is your sales force drowning in information overload from tedious training sessions? There’s a better way to equip them for success. And that’s through engaging sales enablement content.
Sales reps have a lot to remember—like every feature, use case, target audience, nuance, and persona to name a few. Access to sales enablement content that’s clear, memorable, consistent across teams, easy to access, and simple to share makes a hard job a little easier.
In this guide, you’ll discover effective types of sales enablement content so you can train your sellers effectively and start closing more deals. You’ll also see the breadth of formats being used today, and more importantly, what types are best for what contexts.
Here’s an overview of what you’ll learn in this guide:
What is sales enablement content?
Why is sales enablement content important?
19 types of sales enablement content
What is sales enablement content?
Sales enablement content is content that makes the sales process more successful, persuasive, and effective. It encompasses a range of resources that help sellers perform efficiently so they can win more business. Some popular examples include compelling videos, playbooks, and outbound email templates.
While high-quality sales enablement content will help sales pros improve their effectiveness, it adds value in other ways as well.
Why is sales enablement content important?
Sales is a team sport. Every sales team member sees benefits from the right kind of sales enablement content:
- Sales trainers can use onboarding videos to help prepare new hires for their roles, as well as sales scripts and sales playbooks and scripts for sellers of any tenure.
- Sales development representatives (SDRs) and business development representatives (BDRs) can more effectively educate customers and drive sales with a wide variety of content types, including one-pagers and presentation decks.
- Technical sales professionals can show the depth of a product’s features and benefits with explainer videos and product sheets.
Effective sales enablement content results in stronger client relationships and more deals, regardless of which type your team uses. However, it pays to understand your options before deciding which types are right for your organization (and when to use them).
19 types of sales enablement content
Here are the key types of sales enablement content that can help your team drive revenue growth:
1. Training or onboarding videos
Move beyond canned training videos and static PowerPoints. Create custom training or onboarding videos that help sales reps learn how to do their jobs, evangelize your products and services, and connect with prospects and clients. Animated videos are particularly effective at engaging new reps, explaining tricky concepts, and delivering scenario-based training content.
Some common examples of training or onboarding videos include:
- Competitive analysis videos, illustrating the competitive landscape
- Persona videos that help sellers understand their target audience
- Pitch videos to help sellers visualize real-life situations
- Process videos explaining each step of your company’s sales process
- Hard/soft skill training videos to help your team use technology or close deals more effectively
Unlike other training tools, software that creates custom videos can help you speak directly to your team’s needs and demonstrate best practices in a way that standard presentations can’t manage.
Here are some tips for making effective onboarding videos:
- Know your message: What is this video about? What’s your objective?
- Keep it concise: Focus on your main message and avoid unnecessary details.
- Customize your content to your audience: An onboarding video will have a very different angle than a tech training video for experienced sales reps.
- Use multimedia: Incorporate visuals, sound effects, animation, etc., to engage your audience. AI-powered video tools make it easy for non-technical staff to create videos that grab users’ attention.
- Tell a story: Know where you want to take your audience and let the content support the journey.
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2. Product explainer videos
What’s better than telling your clients about your products? Showing your clients how your products work. Product explainer videos demonstrate the value of what you’re selling. Use them alone or embedded in your pitch deck.
Product explainer videos are short, targeted videos demonstrating a product or a service. According to 2023 data from HubSpot, 96% of marketers say these videos help boost consumer understanding of products.
Common use cases for explainer videos include:
- Prospecting
- Sales pitches
- Social media marketing
- Email campaigns
- Addressing objections
Plus, once you have a solid explainer video to share, you can use it in multiple places, from your company website to social media to client calls.
Introduction and upselling videos are other helpful variations of explainers. For example, introducing yourself via video enables you to develop relationships with prospects before you even have your first sales call. And with upselling, the dynamic and engaging possibilities of video explainers make it easy to engage loyal customers and persuade them to expand their accounts.
To ensure your explainer video is impactful, keep it short—two minutes or less should do it. Know your audience and your message and target your content. Above all, avoid cluttering your video with too much imagery or special effects. You want your audience to walk away thinking about your message, not the bells and whistles.
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3. Sales playbooks
Every sales team hopes to provide a consistent—and satisfying!—experience to all their customers. Sales playbooks ensure that sellers can deliver just that. These documents compile best practices and sales documents like pricing sheets, making this information readily accessible to sales reps.
Sales playbooks also function as continuing education for sellers. Whether a sales rep has just joined your organization or has been on the team for years, they can learn something from your sales playbook. Think of it as a repository for the collective wisdom of your team, and a road map for navigating common sales challenges in real time.
But these playbooks are only as good as the effort you put into them. To ensure maximum effectiveness, ask your best sales reps to contribute their insights. And don’t forget to integrate your playbook into your training and onboarding programs.
4. eBooks
What are your target buyers’ most pressing questions? Ebooks are your opportunity to answer those queries and gather that essential intelligence in one easily accessible and shareable place.
Typically 3,000 words or less, ebooks can have multiple functions. You can use them like a blog post on steroids or as a thought leadership vehicle for an executive. They can also act as an FAQ for common questions or a tool at the top of the sales funnel, driving email subscriptions or prospects.
To create effective ebooks that drive leads and build customer relationships, remember your audience’s pain points and goals. What do they need most? A good ebook will be guided by this principle. Also, consider visuals: a chart or graph may help make your point better than several static paragraphs.
5. Case studies
Nothing is more persuasive than success. Case studies allow you to show your customers what your product can do by showing what your product has already done for other companies in the industry.
Case studies can use a variety of formats, from traditional blog articles to testimonial videos to presentations. You can also combine these types, for example, embedding video into a PowerPoint to create a dynamic, engaging demonstration.
Regardless of the form, case studies accomplish one very important thing: they demonstrate concrete results.
To create a compelling case study, you need several things:
- An impressive customer: You don’t need Fortune 500 clients to make an effective case study, but ideally, you’ll feature organizations with name recognition in your industry or area.
- A big problem: The most persuasive case studies document the resolution of big issues–production bottlenecks, major cultural challenges, technical silos, or similar.
- A remarkable solution: Clients want to see measurable change that’s directly attributable to your product.
- Demonstrable results: Faster results, money saved, and stress avoided are common ones. Bonus points if you can include statistics.
- Evidence that you can recreate the magic: Don’t forget to drive home the point that your organization can achieve these results for other customers.
6. White papers
White papers are in-depth, meticulously researched documents that often focus on highly technical material.
While white papers demonstrate how your product solves customer problems, they’re not intended to convert customers on the spot. Rather, they support your organization’s position as an authority on a topic. Any persuading that happens is (nearly) incidental, although white papers can generate leads or build email lists, similar to ebooks. White papers can be targeted either at customers or sales reps.
Remember that this type of content is intended to provide value to readers. Focus on solving their most common and pressing problems. You might also address industry trends, thought leadership, or research.
Above all, ensure that your content is readable and easy to scan. Incorporate visuals and pay attention to layouts and formatting.
7. Webinars
Want to show your customers how your products can solve their problems and achieve their goals? Consider hosting a webinar.
This type of sales enablement content is incredibly effective for explaining how things work—especially if you have subject matter experts who can demonstrate how to use your product or service.
Webinars typically last 60 minutes or less and can be prerecorded or shown live. You can also integrate this content into your other materials. For example, use clips from a webinar as part of a sales presentation.
To maximize your webinars’ effectiveness, ensure you have the right experts on board. You can use someone from your staff or an outside expert who is passionate and knowledgeable about your product.
8. Email templates
If you’re looking to save time, ensure messaging continuity, and improve communication with clients, email templates can help.
Unlike most of the other sales enablement content types on our list, email templates are internal. Intended only for sales reps and other employees, email templates serve as a blueprint for communications with customers and prospects.
Your organization might develop email templates for several reasons:
- Cold outreach
- Follow-ups
- Re-engagements
- Meeting requests
- Thank you notes
The best thing about email templates is that they can be flexible—and in fact, they should be to ensure that your team gets the most use out of them. Provide plenty of customization options, and remember to invest in training your team to use these materials.
9. One-pagers
Think of one-pagers as an elevator pitch for your organization (or one specific product or service you offer). In one concise page, you sum up your value proposition in an easily understandable way.
One-pagers can target many different audiences. You can make separate one-pagers for clients, investors, and even other departments or branches. Share them digitally before or after sales calls and stock hard copies in your booth at tradeshows.
To create effective one-pagers, know your audience—and use your limited space wisely. Identify your audience’s pain points, concerns, goals, and key questions before you sit down to write.
The visual presentation of your one-pagers is as important as the text. So make sure they’re easy to read and understand.
10. Presentation decks
Presentation decks have evolved past the static PowerPoints of the past. You can now enhance or replace decks with video elements and incorporate GIFs and other visual effects to tell your story and connect with your audience. And there’s good reason to—a 2023 study found that video can help your viewers retain up to 95% of your message compared to just 10% when text! You can use these new and improved presentation decks in sales training, onboarding, customer calls, and more.
There are two important things to keep in mind when preparing presentation decks. First, make sure you’re addressing your audience’s concerns and goals. Second, consider developing easily customizable templates for future presentations (or to share with your team).
Want to create more engaging PowerPoint presentations by embedding video clips? Here’s how to do it.
11. Testimonials
Sharing simple customer testimonials is another effective way to win over prospects.
Partner with your colleagues in Customer Success to source these endorsements, and always double-check that you have the customer’s permission to publicly share their praise. (Nothing sours a customer relationship faster than compromising their trust.) Use them broadly—in proposals and sales presentations, as well as on customer-facing websites and social media.
While getting a “quote” is great, a video clip is even more powerful. Ask enthusiastic clients if they’re willing to vouch for you on a Zoom call as opposed to a standard phone call. That footage can then be edited into a polished video testimonial later and repurposed into a variety of other media formats, including quotes with headshots for your website, short video clips for social media, and so on. (Here’s a good example.)
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12. Sales battlecards
How do your products stack up against your competitors? Sales battlecards make it easy to answer this question.
Usually a brief one-pager—sometimes with visual elements like comparison charts—sales battlecards provide easily digestible competitive analysis for your sellers and sales support staff. These are internal documents only and can exist on their own or as part of your sales playbook.
Sales battlecards often focus primarily on your company’s products and services. Generally, these cards outline customer pain points and methods of addressing them, especially in the context of how your product solves their problems better than competitor solutions.
All sales battlecards can be used as training materials, fodder for sales pitches, or ongoing educational resources.
13. Buyer personas
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.
Buyer personas help ensure that your sales and marketing messaging speaks to your audience’s needs, makes sales pitches more effective, and aligns sales team members on target prospects and how to sell to them. Developing effective buyer personas takes a good deal of cross-departmental teamwork, but it’s worth it.
Some examples of characteristics that may go into creating a buyer persona include:
- Job title
- Company information (size of company, industry, specific challenges, etc.)
- Goals and pain points
- Preferred communication methods
- Demographic information (age, gender, location, etc.)
Keep in mind that you’re not limited to static templates and PDFs. With today’s custom video tools, bringing buyer personas to life is easier than ever.
14. Blog posts
Blog posts are another classic sales enablement content type. Sales trainers can share relevant blog posts with new reps to educate them, just as sales reps can share relevant blog posts with prospects to show they understand the prospects’ challenges and offer a great solution.
Blogs are also an incredibly flexible content type. They can be as long or as short as you prefer, targeting highly technical content or commenting on industry trends and emerging research. You can also integrate other content types into your blog posts, like infographics and video testimonials.
To write effective blog posts, your first goal must be to understand your audience. For instance, technical professionals will have different expectations than (most) C-suite executives.
15. Product sheets
If you had less than a minute to describe your product and its value proposition, could you do it? Product sheets make it easy for sellers to summarize their product’s finer points quickly.
Generally confined to one page, product sheets give an overview of a product’s most attractive features. This content type typically features bold visual imagery—including enticing product images—and persuasive writing, as well as a compelling call-to-action.
Sellers may distribute product sheets digitally on sales calls, in person at tradeshows, or work with the marketing team to include them on the company website if appropriate.
16. Customer journey maps
A recent Salesforce study found that 80% of customers consider the experience your company provides to be just as important as your product. Customer journey maps ensure that the customer experience is as smooth as possible.
This sales enablement content type provides a visual representation of that journey and outlines every step customers take during their interaction with your company. Those steps will differ depending on your product, service, market, etc. However, you might see something like this:
- Awareness: Customer becomes aware of the product or problem that needs solving.
- Consideration: Customer learns more about the product and their options.
- Decision: Customer chooses a solution.
To build an effective customer journey map, start by setting goals, e.g., increasing customer retention or upselling existing customers. Then, integrate your buyer personas and dig into the process. What steps does your ideal customer hit along the way to a sale?
17. Product demo scripts
Product demo scripts can mean the difference between a confident presentation and a wasted meeting.
This isn’t to say that sales reps should write down every word they plan to say. In fact, that can seem stilted and forced. However, an effective product demo script should contain essential product information so the audience won’t forget the key points during the presentation.
Your team can also choose to enhance or replace product demos with video, making the scripting process less stressful (and more consistent across seller presentations). Product explainer videos can be particularly effective in these presentations.
18. Sales scripts
A sales script (or talk track) is a list of key points that sellers keep in mind during their sales presentations and client meetings.
Similar to a product demo script, sales scripts shouldn’t include every word the sales rep plans to say. The goal is to be spontaneous and to connect with the client—something that’s easier when you know you have all the necessary information at your fingertips.
19. Win and loss stories
How do you turn failures into future wins, and current success into a guidepost for future sales? Win-loss stories.
This content type focuses on sharing wins and losses among the team. Sellers share how they won (or failed to win) various deals in the hopes that their experiences can help other team members.
Apps like Slack have made sharing these stories easier and more effective. A simple screen recording of a person recounting their wins and losses can work—but it can be even more engaging to bring their storytelling to life with images and animations.
Additionally, win-loss stories are sometimes great opportunities for situation-based training videos. If a frequent win or loss is occurring in your sales team, developing a video that walks through this common scenario can help your sellers learn or refine a particular sales tactic.
Sales enablement content helps your sellers exceed their goals
Your sales team has a lot to keep track of. Engaging and relevant sales enablement content can help organize your sales strategy, ensure consistency across individual sellers and teams, and maximize business from your most loyal customers.
Whether you’re making product explainers, training videos, testimonials, case studies, or win-loss stories, Vyond’s AI video creation platform can help.
See for yourself how Vyond videos can revolutionize your sales enablement strategy.
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