Sales Content Strategy: 4 Steps to Develop a Winning Plan

If you're a B2B brand with a sales cycle that typically ranges between 3 to 6 months, it's crucial to have a sales content strategy in place that equips your sales team with the resources they need to keep your potential clients engaged throughout that period. In this article, we'll provide you with a comprehensive four-step guide to help make sure your sales content strategy is up to par.

What Exactly Is a Sales Content Strategy?

A sales content strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines how your B2B brand will use content to engage with potential clients and guide them through your sales funnel. It involves taking into consideration the entire sales cycle, from initial contact to closing the deal and developing content for every touchpoint along the way. This includes a wide range of content formats such as one-sheets, presentations, educational videos, training videos, case studies, blog posts, webinars, and more.

To achieve sales enablement success, the key to creating an effective sales content strategy is to focus on creating content that speaks to the interests and needs of your target audience while also informing them about how your product or service can benefit them. This means understanding your buyer personas and developing content that addresses their pain points, challenges, and goals.

Additionally, a sales content strategy should align with your overall sales and marketing goals and take into account the different stages of the buyer's journey, including awareness, consideration, and decision-making. By developing content that addresses each stage of the buyer's journey, you can help guide potential clients through the sales funnel and increase your chances of closing deals. With a well-planned and executed sales content strategy, you can drive revenue growth for your business.

Developing a Winning Sales Content Strategy in 4 Steps

Developing a strong sales content strategy doesn't have to involve a massive overhaul of your business. The key components are planning and partnering with the right team to execute if you don't have internal resources.

#1 Sales Touchpoints: Defining Your Strategy

This is where sales presentation assessment becomes critical in developing a sales content strategy. Here you’ll sit down with your sales and marketing leaders to analyze your sales cycle and identify how you can keep your sales team engaged with prospective clients throughout the process. This step cannot be done in isolation; it's essential to involve the heads of sales and marketing, and even a client, to ask the right questions about pain points and challenges your team faces when selling your products or services, and where there are gaps that need to be filled. Based on this information, you can create a plan that considers how many touchpoints you want to have with a prospect during that time and ensure you have the appropriate sales content to stay engaged.

#2 Content Needs: Aligning Your Sales Message

Now that you understand the desired touch points across your sales cycle, it's time to fill them in with content. When thinking about content, it's important to consider your products and services and ask important questions such as:

• Do we have a complex product or service that we are selling?
• Is it important that we have in-person demos for a product or service?
• What are the habits of our prospective clients? Are they constantly on the go?
• What do they need from us to prove that our product or service can benefit them?
• How big is our competitive landscape, and how do we differentiate ourselves?

To create effective sales stories, you need to ask these types of questions to truly understand the type of content that you need to create. For example, if you sell a large-scale medical device such as an MRI machine, this is something that you cannot take to an office, and it sits in a very competitive landscape. You should be thinking about ways that you can visually help your prospective clients understand how your product functions, its key features, and how it's different from the competition. This might include creating 3D product videos, interactive experiences, or explainer videos to help prospective clients visualize how your product can benefit them.

When figuring out what your content needs are, there are no wrong answers at this stage. This should be done on a whiteboard with all team members present, and jot down all ideas that come to mind, no matter how small or grand. Consider partnering with a services provider who can help you think through these ideas, refine them, and execute them.

#3 From Vision to Reality: Creating Impactful Sales Content

Now that you have a plan, a clear idea of the types of content you need, and your creative vision in place, it's time to bring it to life. Depending on your ambitions, you may need to seek external creative partners to help execute your ideas. If this is the case, we strongly recommend looking for a partner with specific experience in developing sales content for B2B brands. It's important to note that there's a significant difference between production studios that create content for advertising purposes versus those that specialize in B2B content.

Whether you're using an external partner or developing your content in-house, we recommend treating your sales content like a Hollywood film. This means mapping out every detail before executing it. Developing storyboards, wireframes, or clickable prototypes allows everyone in your organization to get aligned on the creative vision before time and money are invested in bringing it to life.

When creating your content, think outside the box. In today's technological landscape, there are many ways to showcase your product or service beyond a typical sizzle video. For example, you could consider using 3D product renderings, interactive videos, augmented reality, or virtual reality experiences. These types of innovative experiences not only make your brand stand out from competitors but also help prospective clients better understand how your product or service can benefit them.

#4 Assess and Adapt: Measuring Your Sales Content Strategy

The last step in a successful sales content strategy is equally as important as step one - it's the ability to measure and evaluate how your sales content is performing. By doing so, you can audit, analyze, and make adjustments moving forward. To achieve this, it's crucial to provide your sales content to your team through a platform that offers the insights needed to track its performance.

One way to measure presentation success is to schedule regular evaluations with your sales team. This could be done through a dashboard or by directly asking specific team members for their opinions on how the content is performing. By doing so, you'll be able to determine whether the content is resonating with prospective clients, if it's helping to move the needle, and if it's aligned with your sales goals and objectives.

With this information on hand, you can make informed decisions and continuously improve your sales content strategy. This may involve making adjustments or removing content that isn't performing well, or creating more content that is successful. By consistently analyzing your presentation performance, you'll be better equipped to develop a winning sales content strategy.

Cracking the Sales Code: How a Smart Sales Content Strategy and Controlled Delivery System Drive Success

To build, implement, and sustain a successful sales content strategy for your B2B brand, having the right tools and partners in place is crucial. While many presentation design tools on the market offer features like tracking, analytics, and visualization components to bring a story to life, there are also plenty of creative partners that understand the B2B landscape and can create compelling content. In our opinion, the ideal partner should be technology-focused, understand the power of smart B2B sales presentations, and provide a technology-backed platform for delivering them with 100% consistency and control. This partner should also understand sales content strategies and how to align them with your sales cycle.

At Nuvue, we are a creative-first presentation technology company with a background in helping B2B brands better visualize their sales stories and providing them with a distribution platform to deliver these stories quickly, efficiently, and with insights into performance. We have helped numerous B2B brands build their presentation process from smart sales content strategies and scale with their organizations. If you'd like to see how Nuvue is helping other B2B brands like yours, please schedule a hello call today.