Learn how to increase partner revenue with sales enablement content. Marketers know better than anyone how to use content to educate prospects about products and services in order to move them through the Buyer’s Journey. Salespeople, too, can leverage buyer persona-driven content to engage with prospects and help move them along the buying journey.
Although you may be on board with content marketing and sales enablement, you may be wondering how you can leverage both of these strategies to increase partner revenue and help your partner sales reps succeed. When you provide customers with the right content in the right place at the right time, you’re meeting them where they are in a natural, helpful way.
This is how a single piece of content can be used by multiple departments in multiple ways to achieve the same goals: securing more customers and growing revenue. It all starts with cross-departmental communication and developing content that ensures partner sales enablement success.
How to Nurture Cross-Departmental Communication
Communication is crucial for helping your partners increase their revenue. Let’s say your marketing team is seeing a boost in organic traffic to a specific blog article. Marketing should share the blog post and keyword findings with partner sales reps so they can better understand customer pain points and habits and share the right blog content with the right customers.
Similarly, if a partner sales rep notices that an animated infographic video is performing particularly well on sales calls, marketing needs to hear the good news right away. Marketing can then develop similar or complementary content to make that effective sales enablement content even more effective for internal and partner sales reps.
On the flipside, if certain content isn’t performing for marketing or sales, both departments need to know so everyone can pivot and put what’s working well in front of prospects.
Let’s take a look at three types of sales enablement content that your marketing team can develop to help your partners sell faster and better.
3 Types of Bulletproof Sales Enablement Content
Today’s buyers do their homework. According to Google, nearly 60 percent of customers say they research online before making a purchase. By the time sales reps engage with a lead, they’ve got their work cut out for them. Customers usually come to the sales conversation prepared with a short list of solutions—and plenty of questions about competitors and why your company is the best solution.
Your primary partner sales enablement goal should be to champion sales productivity by giving your partner sales reps the right content and resources so they can sell better and more effectively. Here are three examples of sales enablement content that you can develop to ensure your partner sales reps have everything they need to reach their goals—and yours.
1. One-pager
Simply put, a one-pager is a one-page look at your company’s solution, its benefits, and why it’s the best option on the market. These one-page, quick reference sheets are great tools for busy partner sales reps who are likely selling the products and services of multiple vendors at once. The more precise and easy-to-read your one-pager is, the more easily your partner sales reps can sell your solution over another.
2. Battle cards
Battle cards can help a sales rep understand the competitive landscape and how your company stacks up against the competition. A battle card should also tell your partner sales reps how to strategically sell against your primary competitors.
The best battle cards are loaded with tactics on how to sell your solution—they aren’t side-by-side comparisons of features. Here are some additional tips on how to build out your battle cards:
- Keep them brief: Like all sales enablement content, your battle cards should be short so they work as quick reference sheets rather than full-on vendor comparisons.
- Stay current: Update your battle cards regularly—or keep them in a Google Doc for easy updates—so your reps have the most accurate information about your competitors. Remember: Prospects are voracious researchers, and you don’t want your partner sales reps caught off guard.
- Make them easy to find: Your battle cards will only work if your reps can actually find them. Whether you opt to leverage a cloud-based system like Google Drive or a partner relationship management (PRM) solution, make your battle cards easily accessible.
3. Customized Buyer Personas and Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs)
If you haven’t created customized ICPs and buyer personas for your partners, they’re likely targeting the same customers. When you provide your partner sales reps with unique ICPs and buyer personas, they can focus on selling and growing revenue rather than worrying about competing with each other to sell your solution.
First, a few definitions:
- What is an ICP? An ICP, also known as an ideal buyer profile, is your business’s dream customer. Your ICP is who your partners would convert into customers every single time. An ICP could be an entire company or sole proprietorship and is usually defined by budget, revenue, company size, industry, location, and so on.
- What is a buyer persona? According to HubSpot, a buyer persona is the “semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” Your ICP likely has multiple buyer personas who are responsible for making final decisions.
For each of your partners, you should provide a clearly defined ICP and buyer personas so that your partner sales reps feel comfortable qualifying leads based on ICP. Then, your partner sales reps can start selling to buyer personas based on their unique pain points and challenges. You can also have a single ICP and just identify different buyer personas—drilled down by a specific industry or vertical—for each partner so your partners can avoid competing with one another to sell the same solution. Consider customizing your partners’ buyer personas based on their expertise or preferences.
Content Tips for Partner Sales Enablement
Don’t forget to keep tabs on how your partner sales reps are using your sales enablement content. Whether you track downloads or view counts or poll your sales reps anecdotally, it’s important to know that they’re actually using your content, as well as how usage rates relate to sales and revenue goals.
If you’re seeing a slow adoption rate, you can also go the extra mile with custom branding for each of your partners. Customizing a battle card or one-pager with your partner’s logo or brand colors may increase the likelihood of your partner sales reps leveraging the content you’ve worked so hard to develop.
The post Increase Partner Revenue with Sales Enablement Content appeared first on Partner Relationship Management Software (PRM).