FOR COMPANIES THAT WANT TO GROW

Sales Enablement Content: Leveraging Customer Videos

On this page

Learn how a video-powered sales enablement content strategy will fuel peak sales performance with minimum sweat

In today’s B2B salescape, buyers hold all the cards.

They have more options, more choices, and access to more information than ever before.

In fact, almost half of your prospects will spend at least seven months researching the marketplace, checking reviews, and evaluating their favorite vendors before making a high-stakes buying decision.

And 68 percent of them will do most of this research alone, only involving the vendor’s sales team at the last stage of the buying process.

Different from how businesses shopped for solutions a few years ago, right?

This is why sales enablement content is so important. Because buyers are educated, they expect sales teams to give them highly relevant information that is tailored to their business challenges and which, ultimately, will help them make a purchase decision.

But here’s the problem: sales is a hungry engine. As a B2B marketer, you’re always trying to feed it with content the sales team will actually use and prospects will actually trust. To pour gas on the fire, only 10 percent of B2B buyers consider vendor-supplied content as trustworthy and influential to their decision-making—meaning most of what’s created gets ignored.

What can you do to help your sales team sell when trust is at an all-time low?

In this article, you’ll learn about the best types of sales enablement content to have in your arsenal and where to get ideas for creating it. We’ll also study how one format stands head and shoulders above the rest when it comes to driving key business metrics.

SPOILER: It’s video. Done right, customer videos are proven to break the trust cycle and have a potent impact on sales.

What is B2B sales enablement content and how do I use it?

Sales enablement content is exactly what it sounds like—a set of resources that salespeople use to close a deal.

It provides reps with ready answers to burning questions so they can have valuable conversations with prospects and help them make a buying decision.

Sales enablement content: key formats

There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to sales enablement content. The goal is to give buyers the right content at the right time so the buyer will move to the next stage in their buying journey, whether they’re in the early stages of research or they’re close to closing a deal.

For example, if a lead is torn between your solution and a competitor’s, you’d offer them a comparison guide of each tool’s features, use cases, pricing and so on, helping them call the shots.

Below are a few ideas for sales enablement content you’ll want to have in your toolkit.

Education and thought leadership: These top- and middle-of-funnel assets provide education on an industry challenge or topic rather than overtly promoting your products. Thought leadership informed 80 percent of CEO buying decisions in 2021.

Examples: Blog posts, articles, white papers, webinars, ebooks, newsletters, presentation decks, podcasts

Internal playbooks: To meet buyers where they’re at, sales reps need to understand their motivations, experiences, pains, hesitancies, outcomes and dreamstate. The more insights you, as a marketer, can provide on your audiences, the better equipped your salespeople will be to blast through sales objections in a targeted way.

Examples: Customer personas, battle cards, competitor analysis, sales playbooks, email templates, sales scripts

Product information: Product training has a significant bottom-of-funnel conversion effect when prospects are broadly sold on the value of the solution and need the under-the-hood technical details.

Examples: Product sell sheets, specification docs, feature comparisons, demos, free trials, pricing guides, ROI calculations

Social proof: In this era of distrust, prospects are turning to their peers—people like them—for independent verification that your product has solved the problem for others in their industry, and thus will deliver value or a return on their investment. Having case studies on a website is proven to increase conversions, and virtually all B2B buyers (92 percent) say they are more likely to make a buying decision after reading a trustworthy review.

Examples: Case studies, testimonials, customer reviews

Source: Gong.io

Videos: There is only so much you can do with words! Fully 95 percent of B2B buyers say video plays a key role in helping them move forward with a purchase, and the versatility of this format means you can use it to support the sales engine at every stage of the buyer’s journey. In fact, every single sales enablement asset in this list can be done in video—more on that below.

Examples: Explainer videos, product demos and tours, expert interviews, customer video testimonials, case studies, sales team training (e.g. video role plays and simulations)

“95 percent of B2B buyers say video plays an important role at every stage of the buyer’s journey.”
Brightcove, 2022

How sales and marketing use sales enablement content

The big promise of sales enablement content is to help sales teams sell smarter and sell more. Reps who are empowered with quality knowledge have seen 32 percent higher sales quota attainment and meet quota up to seven weeks faster—a direct bottom-line impact.

Sales teams use sales enablement content to:

Raise their customer, product, and industry knowledge.
Give prospects the best information in the moment.
Add value to their interactions with prospects.
Have a single version of truth for consistent customer messaging.
Expedite the sales cycle.
As attachment to cold emails.

Marketing teams use sales enablement content to:

Incorporate competitive insights from the sales team into content creation.
Better understand buyer sentiment, objections and decision-making processes.
Identify qualified leads and get them to the sales team.
Make reps’ lives easier with clear messaging and proof points that speed up selling time.
Support sales to meet their revenue goals.

Advantages of adding sales enablement content to your go-to-market strategy

When executed properly, sales enablement content has a measured impact on quota attainment, time to revenue, win rates and more:

Increase seller performance: Having self-service content at their fingertips means salespeople can spend less time on manual work and more time having meaningful conversations with prospects.
Reduce churn rates: A high number of lost customers typically means the customer wasn’t fully sold on your solution or they weren’t adequately qualified. Sales enablement content solves both these problems.
Increase customer lifetime value: A happy customer is a returning customer. Arming reps with content that shows customers how to get the most out of your solution means buyers are more likely to continue their contract or upgrade to a premium offer.
Raise revenue and win rates: Quality sales enablement content means that sales and marketing teams are working with the same product, positioning, and strategic brand messaging. Companies that successfully align their go-to-market are proven to achieve higher win rates and faster revenue growth.

Sales enablement content strategy: How to

A sales enablement content strategy lays out:

What content you’ll create (content type, goals and audiences)
How you’ll distribute it (formats, channels)
How you’ll measure impact (data-based evidence)

Here’s how to get started.

Where to get ideas

From customers: The most obvious way to find out what your best customers love about you is to ask them directly! Set up a feedback call to explore their buying experience, how they found you, why they chose your solution, and how they’re benefitting from it. Sales call recordings are another great place to capture prospects’ sentiment and identify success triggers and roadblocks.

From partners: Consultants, vendors, resellers, industry influencers and other collaborators with your company provide an outside view to your content ideation. They can often highlight use cases that sales and marketing teams have never considered.

From the sales team: No one understands how to close deals better than the sales reps talking to customers every day. They know who crosses the finish line and how they get there, and they likely have some great ideas about the type of content that might have turned a lost deal around.

Sales and marketing collaboration

Sales enablement content isn’t “set it and forget it.” It requires a regular feedback loop between sales and marketing to share knowledge and monitor real selling scenarios to learn where the content gaps are and which pieces are working.

Great things happen when sales and marketing teams are aligned, as Hubspot data clearly shows:

Where does alignment begin? With communication! Often, and especially in sales-led organizations with long sales cycles, marketers are far from revenue generation. Instead, they get measured more on top-of-funnel metrics like impressions, clicks, page views and time on site, which creates a conflict with sales goals.

You’ll need regular meetings to discuss and align around sales KPIs and ensure that time, effort and budget are spent where it makes the most measurable impact.

That could mean prioritizing BOFU content and working your way up.

Clever repurposing and distribution

Creating powerful sales enablement content does not mean you have to create every asset from scratch. You can save precious time by repurposing your resources into new formats for buyers to consume: white papers into pie charts, webinars into slide decks, technical guides into infographics.

Remember we said that every type of sales enablement content can be created as video? Repurposing is one area where video’s versatility really shines through. Videos are easily segmented into bite-sized informational clips or teasers for sharing across multiple platforms, thus extending your reach.

For example, you can:

Create short how-to-videos and product updates from your technical packs.
Clip the best bite-size pieces of webinars to social media.
Get a sales rep to record a Q&A focused around common questions and pain points.
Repurpose customer testimonials into video ads.
Place customer video testimonials on your website, social media channels, Youtube, or embed into email outreach.
Edit customer success stories into a video FAQs compilation to overcome all the common barriers to purchase on your website.

Content system and repositories

When AI-sales enablement platform Seismic surveyed their customers, they found that sales reps were spending nearly 10 hours per week tracking down content to send to buyers.

That’s precious time that should be spent engaging with prospects!

Once you have created your sales enablement content, the next task is to make it ridiculously easy for your sales reps to find the right content at the right time. There’s no single solution here. Options range from setting up an internal wiki or a tagged, searchable knowledge base to investing in professional sales content management software.

Look for solutions that offer detailed analytics, so you can track if your salespeople are actually using the assets, how often, and how it’s playing into their sales figures.

Or if you want to start your own repository from scratch, here at Teraleap we have designed a “Success Story Showroom” which is a guide to create your own digital repository of all the video stories your company has gathered.

The Success Story Showroom alone will power up your sales and marketing teams like never before. Here are 5 ways to use the Success Story Showroom for sales enablement:

Video: the perfect format for sales enablement

As you can see from the above chart, almost seven times as many buyers would rather watch video than read white paper content when learning about a business, product or solution. This shows that prospects don’t have the time or attention to read a PDF with a dozen pages of context. You have to be short, smart and sharp to stand out from the crowd.

“70 percent of B2B buyers say video beats all other content types in creating awareness of business-related problems.”
Brightcove, 2022

The impact of video on key business metrics

As a marketer, you won’t be surprised to learn that video is an excellent tool for increasing your sales team’s outreach and closing success. What might surprise you is just how effective video is against key business metrics:

Conversion rate – Video on a landing page can increase conversions by 80 percent or more.
Email open rates – Just adding the word “video” to an email subject line can increase open rates by 19 percent.
Email click-through rates – Embedding video in an email can boost CTR by up to 500 percent.
Paid social conversions – Our client Greenfig achieved 40 percent uplift in CTR on their paid social ads that included video.
Close rates – Sales teams enjoy a 42 percent average increase in close rates when video is incorporated at later stages of the sales cycle.
Sales velocity – Adding a video to a proposal can increase close rates by up to 41 percent and helps close deals 26 percent faster.

Customer video testimonials: insider nuggets

Not so long ago, producing video testimonial content required many disparate tools, skills and an extensive time commitment – not to mention the budget. It doesn’t have to be that way anymore. My team and I at TeraLeap are focused on making it easy and cost-effective to deploy customer video testimonials in a vast range of use cases to support your sales team. Here are some of the ways our clients are using video testimonials to grow their businesses:

Our client’s top use cases

Generate highly qualified leads with clear buying intent.

Unqualified leads and tire kickers are a time sap for overworked sales teams. One clear perk of video testimonials is they help educate leads on the value of your solution before they schedule a call. It provides a story of impact, showing both the features utilized and the benefits achieved.

Embedding these videos into your marketing funnel can both intrigue buyers with possible solutions they hadn’t considered as well as empower them to educate themselves. This frees up your sales team from time wasters while simultaneously providing more qualified leads.

Disarm customer objections.

With gentle guidance, you can have your customers talk about some of the top objections in your sales process and how this customer overcame them. This isn’t about putting words in your customers’ mouths—that would be unethical. But the chances are, your (happy) customer, once upon a time, had the same problem as your prospects. Now they’re on the other side and can speak with authority on how they navigated the issue.

Win more RFPs.

Embedding video testimonials into your Request for Proposal responses plays a pivotal role in customizing your response and convincing the client of your company’s capabilities. One of our clients included stills from their video testimonials in their RFPs, with links to the full videos on their website, and achieved, quote, “incredible click-through rates.” Their prospects commented that they had never seen video used in RFPs before – showing the power of video testimonials to help you stand out from the crowd. Other places have seen an increase in close rates by up to 41%.

Precisely match social proof to prospects.

Placing one video testimonial on your website can instantly ratchet up conversions, but creating a library of testimonials is where the magic really happens. Having a searchable repository of testimonial content allows the sales team to sift through the videos and extract specific clips that address particular customer concerns or answer questions raised during sales calls. For example, if a prospect mentions an issue with X, the sales team can send them an exact clip of a customer who previously faced a similar situation.

Success Storybooks & Showroom: our framework for customer-driven content

All of the above use cases are made more impactful through Success Storybooks (or summaries) all housed in a Success Story Showroom—a dynamic, centralized library of all your organization’s video testimonials, which we recommend all our customers create. The Showroom and Storybooks contain a summary of all your video testimonials complete with outcome stats and ready-to-use quotes, structured and searchable via key identifiers such as:

Industry type
Company size
Customer role
Challenge
Outcome

You can view a sample Storybook here.

Is setting up a Success Story Showroom worth the effort? Definitely. Keeping the Showroom updated with fresh success stories ensures your company’s offerings are always presented as current and effective. More importantly, it ensures sales teams can quickly locate highly targeted success stories so their prospects get the exact validation they need—and sales teams don’t break a sweat to find it.

There are multiple ways your reps can use the Showroom—prior to a call to warm up prospects, during the call to answer queries, after the call for follow-ups, and generally to maintain engagement during long sales cycles. It’s an awesome tool that will make your reps sing for joy!

The Bottom Line

B2B buyers control the purchase process today more than ever. They want information that’s easy to find and easy to use. As a B2B marketer, you’ll need to adapt your sales enablement content to suit this reality. Ease their pain during the buying journey, and you’ll win many happy customers who will advocate for your brand.

But the real slam dunk for your sales team? Video—and video testimonials in particular. Videos are a source of gravity that irresistibly pull prospects to your organization and seamlessly convert them through every stage of the buying journey. Including more of them in your process represents a dramatically improved recipe for leapfrogging competitors and driving top-line growth.

With TeraLeap, it has never been easier to create professional customer video testimonials at scale. Ready to take the first step? Book a friendly discovery call with our team. Want to dive deeper? Read our comprehensive guide on leveraging customer testimonials. It’s your complete how-to for creating trust-building video testimonials for your marketing campaigns.

Get trust-building customer video testimonials 5X faster