How to Create Engaging Assets for Your Sales Team

Qualifying a lead is a multi-step process, and on average, it takes a minimum of 6 to 8 touches. During this time, the SDR (sales development representative) evaluates a prospect across four important aspects: budget, authority, need and timeframe (BANT). A prospect who checks all these vital criteria is deemed worthy of persuasion. Related: 7 types of sales collateral that convert This is merely the beginning of the sales process. Once a lead has been qualified, they move through four stages of engagement before being converted into paying customers. These stages are popularly called AIDA: awareness, interest, desire and action. There's also a fifth step (satisfaction) which happens after the transaction is complete. Creating awareness, generating interest and building a desire to buy does not come easy. To build a successful sales team, it's not only important to train your SDRs, but to equip them with content that can trigger the right response from a lead. [Click to tweet ] Identify the assets required The first step in the asset creation process is building a requirements sheet. SDRs require a unique list of assets at each stage of the sales process. For instance, assets presented during the Awareness stage would mostly deal with information about your business, the founders, investors, products and services, and so on. In the Interest stage, assets mostly deal with product demonstrations. Desire is generated through testimonials and peer reviews that validate your legitimacy and remove any hurdles that prevent your lead from converting. Once you identify the objectives of each of the different stages of the sales process, building assets to fit your agenda becomes easy. Create content assets The success of the content creation process is determined by how engaged your customers are during sales outreach. A tool like Lucidpress streamlines the creation of various content assets—like brochures, sales proposals & case studies—with consistent branding. You might also create interactive content like videos and slideshows that are proven to offer high engagement and message retention among viewers. The question, however, is what kind of content you must create to build better engagement for your brand. Here are a few tips to take note of. Measure client dropout rate In any sales process, only a small fraction of the qualified leads you reach out to eventually become paying customers. The rest of the leads drop out at various stages of sales. Identify the dropout rate at each stage of the sales process. The stage where the most clients choose to part ways is the one where your content needs more attention. You don't have to use your existing content assets as benchmark if you don't want to. In fact, it's fine to start from scratch to build new content. Hold an internal meeting with all stakeholders (sales, marketing & product managers) to build a list of features and ideas that could deliver maximum value. This brainstorming session could also include benchmarking your content against the competition's. This will give your team a good idea of what's missing and how your content could be made more engaging for prospective customers. Build a content library The next step is to translate the ideas from the brainstorming session into actual assets. It's worth remembering that too much information can clutter your sales deck, so new assets should be organized into a content library instead. If you plan to use content management or knowledge management tools to handle this, make sure you pick a service that features a "learning path" or curriculum. This will help you organize your content into distinct folders for every stage of the sales cycle, which can be handy during the testing process. As we'll see in the next step, it's vital to experiment with various combinations of content assets and compare the conversion rates. Multivariate testing The next step is to test the effectiveness of your content assets on the conversion rate. The ideal way to do this is to build a handful of different content assets that could be pitched to clients in the same stage of the sales process. For instance, one deck could focus on charts and graphs, while another could use videos and interactive graphics to sell the product. Make sure that every SDR pitches at least one client with each of the various assets. Have the performance metrics of the original deck in hand before carrying out this experiment. At the end of this stage, build an aggregated report of how each of your content assets performed and how they all compare against the original deck. Secondary multivariate testing Once you've identified the content that performs best from among those tested, the next step is to experiment with more assets of the same kind. For instance, if videos and interactive graphics worked best, then you could work on creating new decks that feature such content. The idea is to find the sweet spot that maximizes engagement and conversion. Once you have a handful of different assets ready, experiment one more time with a new bunch of leads to find the highest performing content deck. Rinse & repeat Creating highly engaging sales content is a never-ending process. Once the best performing deck has been identified, the next step would be to look at other stages of the sales cycle where dropout rates are high and repeating the process. Doing this for each of the sales stages will help build a content library that converts higher than ever before. Our sales enablement software makes it easy to create & manage beautifully branded sales content.