The 5 Most Common Types of Sales Enablement Content for Remote Selling [HubSpot Research]

Having a bank of solid sales enablement content is more of a need-to-have than a nice-to-have for remote sales efforts. Salespeople often lean on resources that streamline and enhance their ability to effectively sell from anywhere, so it's no surprise that several businesses are prioritizing this kind of content creation.

In HubSpot's recently published Sales Enablement Report, we explored the subject a bit further. We surveyed 500 sales leaders across eight countries about the strategies they employ to enable their sales reps, including the specific types of sales enablement content they leverage.

Here, we'll explore the five most common kinds of sales enablement content our respondents referenced, get some insight on how to do each format right, and see some examples of what each type of content should look like.

1. Email Templates

According to HubSpot's report, email templates were the most popular form of remote sales enablement content with roughly 53% of respondents leveraging the medium — and for good reason. This kind of content saves time, takes some strain off sales reps, and allows you to experiment with different kinds of messaging.

Email templates help remedy the uncertainty and inefficiency that stem from aimless guesswork when trying to initiate, manage, and close deals. They offer another degree of cohesion to your sales efforts — ensuring that your communication with prospects is well-tested and consistently effective.

The key to creating a solid email template is reconciling engagement with brevity. Your prospects don't have the time to read a virtual novella, talking up every facet of your business. No, they're much more interested in attention-grabbing, personal messages that convey interest and value.

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2. Call Scripts

Sales calls are tough to wing. Reaching out to a prospect with no idea of where a call is supposed to go is every bit as difficult as it is ineffective. Reps need a roadmap — that's where call scripts come in. They give sales teams a backbone for their calls that keeps them on track and prevents them from losing prospects with aimless conversation and too many ums and uhs.

It's worth noting that call scripts aren't quite as rigid as film scripts. They're not concrete documents that need to be faithfully recited the same way every time. They require extensive research on the prospects they involve and a certain degree of personalization that reflects those findings.

They also tend to offer different avenues sales reps can take depending on the nature and trajectory of the call. Ultimately, call scripts provide assured, generally well-tested guidance for reps trying to get the most out of their sales calls.

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3. Pre-Call Checklists

Pre-call planning provides another helpful dimension to your ability to successfully guide sales calls. So it's no surprise that 37% of our survey respondents say they leverage them to help enable their sales efforts.

You can't rely solely on your natural charm, intuition, and improv skills when calling prospects. You need to know what you're getting into, what you'll need to have on hand, what you can expect from the conversation.

Pre-call checklists cover aspects of a sales call like client characteristics, background on their primary issues and concerns, necessary support materials you need to bring, your goals, key questions to ask, and potential objections you need to anticipate.

The keys to putting a successful pre-call planning checklist together are establishing a firm, baseline understanding of your prospect, setting a preferred course to follow, and trying to account for any curveballs that might come your way.

You need to conduct extensive research on your prospect's business and industry, know who you're going to be talking to, see if you and your prospect have any overlap in your professional networks, establish firm goals for the call, gather relevant support materials, prepare thoughtful questions, and brace yourself for as many objections and questions your prospect might have.

With all those factors and considerations in mind, you'll be able to put together a pre-call planning checklist that lets your sales team get the most out of its calls.

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4. Product Demos

Product demos are an excellent way to acquaint prospects with your product or service quickly, accessibly, and thoroughly. That's why 36% of HubSpot's survey respondents say they leverage the medium to enable their sales teams' remote selling efforts.

Product demos come in various shapes and forms, but in terms of remote sales enablement, the process is often associated with video. And product demo videos — effective as they can be when done right — are tricky to nail.

To get there, you need a firm picture of your goals, a solid understanding of your audience, a definitive budget, and an idea of whether you want to produce the video in-house or outsource it.

Beyond those logistical components, you have to account for the creative side of things. Decide whether you want your video to be live-action or animated — and give it a firm structure, fleshed out by a compelling script.

Here's an example of a well-crafted one from Slack.

5. Customer Testimonials

Users trust other users — that's just a fact of life. Prospects often want to hear objective takes on an offering from people with no agenda and nothing to gain from talking that product or service up.

Customer testimonials lend sales teams a new degree of credibility — so it makes sense that roughly 36% of our respondents use them to support their remote sales enablement.

Having your most enthusiastic customers vouch for your business and share their experiences helps put prospects at ease. They demonstrate how their peers have seen success with a company — letting them more meaningfully imagine your product or service in the context of their operations.

This kind of sales enablement content can take on a variety of forms. Testimonials can be relayed through quote graphics, customer interviews, audio, video, case studies, blog posts, press releases, and other mediums that lend themselves to compellingly conveying customer praise. Here's an example from HubSpot's customer testimonial page.

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Pinning down the kind of sales enablement content that will best suit your sales team's needs can be tricky — and creating the content itself can be even tougher. That's why it's important to know the different potential formats you have at your disposal.

Producing successful sales enablement content requires some trial and error. But if you have the patience to ride that experimentation out and baseline knowledge to know what you're doing, you'll be in a great position to put together content that can take your sales team's efforts to the next level.