10 Types of Sales Enablement Content and How to Create Them

Your sales reps are reaching out to new leads only to find they’re already familiar with your product—making the usual cold-calling script not working. Meanwhile, your marketing team’s latest campaign is sending a flood of mixed-quality leads in your direction. What's a sales rep to do?

For starters, you can build out a deep library of sales enablement content. 

With a combined annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.4% from 2019 to 2026, the market for enablement content—resources designed to help reps close deals—has taken off. Understanding how to create and deploy effective enablement resources is crucial for successful sales execution. This guide will explore how you can equip your team with the tools to close new deals effectively.

There’s a critical distinction between internal and external sales enablement tools. 

Internal sales enablement content supports your sales team in engaging leads, nurturing relationships with prospects, demonstrating product features, and overcoming objections. It could be anything from product training videos to sales scripts—equipping sales reps to do their jobs.

External sales enablement content provides information for potential customers to digest on their own. It can include case studies, white papers, or product demos to help buyers explore features or answer objections between discussions with their sales rep. External enablement content can target prospects at various stages, helping them move forward step by step in the buyer journey.

With the range of sales and customer support technology available today, sales enablement materials can take any number of forms. Here are some of the most common types of sales enablement content for internal and external use:

Internal sales enablement content examples

1. Sales scripts and playbooks

Whether a sales professional is new or seasoned, they’ll encounter unfamiliar scenarios as they engage prospective customers. Sales scripts provide a blueprint for those conversations, while sales playbooks outline potential approaches to different types of prospects. 

Say a rep has experience selling customer relationship management (CRM) software to retail customers but is now tasked with meeting prospects in healthcare. A sales playbook might outline key objection-handling methods or customer success metrics relevant to healthcare customers, while a script could provide key talking points to memorize for effective sales calls.

2. Email templates

As any sales professional knows, email can be a serious time waster. Drafting email after email for outreach or in response to specific questions can take hours. Your reps would rather spend this time connecting with new prospects or taking the next step toward closing deals. 

That’s why the most effective sales enablement toolkits include a variety of email templates for all kinds of scenarios. Pre-formatted quotes, drop email campaign outlines, check-ins for dead leads—any email team members regularly need to send is fair game. Even better, make them “living templates” that you host or share within your CRM or email marketing software. That way, sales reps have a starting skeleton they can update and refine based on their interactions.

3. Sales battle cards 

Every sales agent should develop in-depth knowledge of the products they sell. There are always little details that are easy to forget but invaluable to have at the tip of your tongue. Sales battle cards help reps keep those crucial details readily available. 

Battle cards can include quick comparison points based on competitor research, a summary of key value propositions for your company, or critical product specs. Reps can have them on hand and review the appropriate cards before sales calls with challenging prospects.

4. Buyer persona overviews

Understanding the target audience is one of the foundational tasks of any sales rep. The better they know their potential customers, the more effectively they can address those customers’ potential objections and pain points. Buyer persona overviews aren’t a replacement for talking with real prospects—you have to get to know each potential customer in their own right—but they help expedite getting to know them.

Good persona overviews provide a sketch of each type of prospect your salespeople engage, which they can fill in based on real interactions with those prospects. Overviews should offer highlights such as a prospect’s typical place in the buyer journey, key messaging points, and the most common objections or concerns. Sales agents can use these as a starting point to fill in the gaps about any prospect they’re preparing to reach out to.

5. Win/loss stories

Think of win/loss stories as internal testimonials for sales staff. They showcase real scenarios in which other team members successfully closed deals—or fell short of landing the sale—providing helpful insights about the most effective methods. Having real examples from their peers can help each sales member develop their own strategy for success. 

The more of these you can get, the better. Make it easy for reps to share their stories in short videos. With screen recorder tools like Loom, for instance, anyone on the sales team could create a quick overview of a successful sale and share it with the team on your sales Slack or Teams channel. 

External sales enablement content examples

6. Blog posts and other content marketing

A lot of external sales enablement content targets prospects at the top of the sales funnel looking for more information about topics related to their business. Blog articles, e-books, whitepapers, and similar resources can build your brand authority and set up sales agents for successful engagement down the road.

For instance, say you sell accounting software to small businesses. Articles and other external resources might tackle topics like “the best methods for managing accounts receivable” or “key features of cloud payroll software for small businesses” to offer guidance and build trust with potential customers. When it comes time for that business to upgrade its accounting system, that trust keeps you top-of-mind.

7. Product demo or explainer videos

Sales reps don’t have time to show off every important detail or update prospects on new features as they’re released. Providing them with a library of explainer videos or product demos helps them provide quick answers or inside looks that prospects can digest on their own time. 

You can even use an AI video tool like Loom AI to automatically personalize videos you’ve already made for each prospect by changing the audio in specific spots.

Don’t overdo these, though. The best explainer videos are short and sweet, offering quick looks and giving prospects specific insights into how your product can address their needs. With Loom, you can quickly create simple, accessible explainers blending on-screen and webcam video content to walk through complex features.

8. Case studies and customer testimonials

When a customer is making a critical purchase decision, few things are more convincing than detailed testimonials from other happy customers. Real, social proof is worth far more than a well-rehearsed sales script—nearly nine in ten customers regularly check online reviews before making a purchase.

Your sales team should have access to plenty of case studies, each highlighting specific wins and showing off how your product moved the needle for other companies. Make sure they’re specific, highlighting metrics that demonstrate tangible value such as:

• Boosted sales by X%

• Improved customer satisfaction scores from X to Y in Z months

• Reduced expenses by $$ 

9. FAQ sheets and one-pagers

Many prospects think of their most important questions after a sales call, but they don’t want to continually follow up with their rep to get answers. FAQ sheets or one-pagers with basic product details are invaluable resources for potential customers to peruse on their own time. They also make it easy for sales agents to share essential information with other decision-makers without scheduling additional meetings or calls. 

10. Webinars

Webinars are an excellent way for reps to go deeper with multiple prospects at once. They also help you build more authority by showcasing expertise from others within your company. When subject matter experts speak to specific customer pain points and demonstrate deep product knowledge, it builds trust in your brand and potentially moves numerous buyers to the next stage in their journey. 

Online webinars don’t have to be product-focused, either. HubSpot frequently hosts webinars on marketing and customer service topics, while Semrush offers sessions on small business SEO strategy. As with your content marketing materials, consider topics that might be of interest to your target audience.

Just because you provide content for your sales team doesn’t mean it’s useful. Salesforce reports that only 29% of sales reps are fully satisfied with the support materials they receive.

Rather than leaving 70% of reps unhappy with their enablement tools, you must ensure each piece of content supports them and connects with their target audience in some way. The following steps can help you create high-quality sales enablement content.

Know your buyers

Optimize your sales enablement content to speak to your current buyers and their biggest problems. Collect feedback from sales agents to understand those issues, what’s connecting, and what’s falling short. Surveys can also collect useful information directly from your target customers. 

Map the customer journey

Sales content is only effective if it speaks to prospects where they are. To know that, you need to clearly map the typical journey your customers take to your product. Outline the various stages of the buyer journey, the most salient talking points for each stage, and the key enablement materials your sales team needs to meet them on the road.

Audit and analyze existing content

Enablement content should never be static. Find out what tools and materials your team is using, what’s proving effective, and what’s gathering dust on the shelf—or, worse, actively turning prospects away. Keep updating and optimizing your sales enablement tools.

Collaborate to create better sales content

Sales teams don’t operate in a vacuum. To be successful, they must work with product, marketing, engineering, and customer support teams cross-functionally. You can foster this collaboration by bringing those teams together when creating sales enablement content. 

For instance, if the sales team is going to successfully sell your product, they should know what to highlight, how it works, and who built it. Product demo videos and internal training content recorded with Loom could include segments with product designers and engineers, rather than just talking points from sales reps, in order to demonstrate all the key features and details sales reps need to know.

Train reps to use the content properly

Never assume that your sales team knows the best use case for a specific piece of sales content. When you roll out new materials, take the time to show reps when and how to use them, even if it’s just in a training video. 

Loom can easily double as a tool for video training, providing quick coaching feedback on a rep’s use of content or capturing a walkthrough of your latest enablement tools.

Use tools to create effective sales enablement content

Don’t start from scratch or reinvent the wheel when trying to support your sales team. Choosing the right sales enablement technology can help you craft better content more quickly. For instance, you can use Loom’s screen recorder to create personalized, engaging demos or explainer videos for your reps to share with prospects and customers. 

No sales strategy is complete without a robust library of sales enablement content. From email templates for reps to product demo videos for prospects, it’s essential to provide relevant content that supports your team at every stage of the buyer journey.

With Loom, you can build a powerful collection of sales enablement videos to cover the basics of onboarding, explain complex concepts, or demonstrate key features. You can even put the power in your sales reps’ hands, enabling them to create their own explainer videos to support their colleagues. 

With so many options, Loom is a versatile asset for personalizing the sales process. Let your sales team try it for free today.