Sales Collateral For Gaining Prospects

Sales collateral is basically anything that helps move a prospect through the sales funnel. Sales collateral includes any type of printed or digital resource- information, media, or content that helps support the sales process.

The purpose of these materials is to give prospects, the information they need to decide to buy your product or service and help salespeople to support their cause through sophisticated case studies or presentations. Let’s see how providing your salespeople with everything they need can skyrocket your company revenue!

One of the biggest revenue-driving forces behind organizations is its salespeople. Your salespeople help your organization to grow by representing the company, going out in the field, interacting with customers, building relationships, establishing trust, and closing deals!

With such critical and massive responsibilities resting on their shoulders, salespeople need to be equipped with all the resources they would need to help them optimize interactions with clients and prospects, thereby closing more deals.

Even though salespeople have the most important job in your company- to drive revenue- salespeople say they lack the necessary knowledge to sell better and increase their close rates. This is where the need for creating top-notch and resourceful sales collateral arises.

Salespeople need to be equipped with all the knowledge, tools, and resources they need to get in touch with the prospects or customers, have meaningful relationships, and help them move down the sales funnel and close more deals.

Let’s see how creating awesome sales collateral can help your sales team achieve all that and more!

What Is a Sales Collateral? (Definition)

Today’s consumers are informed and more tech-savvy than ever. In fact, 70% of the buyer’s journey is completed before a buyer even reaches out to sales.

In a world of empowered customers, salespeople need to always be ready with the resources they need to close down more deals.

Therefore, businesses develop sales collateral to help boost the sales process. Companies use sales collateral with the aim of moving prospective customers through the entire process.

The many types of sales collateral range from traditional brochures, pricing sheets, website content, etc.

Must read: The Ultimate Guide To Sales Enablement Content

Examples of Sales Collateral for Improving Conversions:

Sales collateral can take many forms depending upon the need of the prospect and its position in the sales funnel. While some prospects are ready to buy while others may be simply scanning options.

Therefore, your sales team needs to be ready with different collateral for different stages of the buyer’s journey. Let us explore some of the best sales collaterals out there and how you can utilize them to close more deals:

Sales playbooks
Case studies
Corporate brochures
Blog posts
One-pagers
Presentations & sales decks
Explainer videos
Email templates
Sales scripts

1. Sales playbook

A study reveals that 54% of salespeople using sales playbooks are likely to meet their sales target versus just 46% when no playbook is available to the sales team. Moreover, “Best in Class” sales teams (top 20%) are more than twice as likely to deploy sales playbooks compared to “Laggard” teams (bottom 30%).

A sales playbook is nothing but a reference document for new as well as existing salespeople. It has all the resources, company information, target market info, software tips, strategies, and more to help out salespeople do their job easily.

With crucial information like tutorials, hacks, email scripts, competitive intelligence, buyer personas, and other sales enablement content, it’s like a sales bible for every sales rep in a company. Playbooks are important as they ensure everyone has the same access to knowledge and resources as they try to hit their goals.

Check out below Free Sales Playbook template by Bit.ai

2. Case studies

Case studies are more about stating facts and less about selling your product or services. They describe the problems faced by the “case” (a.k.a. the customer), the solution they used (i.e. your product), and the outcome using the solution.

More than 72% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more. This is why case studies, which act as an elaborate form of testimonials, are crucial when approaching a prospect.

Positive feedback from existing buyers builds trust and credibility for the product and leads to new customers to take the leap, thus case studies can be one of the most powerful tools a sales rep can use. Depicting the success previous customers have had with your product strengthens your case and adds integrity to the company, its products, and services.

3. Corporate brochures

Brochures are age-old sales collateral that still holds its value in our digital world. These include printed materials such as pamphlets, guides, and flyers. In the age of Facebook groups and tweets, traditional brochures and flyers are still doing their job! They are particularly prominent in the service industry and do a great job of making the first contact with a prospect.

If you want to create digital counterparts to your physical brochures, you can use a design tool like Canva or PicMonkey. You can easily create digital brochures or flyers and then embed them on your website, share them on your social media accounts or via your email newsletter, and more.

4. Blog posts

Marketers often use content marketing and blog posts to attract visitors to the company website in hopes of them signing up for their product offering or contacting the sales team.

The sales team should also be made aware of the blog posts that do well as it will help them understand what the target customer is looking for online. Having this knowledge is crucial as it allows reps to focus directly on the pain points of the prospect rather than giving them the whole nine yards and risk losing their interest.

5. One-Pager

As the name suggests, a one-pager is a single-page document highlighting your business, products, and service information. Think of one-pagers as a one-page pitch for your business. One-pagers help prospects quickly go through your business overview and compare different solutions.

By giving the reader, a brief, concise, and to-the-point summary of your business, product, or service, you try to catch their attention and subsequently, get them excited about doing business with you. It’s a great way to make a good first impression so make sure you use a template like this to create an awesome one-pager.

6. Sales decks

Sales decks and presentations are nothing but PowerPoint you use to persuade prospects and clients during a sales meeting. These are used for the first major interaction with a prospect and describe customer problems and how your product solves those problems.

Sales decks are usually the tipping point that decides whether or not you will convert your prospect into a customer. Every sales deck can be broken down into three sections:

The problem that exists in the world currently,
The solution your business presents,
And lastly, how will the prospect benefit from your solution.

If you want to create amazing sales decks and presentations, take a look at this resource for inspiration: The Best Sales Deck Examples To Revamp Your Sales Strategy

7. Explainer videos

While sales decks can only help you convert one prospect at a time, explainer videos can be scaled infinitely using the internet. Videos are a great way to explain your product or service to prospects in a visual manner.

With numerous options like YouTube, Facebook Watch, Snapchat Stories, IGTV, Vimeo, etc., you can publish explainer videos all over the internet and let the prospect come to you.

4 out of 5 consumers believe that demo videos are helpful.
4x as many customers would rather watch a video about a product than reading about it.
Almost 50% of internet users look for videos related to a product or service before visiting a store.

As data suggests, people would rather watch a video than read about your product or services, making them a must-have sales collateral in your arsenal. Make sure to make your explainer videos interactive, high quality, and informational.

8. Email templates

The email has been an age-old communication between salespeople and prospects and continues to dominate in the age of social media.

More than 86% of businesses surveyed indicate that they plan to increase their upcoming email marketing budgets as the number of email users continues to rise worldwide. However, simply sending emails to prospects is barely the first part.

Making sure those emails look amazing, have informational content, and are extremely targeted must be on top of your priority before clicking “send”.

Did you know that only 24% of sales emails are opened? With so much effort being wasted, the sales team must have several pre-designed email templates to test their outreach campaigns and see what works and what doesn’t.

They should have email templates for different stages of the buyer’s journey including outreach, followup, check-ins, and more.

9. Sales scripts

Communication is one of the most fundamental parts of the sales process. In fact, 92% of all customer interactions happen over the phone. This is why it’s crucial to have a reference point for salespeople to keep the conversation going in the direction they want.

Sales scripts work wonders in such cases, making sure that the sales rep is in line with the topic of conversation, and all of the product’s value propositions are touched upon.

Sales scripts do not have to be monotonous or give your salespeople a robotic conversation style, they can be as brief with key talking points to keep the conversation meaningful. While experienced salespeople only require a small list of points, beginners or trainees can be equipped with a detailed script to boost their confidence.

Must read: The Beginner’s Ultimate Guide To Sales Prospecting

Tips For Creating Top-Notch Sales Collateral

Your prospects will interact with your sales collateral throughout their buying journey.

While the sales collateral alone might not close the deal, you still need to optimize it to the point that it might as well does! Here are a few tips that’ll let you do just that:

1. Collaboration is key

The creation of great sales collateral requires the efforts of both the marketing and sales departments. This makes the two departments work together, resulting in better alignment between the two.

Sales collateral typically originates in the marketing department, and the resources created by marketers are passed on to the sales department to assist in the sales process. Only with the input of salespeople can marketers create useful content that the sales team actually uses.

Even though it is obvious that quality sales collateral cannot be created in silos and requires sales and marketing to collaborate, a mind-boggling one trillion dollars is lost in sales due to lack of proper communication and collaboration between sales and marketing teams.

Both sales and marketing need to operate as a single unit, sharing data, insights, and creating valuable content, to close more deals.

2. Make content easily accessible

Here’s a great tip for you- creating sales collateral won’t magically help them sell more effectively. You need to make the right content accessible to the right person at the right time for it to be worth the effort.

A shocking 80% of marketing content is rarely or never used by sales, according to ITSMA. Without proper guidance and training on how to make use of resources, the sales team can’t execute strategies effectively.

Management needs to make sure that sales reps are equipped with all the resources they need, as well as keep a tab on which sales materials are being used and which are not.

3. Involve your salespeople

Your salespeople are the ones who interact with your prospects on a day-to-day basis. They are the most familiar with their needs, wants, and problems. No survey or case study can bring you such intimate insights on your customers than your sales reps.

Thus, it only makes sense to involve them in the creation of sales collateral and value their opinions and feedback. Ask your salespeople whether the sales collateral is actually helping them close more deals or not.

Do they have the content they need for every stage of the buying cycle? Are they able to answer all buyer questions effectively?

Create content that forges a strong connection between sales reps and customers and allows them to use the type of content that fits their selling style, instead of pushing boring sales pitches.

4. Don’t forget about your customers!

While creating sales collateral, we are so focused on the effective alignment between sales and marketing, that we often forget about the most important aspect of this whole exercise- the customer!

To create sales collateral that stands out from the crowd and speaks to the customers on an emotional level, you need to truly understand your customer’s pain points.

Reverse engineer your customer needs and wants and try to create sales collateral in a language they understand and can relate to.

5. Keep content up to date

Sales reps use on average more than 17 pieces of content to enable the selling process. That sales content must be relevant, meaningful, and shared at the appropriate time to assist the buyer on their journey.

Keeping this content up-to-date is a must for salespeople to deliver accurate information to the prospects. Remove outdated collateral and provide only the latest.

Verify that your content is all up-to-date with regard to your company’s information like company logo, taglines, color schemes, etc. Are there multiple versions of one sales pitch? Are you using last quarter’s prices in brochures? Make sure that answers to these questions are a firm NO!

Conclusion

Sales reps need to have the right tools to be good at what they do and do it efficiently. Equipping them with great sales collateral is the foundation of forming a great sales team.

Apart from helping the sales process and educating prospects, the creation of sales collateral also forces sales and marketing to work together collaboratively towards a common goal. Without their joint effort, no great sales collateral can be created effectively.

Great sales collateral, in turn, drives revenue and helps creates more meaningful relationships with customers.

What are your thoughts on sales collateral? Does your company produce great sales collateral? Share with us in the comments below!

Further reads :

Sales Collateral: Definition, Types and Tips!