As a business, you want your sales teams to focus on what matters the most – that is, speaking with prospective customers, and closing deals. Preparing decks, and hunting for the right information and documents to use in the pitch can all be a waste of time and resources.
Whether you are dealing with leads at the awareness stage or the nurturing stage of the funnel, your sales success hinges on your sales content management strategy.
In this article, we dig into the fundamentals of sales content management to help you understand the art and importance of creating and organizing compelling sales content.
First things first, let’s understand what we mean by sales content management.
What is sales content management?
Sales content management is a process that involves a mix of creating, organizing, and distributing customer-facing content for sales teams. The ultimate goal of sales content management is to empower the sales reps with the right resources at the right time to nurture leads and boost conversions.
Internal and external sales enablement content
We can split sales enablement content into two categories:
- Internal sales enablement content
- External sales enablement content
While internal sales enablement content primarily focuses on training sales representatives and making them aware of the latest developments, external sales enablement content aims at improving customer engagement and accelerating the conversion cycle.
Internal sales enablement content examples: Outreach scripts, sales process documents, sales training manuals, competitor research, and battle cards.
External sales enablement content examples: Case studies, Whitepapers, testimonials, e-books, sales decks, explainer videos, and product guides.
Read also: Sales funnel stages: A complete guide for 2025
Types of sales enablement content
This section examines the different types of sales enablement content and how each format empowers your sales executives.
External sales enablement content formats
- Whitepapers, Ebooks, Case Studies
Case studies, ebooks, and white papers are one of the most popular sales enablement content formats and an integral part of a company’s content marketing plans. One of the primary reasons for their popularity is their ability to attract high-intent prospects and leads who are keen on understanding how your products or services can address their challenges.
Additionally, these collaterals have also become quite popular due to their in-depth and analytical nature and ability to educate prospects. While collaterals including whitepapers establish authority, case studies illustrate real-world success stories following a simple problem-solution format.
- Sales Decks and Presentations
Apart from the previously mentioned collaterals, one of the best and most effective ways to engage high-intent customers is to create customized sales brochures, decks and presentations. These assets equip your sales teams with the most relevant information organized in a manner that makes it appealing to the target audience.
Additionally, these sales decks play an integral role in persuading buyers to make the best purchase decisions since they can always refer to these slides in case they wish to review the key benefits, features, and other details.
However, it is critical to customize the sales deck for different customers to address their unique challenges and resonate with them.
For instance, customers in the healthcare industry use a project management tool quite differently from someone working in industries like insurance or advertising. The key integrations and compliances necessary to make your software useful to these customers can make or break your sales deck.
You may want to highlight your HIPAA compliance in your sales deck for a healthcare audience while showcasing integration with tools like Figma for your advertising client.
- Explainer Videos And Resource Hubs
Explainer videos are more than just walkthrough videos that demonstrate how your product or service works, illustrating their unique value and answering frequently asked questions. In short, they break down complex concepts, enhancing comprehension, and engaging prospects from the start. A sales rep with a concise explainer video allows them to demonstrate the key benefits and features of a product or service and also address customer queries.
Resource hubs serve as an information trove that typically includes a mix of templates, blogs, instruction manuals, and other sales-related assets. A one-stop shop for sales teams to organize and distribute sales content across different stages of the funnel.
Read also: 7 things sales leaders are doing in 2025
Internal sales enablement content resources
- Cold Outreach Sales Scripts
Sales scripts fall under the internal sales enablement content umbrella and are predominantly used by sales reps worldwide across different stages of the sales funnel. These scripts facilitate clear and effective communication and are extensively used for prospecting and closing deals.
That said, it is worth noting that following a script during cold calling and writing emails worked well a couple of decades ago, the conversation’s unnatural format is a deterrent for customers seeking personalized interactions.
Therefore, it is essential to personalize customer interactions while providing the necessary information to nudge the customer through the sales pipeline.
One popular and common way to do this in recent times is by integrating AI into the process. Technology like chatbots and GPT can help your organization personalize your scripts at scale, helping you maximize ROI.
But in addition to this, the key skill to personalize your conversations is by asking the right questions.
So, regardless of whether you type out your cold outreach script manually, or use AI tools, the objective of your outreach script must be to identify the customer’s problems by asking the right questions instead of simply pitching your product or service.
- SDR Training Manuals
A sales development representative (SDR) manual includes precious insights and tips that empower sales reps to get better at nurturing leads and closing deals efficiently. From ebooks, templates, and handy tips, an SDR manual typically has all the information sales teams require to understand their role, develop the hard and soft skills required in the sales field, time management, and manage their workload.
- Battle cards
Going into the field to sell your product or service puts you in the line of fire of prospective customers. Sales battle cards, also known as cheat sheets or kill sheets, is a short document that gives your sales professionals all the ammunition they need when speaking to a customer.
This could include feature and price comparisons between your offering and those of your competitors, frequently asked questions and their answers, common objections and ideas to tackle them, as well as common use cases, partnership opportunities, and so on.
- Sales Playbook
Sales playbooks are detailed guides that cover all the important sales strategies and processes that sales teams can use at different stages of the sales funnel. This also includes real and hypothetical sales scenarios and how sales reps can navigate them and ultimately close deals efficiently. A sales playbook typically includes the sales methodologies, customer profiles, sales strategy for different stages of the funnel, roles and responsibilities of different SDRs, and KPIs.
Create a winning sales content management strategy
Now that you know the different types of sales enablement content that will be stored in your library, it is a good time to understand the art of creating a winning sales content management strategy.
Before we start, it is very important to understand the difference between content that converts and content that informs.
We will examine the content management strategy that empowers sales reps to convert prospects from cool or warm leads to paying customers.
1. Set and define objectives
Before you dive deep into building a sales content management strategy, it is crucial to know where your sales team stands now and its current objectives. Review your objectives and goals and evaluate whether they align with your plans. Determine how your sales team will locate and distribute content and how it can fit into the customer’s journey.
2. Internal research
Conducting internal research to analyze and review your existing content is an absolute must. This involves a thorough sales content audit and an understanding of how your sales team operates. The goal is to help your sales team find the most impactful and effective sales collaterals to convert a warm lead into a customer.
Identify the areas within the buying journey where your prospects tend to drop off and determine the content formats that work and those that aren’t that effective.
Talk to your sales team to understand the type of content they think they require to convert prospects into buyers across different phases of the sales funnel.
3. Market and competitor research
Once you have completed internal research, you can move on to the market and competitor research phase. You can only improve your sales performance if you understand the pulse of your audience. Conduct customer surveys to help define your ideal customer profile (ICP) and note down the traits and behaviors of your highest-converting customers.
Find answers to the following questions:
- Who is your target audience?
- What are their biggest pain points?
- How can you address their needs?
- How can you differentiate your leads?
Now, you need to study your competitors and identify the things they are doing better than you. Does their sales content follow a different theme or tonality? What is their approach? What is working for them?
A thorough internal and competitor research should set a solid foundation for your sales content enablement strategy.
4. Identify and pick the right tools
It is safe to say that the research part is done. Now that you understand where you stand and what your competitors are up to, it is time to create and execute your sales content enablement strategy.
The first step is to pick the right tools to ensure your sales content is neatly organized into relevant folders or sections within the tool. You must always aim to address your sales team’s problems by identifying the gaps within the existing systems in place. This will allow you to add, delete, or replace some tools to ensure an improved workflow, content accessibility, and flawless collaboration across the sales team.
5. Sales content audit and sales inventory management
What does a successful content audit look like? Well, the first step is to get familiar with your existing content inventory and sales assets. Review every asset used by your sales team to nurture prospects across the sales funnel and identify the top-performing sales content.
Do you still require old sales content lingering in your folders? If not, delete them. Select a bunch of effective client-facing content including blogs, ebooks, case studies, battle cards, whitepapers, etc, and identify a common theme. What makes them tick?
Invest in visually appealing sales collateral that also aligns with your brand. This includes flipbooks, presentations, and any other client-facing document.
Now, secure every content piece in a folder so that they are easily accessible and not scattered. Once the organization is done, you can improve your existing content and replace outdated data with the latest numbers and trends. Assign a content score for every content piece depending on conversion success, use, correctness, effectiveness, etc.
Read also: How Oneflow’s contract automation in 2024 helped customers reclaim 4 hours a week to focus on strategic priorities
6. Staff training
Despite implementing the best content organization and scoring practices, it may take a while for your sales team to get used to a new structure. Therefore, it is crucial to train and inform them how they can access different sales collateral as and when required. Additionally, there is a high chance they may have to share different types of content to nurture and engage with prospects across different stages of the funnel. So, it is a good idea to create custom URLs for every content piece for seamless sharing and tracking.
This allows your sales team to measure engagement and tweak their strategy periodically, depending on the performance.
Conclusion
Building a successful sales content management system requires businesses to be systemic in organizing all of their collateral such that their sales team finds the right content piece at the right time.
Sales content management, if done right, is the pathway to higher conversions and streamlined operations. The ball is now in your court. Upgrade or modify your current processes, nurture prospects across different stages, and close deals with ease.
