Need to figure out what sales assets to prioritize in your sales motion? Check these out.
Especially in today’s world, where most meetings are happening virtually, having relevant sales collateral to educate your prospect is key to winning deals.
This includes assets that a salesperson will share with their prospects prior, during, or after sales engagements such as meetings.
These assets are also shared through digital sales rooms or content hubs which are becoming increasingly popular methods of consolidating these assets and conversations into a single experience.
Below are 5 popular types of externally-facing sales collateral according to a recent poll we conducted on Linkedin:
The best way to communicate the value and results that your product yields is through the voice of your customers. Case studies are assets that clearly articulate the value that your product or service has brought to your customer.
A case study is focused on explaining various aspects of your customer and the experience that they had using your product. It’s important that the audience consuming the case study is able to identify with the customer being featured in the case study. You want the audience to be able to think “that sounds like me/my situation”.
When creating the case study you want to be able to feature a brief overview of the company. Not too much, but enough to be able to validate the company and describe variables such as firmographic information.
The core content of the case study should dive deep into what the customer was experiencing before using your product, how they used your product, how your product solved their problems or helped them reach a desired outcome, and of course the results they experienced as a result of using your product.
A 1-pager can vary in its format, however generally it’s a single page that articulates what your company does, what kind of customers/partners it works with, and the product it offers.
The intention of a 1-pager is to be able to give a prospective customer a quick overview of your company that is concise and on-brand. This is a great asset at the top of the funnel when doing outbound prospecting but also in response to an inbound inquiry.
An effective 1-pager should provide just enough information in order to intrigue the prospect to want to learn more about your company and product. It can also be thought of as a “elevator pitch”.
A competitive comparison document compares features, strengths, weaknesses, integrations, and other important information against your competitors and your company.
The intention of this document is to provide your prospects with an easy to understand reference that highlights your company/product against your competitors in a favorable way.
This document can be structured in a few ways including comparing your company to one or multiple competitors. It’s important that a salesperson conduct proper discovery to be able to determine the competitors that they are competing against on a deal.
Features alone don't close deals however having a document that lists out key features can help drive a deal forward. This is an asset that can be used at the top of the funnel during prospecting or further down the funnel.
Ideally, these product overview documents should be personalized based on the insights that the salesperson uncovered during discovery. However, these assets can also list out the most powerful features based on the persona the salesperson is targeting in general.
From a design perspective, these documents explain the product feature, the benefit of the feature, and ideally have a screenshot or visual representation of the feature.
In tandem with these product overview docs, salespeople now have access to demo creation tools like Navattic, Reprise, DemoStack, Walnut.io just to name a few. These allow the salesperson to provide an interactive demo environment that the prospect can use to test drive the product.
Organizations are keen on determining what the ROI or return on investment might be when purchasing a new product. ROI calculators are tools that allow prospects to understand the impact that a product can potentially have on their bottom line.
Typically these ROI calculators provide quantitative data such as cost savings, efficiency gains, additional revenue generated, etc. Each ROI calculator is customized to the product and value proposition it’s tied to however within a software context it might feature inputs such as # of users, your average deal size, website traffic, etc.
Here is an example of an ROI calculator provided by HubSpot.
