Drive More Sales Using Interactive Content For Sales Enablement

Interactive content is an excellent resource to empower a company’s sales enablement department, resulting in higher revenues and better training sessions for sales teams.

Despite all the growth potential that the combination of these two areas can bring to a business, it’s still rare to see cases where this is effectively done, especially outside of the US.

Even in Content Marketing and Digital Marketing strategies, which have interactivity as an important value, companies are only now realizing that interactive content is fundamental for building a positive relationship with the audience.

In this article, we’ll show 3 ways to use interactive content for sales enablement, aiming to conquer and retain more customers. We’ll talk about the following items:

Are you interested in improving your team’s sales processes? Then keep reading! 

What is interactive content?

Interactive content is a type of content with elements of interactivity, involving the user to create a highly personalized experience, thus assisting the buyer persona in finding a solution to their problem.

The main intention of the interactive content is to draw the audience’s attention and entertain them, besides getting closer to the public.

That’s because nowadays, with Digital Transformation, the arrival of new applications, social media, and other native content, the dispute for people’s full attention is fierce, and the tendency is for it to become bigger.

The amount of information available on the Internet is only increasing, but people’s time during the day remains the same 24 hours as always.

To get an idea of how intense the war for attention is, according to a survey by NewsCred, people are spending, on average, only 37 seconds on blog posts, which are static content.

Static content is the opposite of interactive content. Instead of actively participating in the experience, the audience reacts to it passively, without interacting.

The way out to get the audience’s full attention is then in stimulating engagement. That’s why interactive content is currently being so widely used in marketing plans.

It provides more accurate data on customer behavior, and it can also be part of a company’s sales enablement strategy.

What are the challenges in implementing sales enablement processes?

In the sales department, the situation is not very different. The urge to find ways to establish scalable and repeatable processes, helping the customer in their needs, has led to the creation of the sales enablement sector.

This sector is also responsible for aligning marketing and sales strategies to work together towards the same goals. To do so, it’s essential to ensure that the company uses the same basic approach at all stages.

The sales enablement team must always be aware of the sales process, seeking to find and implement new strategies (which may or may not come from Marketing) and new tools to improve conversions, thereby improving customer satisfaction.

In addition to research and implementation, this includes constant training of sales teams, including coaching techniques focused on getting the best out of each member.

A study by Demand Metric showed that 75% of companies surveyed said that sales enablement was able to contribute moderately or significantly to their sales.

In the same survey, 88% of the companies that had established sales enablement sectors, already considered it very strategic for business success. 

How important is content production to the sales process?

In some countries, there is a shortage of qualified professionals for the sales enablement area. Even in the United States, many companies don’t have enough resources to invest in the sector. And that’s another reason to consider interactive content.

With them, it’s possible to identify gaps in the sales process that could be verified by the sales enablement, even if you have not yet created a specific team.

Together, marketing and sales can develop new possibilities that have not yet been identified. With interactive content, these possibilities are endless.

According to another survey conducted by Demand Metric, 95% of the professionals interviewed ensured that they experienced benefits from the collaboration between the marketing and sales teams.

That’s why producing content that captures useful data for later analysis of the sales sector is critical, especially for those who want to have a strong and functioning sales enablement sector that improves sales processes.

Some interactive tools, such as Quick Start from Ion, already have templates that you can use quickly in Digital Marketing strategies, avoiding wasting time with programming and code development.

It’s a great option for those who don’t work with a large sales or marketing team.

How can interactive content support sales enablement?

In the previous topic, we’ve already mentioned the importance of producing content, whether static or interactive, to help sales enablement and consequently improve the sales process.

Interactive content can go deeper into this matter since one of its main features is the ability to motivate audience interaction. By observing and collecting data, it’s possible to understand them better.

To better illustrate this, let’s look at three ways of using interactive content in the sales enablement process and convert more customers.

Check it out!

1. Alignment between marketing and sales

Combining these two sectors can bring incredible benefits to a company that can unite them around a common purpose.

While marketing attracts new prospects, educates them, and makes them hot leads for sale, the sales force can provide important feedback and insights that marketing could not have — since salespeople are closer to clients.

Everything changes with the emergence of interactive content. Now, marketing also has data to discover how the customer thinks and behaves.

This might seem to become some dispute, as marketing no longer relies so much on sales feedback to create materials more suited to the persona’s wishes.

In fact, the interactive content enhances the interaction between the two sectors, which can now exchange information about the audience and create even better content.

2. Maximize the power of interactive content

The interactive content is widely used at the top of the funnel to show solutions for the leads and establish initial contact.

Despite the recommendation to avoid using “aggressive” sales techniques, not using interactive content at the bottom of the funnel, directing them to conversion, can be a mistake.

By seeking to work on lead loyalty through interactivity, marketing achieves higher conversion rates and hotter leads for sale, especially if you take into account the need sales teams may have for a specific issue.

According to a survey conducted by Sirius Decisions, 70% of the content made by marketing is not used by the sales sector. It’s as if they speak different languages or are part of different companies.

Interactive content is the solution to this problem because marketing can produce more valuable materials for sales approaches.

One example of how you can apply this is to create self-navigation experiences that allow salespeople to understand what content potential customers see as most relevant. 

In this way, it’s possible to find out what type of content is most used by them and which ones deliver real value.

Another example is this content created by Ion, which measures the maturity of the user Content Marketing strategy.

3. Less waiting for return on investment

As you can see, interactive content allows marketing to be closer to customers, without having to wait for meetings with sales teams to understand their needs and wants.

The reward comes not only to the audience, who can find better solutions but also to the company, saving time and budget when using interactive content. That way, you can expect much higher ROIs. 

Sharing interactive content with sales enablement teams allows them to have new insights based on those materials and what they might have by being in constant contact with customers.

The sales enablement department can then train sales teams to focus on the audience’s pain and desires, detected through interactive content.

Bonus: Solution Finder tool

Solution Finder is a tool that relies on the information collected to determine which product or service is best for the customer, making a recommendation.

The interactivity of Solution Finder resembles a quiz, with the differential of being more specific and providing, in the end, a clear indication of which service or product the user should use.

In fact, interactive quizzes can even be used as a Solution Finder tool, as well as calculators or assessments.

An example is the custom evaluation tool that Purchasing Power has built to identify which laptop is best for the clients.

Another good example is Lansinoh, which has created an interactive calculator that calculates how much readers can save by breastfeeding their babies instead of buying formula.

Such examples of Solution Finder are important to show one of the benefits of interactive content to sales and sales enablement teams.

How about starting to produce interactive content as part of your Digital Marketing approach? Want to know where to start? Download our Interactive Content Guide and take your strategy to the next level!