5 Keys to a Successful Sales Enablement Content Strategy

Well-timed sales content is the unsung hero of every closed deal (or culprit, if you’re looking at closed-lost deals). 

Without the right resources at their fingertips, it’s hard for even the best sales reps to close consistently. That’s why a good sales enablement content strategy can be the difference between hitting quotas and missing the mark.

But few teams have a scalable, repeatable process for creating and managing sales content that doesn’t descend into chaos. 

Reps often don’t know where to find the assets they need, and enablement teams struggle to understand what’s being used (and what’s actually effective).

This guide breaks down how to build a strategy that scales, ensures alignment between sales and marketing, and drives meaningful results. By the end, you’ll be able to tell if your team has the right enablement assets, whether sellers are able to find them quickly, and what’s impacting deals.

What is a sales enablement content strategy?

A sales enablement content strategy is a systematic approach to creating, organizing, and measuring assets that are designed to help sales teams close more deals. 

That could be by making it easier for them to demonstrate how certain features work, position your product against your competitors, explain pricing structures, and so on.

Often, this sales enablement content includes buyer enablement content, which is content that makes it easier for your prospects’ buying committees to make a purchase decision—think ROI studies, cost calculators, and diagnostic tools. (This ultimately benefits your sellers, too.)

But while content is a key part of a sales enablement strategy, it’s not the only piece—it should integrate with other important elements such as internal training, other sales enablement tools in your stack, and analytics.

💡 Sales enablement vs. marketing content: They’re similar, but target different points in the customer journey. Unlike marketing materials, which tend to be broader and aim to educate your prospects while increasing your brand’s mindshare, sales enablement content is more focused on moving prospects toward making a buying decision.

7 common sales enablement content challenges

Creating and managing sales enablement content without a strategy often leads to inefficiencies, misalignment, and missed opportunities because the lack of structure and foresight directly impacts how content is produced, organized, and used. 

Here are some common sales challenges that a well-defined sales enablement content strategy can help overcome:

1. Lack of alignment on what’s needed. When sales and marketing teams operate in silos, it leads to a disconnect between what Marketing creates and what Sales actually needs. This misalignment creates gaps in the content library and causes reps to scramble for key assets like competitor comparisons, ROI calculators, or battle cards when they need them most.

2. Sales doesn’t know which assets are available. Even when relevant content exists, sales teams may not know about them or struggle to locate them quickly. It’s also common for sales enablement systems to struggle with disorganized content repositories and poor discoverability, so useful content and materials get overlooked.

3. Ad hoc or reactive content creation. Without an enablement content strategy, content creation tends to get driven by one-off requests from Sales or urgent needs for specific deals. This reactive approach leads to inconsistency and gaps in your content library.

‍Lish Barber, Senior Director of Enablement at Sigma Computing, recommends using sales data to become more proactive:

“So many people fall into the order-taker role because they don't know how to use data, or they don't understand sales math to be more proactive with their sales partners. I want them to be aware of problems they may not have even realized they had through data, and then ask them, ‘Do we want to solve that because we think it's impactful to do so?’”

4. Outdated content. Over time, all content becomes outdated, whether that’s because of product updates, branding, or shifts in messaging. (How many old outreach email templates are floating around?) With traditional sales enablement content platforms, you essentially need a dedicated person whose main task is to keep track of and constantly cull all enablement content that’s available on your drives, company wikis, and CMS platforms—it’s a pretty big investment.

5. Messaging is off or not buyer-focused. Without a focused strategy, enablement content runs the risk of talking too much about product features rather than buyer needs, or using inconsistent messaging and failing to resonate with your target audience.

6. Difficulty in tracking impact. Which content is driving deals? Without proper analytics, it’s hard to know. This means marketing teams can’t optimize their efforts, and sellers don’t know which assets to use.

7. Scalability challenges. As your business grows, your customer segments and product offerings will also evolve. The result? Your content needs will multiply alongside them. Having a content strategy that’s built for scalability ensures your content creation and management systems can handle this growth without sacrificing quality or alignment—and will also prevent the enablement team from becoming overwhelmed by new demands.

Types of sales enablement content (and examples)

When it comes to sales enablement materials, there are two main categories of content to consider: external or client-facing content, and internal content that only your teams will see. 

Some of these content types can fall under multiple groupings (e.g., product explainer videos could be used for both prospecting and onboarding/adoption, and battle cards can be adapted to be client-facing).

Client-facing enablement content

Sales follow-up & deal nurturing

These resources will set your sellers up to have more meaningful (and successful) conversations with prospects early on in the buyer journey:

✅ Buyer enablement content (e.g., buying checklists). These resources simplify complex purchasing decisions by breaking them into actionable steps, helping buyers champion your solution within their organization. 

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✅ Product explainer videos and demos. Short, engaging videos are useful for showcasing how your product works and solves real-world problems, and can be useful for busy or small sales teams that don’t have time to run through personal demos with every prospect. 

✅ Case studies and customer testimonial videos. Real-world success stories and video testimonials (ideally featuring your prospects’ peers) build trust and provide tangible proof of your product’s impact and how it’s already making businesses successful.

✅ Datasheets, infographics, and one-pagers. These should be concise, visually engaging documents that highlight key features, benefits, and technical specifications for potential customers—and make it easy for your sales reps to address specific buyer needs. 

✅ Sales decks. Ideally, your sellers have a dynamic presentation that can be easily tailored for different buyer personas or stages in the sales funnel. 

✅ Competitor comparisons. Side-by-side comparisons should be factual, while still highlighting your product’s unique value proposition against each competitor’s unique strengths and positioning you as the better alternative.

Value demonstration

Next up: content that showcases the unique value of your solution with concrete numbers. These assets are crucial for proving the business case to buying committees and moving the deal forward. 

✅ Diagnostic tools and calculators. Interactive tools are more expensive and resource-intensive to build, but they’re very engaging and give prospective customers a hands-on way to assess their challenges and quantify the potential benefits of your solution.

✅ Pricing calculators and pricing comparison calculators. These tools help buyers understand costs, compare options, and evaluate value. If your sellers are going to be talking to CFOs, this would come in handy for them. 

✅ Research reports and whitepapers. In-depth, data-driven resources not only establish authority for your brand, they also educate buyers on industry trends and position your solution as a thought leader in the market.

✅ ROI calculators and reports. If you’re selling a high ACV product, this type of content is vital for quantifying the financial impact of your solution and supporting your buyers to justify the investment to internal stakeholders. 

Onboarding & adoption

These materials are designed to give your newly closed customers a preview of your onboarding and implementation process, so they know what to expect and will feel more confident about choosing your solution:

✅ Customer enablement (e.g., migration guides). These guides are great for easing transitions by explaining how to switch to your solution seamlessly while addressing potential buyer concerns about effort and complexity.

✅ Customer success collateral (e.g., onboarding plans). Set expectations and build confidence post-sale by outlining clear onboarding steps. This will help your buyers feel confident that they’ll have a smooth path to value realization.

✅ Security and trust information. Transparency around data security, compliance, and privacy builds trust, especially for buyers in highly regulated industries like healthcare and finance.

Internal-facing

✅ Persona documents. Detailed profiles of ICPs (ideal customer profiles) or target buyers, including details like pain points, goals, and use cases, will help sales reps tailor their approach.

✅ Product training. Resources specifically about how your product works (e.g., setup steps, basic troubleshooting) are essential for onboarding and also ongoing training to help sellers fully understand your offerings as they evolve and effectively articulate their value.

✅ Competitor battle cards, comparisons, and research. These are like quick-reference objection handling guides that equip sales reps to address prospects’ concerns and differentiate your solution from competitors in real-time.

✅ Interactive demos. Sometimes, you don’t need a super polished demo when it’s for internal use only—you just need a rough hands-on tool or sandbox that allows reps to explore the latest product functionality.

✅ Pricing sheets. Internal pricing matrices help sales reps quickly reference costs, discount structures, or tiered offerings during negotiations.

✅ Sales scripts and talk tracks. Predefined conversation starters and frameworks based on your sales methodology are helpful for sellers. Even if they don’t have to strictly follow them, they’ll know they have something to fall back on if they ever stumble or get lost in a sales conversation.

✅ Messaging docs. Similar to internal sales playbooks, messaging docs provide consistent, buyer-focused messaging for sales reps to use across channels, and ensure they’re aligned with other teams like Marketing and Product. “Our roadmaps overlap,” says Barber. “Product marketing might have a launch. RevOps might have a process update. Sales enablement has to connect all of those pieces to make sure the field is getting what they need to be successful.”

✅ FAQs. FAQs aren’t just for customer support team members. A centralized repository of answers to common buyer questions also ensures your salespeople can find answers to a variety of questions quickly.

✅ Other internal documents that you don’t want to be client-facing such as screenshots, messages, and lists of customers that moved from a competitor to you.

💡 Dock tip: For more examples of sales enablement content from some of today’s top companies, check out Dock’s Revenue Archives gallery.

Elements of a sales enablement content strategy

No matter what industry you’re in, a good sales enablement content strategy almost always includes the same core elements:

1. Research

The foundation of any content strategy is research. Before creating anything, you need to understand the challenges faced by both your sales team and your buyers. 

The key here is to make sure your efforts are continuous, ongoing, and organic. It’s much easier to continuously have your thumb on the pulse vs. doing big one-off efforts.

Research tactics to consider

• Sales team conversations: A good habit to start building is scheduling recurring (once a quarter, or at the very least, once a year) discovery meetings with your sellers to uncover gaps in the content library and identify commonly encountered objections or deal blockers that could be better supported with content.
• Customer Success feedback: Customer Success teams often have valuable insight into information that buyers needed during the sales process but didn’t receive. If your follow-up process needs a bit of help, make sure to speak with your CS team.
• Customer calls and Gong recordings: Analyze your sales calls to identify recurring questions, objections, and areas where buyers are looking for more details or clarity. There are many sales AI tools that can even summarize and pull out key themes and highlights from these conversations to help save time.
• Slack and internal messaging conversations: Review your Slack channels or other internal messaging platforms for recurring themes or questions from both marketing and sales team members. These informal discussions are often a goldmine of information about content gaps, pain points, or areas where sellers need better support.

2. Content audit

Most of the time, when sellers ask for content, those pieces already exist—they’re just not very discoverable. But an accessibility problem is not the same as a lack of content (which we’ll talk about in just a bit). 

So, before diving into new asset creation, take stock of your existing content to ensure you’re not reinventing the wheel or overlooking any major areas.

There are countless ways to do an audit, but here are a few options to consider. You could audit content by:

• Content types or formats. Examine sales enablement assets by format type, such as case studies, sales decks, ROI calculators, and competitor comparisons.
• Audience. Ensure you have tailored content for different customer segments, industries, or personas.
• Product and services. Evaluate whether you have content that adequately supports each of your offerings. (This includes everything from one-pagers for core products to in-depth guides for specialized services.)
• Objections. Align content with common objections raised during the sales process, which helps sellers find what they need to address challenges more quickly.

You might want to create a few different matrices to map your content to key variables, such as customer personas, objections, or stages of the buyer journey. 

For example, you could have a matrix showing which assets align with early-stage vs. late-stage buyers.

3. Content creation

Once you understand what’s needed, you can begin creating net-new content—but this step requires careful planning to avoid your team becoming an on-demand content service or “order-takers,” as Barber mentioned earlier.

Again, there’s sales enablement content and buyer enablement content, which have slightly different objectives: 

• Sales enablement content helps reps sell. Examples: sales decks, pricing calculators, and competitor comparisons
• Buyer enablement content makes it easier for buyers to advocate for your solution internally. Examples: buying checklists, ROI calculators, and research reports

💡 Dock tip: Avoid churning out content for short-term needs. Instead, prioritize scalable assets that address recurring challenges or long-term goals.

4. Content management

An unorganized content repository is one of the biggest barriers to effective sales enablement. If sales reps can’t find what they need, even the best content will go unused. 

According to Forrester, about 65% of marketing assets go unused because they are irrelevant.

Here are a few best practices to keep in mind to keep your sales enablement content organized, top of mind for sellers, and easily accessible:

• Use a content management system: Make sure all your sales enablement content is stored and organized in one place. While you could use a company wiki or file-sharing platform like Google Drive, this can quickly become unwieldy as your business grows and you start amassing more content.
• Rethink your content delivery methods: Instead of making your sales team dig through and manually search a huge convoluted repository of assets, why not consider allowing them to create digital sales rooms? This way, they can quickly spin up online hubs with tailored mutual action plans, content, contact details, and more for each client—in just a few clicks using pre-built templates:

• Have a version control system: Ideally, your solution will have some way to ensure outdated materials are automatically archived or replaced with updated versions to avoid confusion. This is one of the main disadvantages of most sales enablement platforms like Showpad or Seismic—even though they’re more advanced than having all your content on Google Drive, they generally have a more old-school folder structure, which makes it harder to find things efficiently.
• Always, always tag and categorize content: Use clear tags and categories to make it easy for sellers to search and filter content by topic, audience, or sales stage.

Fun fact: Dock is designed to address all of these best practices. Its intuitive platform makes it easy to replace old assets universally and its digital sales rooms significantly streamline delivery by letting reps create tailored content hubs in minutes:

5. Measuring content success

To continuously improve your strategy, you need to know what works—and what doesn’t. Dock offers built-in content analytics, enabling you to track engagement and link content performance to sales outcomes:

From a content perspective, you might want to measure KPIs like:

• Content usage: How often is a piece of content accessed by the sales team? At what stage are they using this content most frequently?
• Buyer engagement: Are prospects interacting with the content? (For example, time spent on a research report or a pricing calculator.)
• Deal impact: Which assets contribute to closing deals or shortening the sales cycle?

But beyond content metrics, it’s also worth measuring other performance-related metrics such as sales cycle length and first meeting conversion or win rate. 

Dock other enablement tools like mutual action plans that show buyers clear next steps and remove friction in the deal process, which support reps in hitting these adjacent sales metrics:

Organize your sales enablement content in Dock

A strong sales enablement content strategy is about more than just creating assets—it’s about creating a holistic system that takes into account cross-functional alignment, sales content management, and continuous optimization.

How Dock can help

Dock simplifies sales enablement content management and amplifies your content’s impact by providing:

• A centralized workspace that lets your sales enablement team store, organize, and share sales and buyer-facing content in customizable, easy-to-navigate hubs.
• Content analytics that track engagement metrics like views, time spent, and interactions to measure what content drives results.
• Streamlined collaboration hubs to ensure sales, marketing, and customer success teams stay aligned with a single source of truth for all their resources.
• Dynamic updates that keep content fresh with version control and real-time updates, so reps don’t have to sort through outdated materials and inaccurate information.

Ready to transform your sales enablement strategy? Discover how Dock can help your sales team stay organized, measure success, and scale with ease.

Ready to get started? Try Dock for free.