B2B Sales Toolkits: need to have vs nice to have
/Since I started my career in sales, I am one of the first marketers to lean in when a sales manager says they need a sales toolkit for a new launch or a new market or a new company. But, having worked with SO many companies, and sales managers, they all have ideas about what a sales toolkit should include. After my decade’s worth of experience and watching what’s worked and what is important there’s a couple of things to do before you just run and build a toolkit.
Figure out who the market is: Ask questions or know if this is for a direct sales team or a channel team, who is their audience, what do they care about, etc. You can read more about how to get to these answers faster in this blog post. You need to know if this product is being sold to existing customers or new customers, which will affect what kind of tools you need your sales team to have.
Figure out what they think a toolkit is: This is where we talk about the “medium” you will use. Do they want a bunch of 1 page PDF’s, or videos, or white papers? If people want videos and they receive white papers, you are never going to get them to use the toolkit. I’ve found that varying mediums actually makes them accessible to everyone.
Pick 4: Don’t try to boil the ocean and build ALL the pieces of a toolkit. Pick 4 pieces, vary the mediums and message and let your teams start to use them. If you do what I mentioned in my “how to get your sales enablement content used” post then you’ll be able to figure out what’s working and not.
After you’ve done all the things above, here is a sales toolkit framework that I’ve been using for about 4 years and with just some minor tweaks it seems to work.
Anything in here that I am missing that you think are must-haves versus nice-to-haves?
