How to generate 20 buyer enablement ideas in 20 minutes
When I speak with clients, a common challenge is coming up with ideas that are truly ‘buyer enablement’, and not sales enablement dressed up with another name.
To be a true buyer enablement tool, what you create must help that persona with a task or job that they have to do anyway, whether you and your company exist or not.
If it leads back to your unique differentiators and a future sales opportunity - that is icing on the cake but not the primary goal.
Get very specific about your target persona
With this first template get your team in a room (ideally in person with a whiteboard and sticky notes) or if not possible, get them around a screen with Canva, Miro or Lucid or any other whiteboarding tool.
Get very specific on the persona you want to target. The more specific you are the better the tool you will create.
In this example let’s assume you have a call recording and analytics product that you sell into sales teams and the VP of Sales is your target persona.
But let’s drill in further, we are looking at a VP of Sales, who’s in their first 90 days, at a Series B SaaS company, with $15m of ARR and grand targets as they head towards $100m ARR.
Consider the tasks they need to complete in their first 90 days to be successful in their role
As a team, step into the mind of this VP Sales - what are they working on in those first 90 days?
Customer focus - they will want to get in front of as many customers and truly understand the business problems they faced and how the product is solving them. Who is the ICP and which buyer personas are involved?
Sales strategy - they’ll want to start building their sales strategy, based around what they learned from the customers and aligning with their marketing and customer success peers. They’ll populate a 30-60-90 day plan to share their progress with others.
Leadership - they’ll want to build out their financial plan, understanding the metrics for their team, understanding compensation and performance and developing a sales budget and align this with the CEO or CRO’s executive plan.
Team building - they’ll want to develop a hiring plan, and figuring out how to inspire and enable their direct reports. They’ll craft job descriptions and reach out to their network to entice ex-colleagues to follow them.
Transparency - they’ll want to ensure they and their team have full visibility of what is happening developing a clear vision, quarterly objectives, supported by the right dashboards to track progress.
These are just some ideas that help you get into the mind of this person as they ramp in their new role.
As you stick them up, you’ll notice that most of them will naturally fit in the “Problem Identification” phase of their buying process.
Most tasks will fit into the problem identification phase
At this point in this persona’s role - they are absolutely not building requirements for new tools, or assessing the ROI of your solution - so focus on the tasks they are doing at the very front of a process.
Having put as many tasks on the board as you can fit - use some sticky dots to prioritise your top four or five tasks - the ‘must do’ tasks that will this VP Sales needs to complete.
Craft ideas that support this persona in that task
Now switch to a second whiteboard and come up with ideas for tools and assets that could support this VP Sales with the jobs-to-be-done you identified.
Think about calculators, diagnostics, checklists, templates, guides.
The kind of thing that is interactive and can help this VP Sales with their own tasks - not just an ebook guide.
If you were this VP Sales - what would help you to achieve the tasks that you need to complete anyway?
You should quickly come up with a list of useful tools. Notice that an ROI calculator for buying your product is very unlikely to be on the list - it just does not help this person do what they need to do right now.
Build your buyer enablement tools - but keep it simple
Now you can imagine how easily you could create these tools. They don’t need to be overly snazzy and baked into your website - they just need to be useful for the person you have in mind.
Check out this very simple 30-60-90 day plan template I provide for a VP of Sales.
Super simple but gives them an idea of the topics they should be thinking about, and how they might consider measuring their progress over the first 90 days.
Build a pipeline of buyer enablement tools
This is not a ‘one and done’ process. You should think about continually delivering new tools, to address new personas, at each step of their journey.
You want your buyer enablement page or resources section of the website to be ‘bookmarkable’ - so good that people keep coming back to it, they keep using it, and they keep recommending it.
If you need help coming up with ideas, or building and managing your buyer enablement tools, then I help CROs and founders with exactly this.
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Whenever you are ready, there are three ways that I can help you accelerate your revenue.
Buyer Enablement Assessment - Answer nine questions in five minutes and receive your free personalised report to help you SDRs and AEs generate pipeline.
Revenue 360 Assessments - inspire and lead your revenue teams with revenue specific 360 reports designed for marketing, sales and customer success teams.
Buyer Enablement Platform - We’ll design, build and manage your buyer enablement platform on your behalf - generating quality pipeline in under 90 days.