7 Excellent Sales Collateral Tips That Can Help Your Startup Grow

When you have a growing startup, sales collateral is something you can’t neglect when trying to close more business.

In today’s competitive market, you must take various approaches to ensure you have an edge over your competitors.

Hence, sales collateral enables you to create content and resources that connect your prospects with your brand and help speed up the sales process.

What is Sales Collateral?

Sales collateral comes in various forms, and below, I have listed down types that businesses can use to inform their customers:

• Brochures
• White papers
• Blogs and landing pages
• Infographics
• Product sheets
• Educational & explainer videos

As we learn how sales collateral can help your prospects through the sales pipeline and convert them into customers, we also need to know how to utilize it to its optimal level.

So, let’s first glance at the benefits of sales collateral and how it can help you take your startup to the next level.

Benefits of Sales Collateral

Seventy-eight percent of executive buyers have mentioned that salespeople don’t have relevant information to share with them.

This creates a distance between a company and its potential customers.

Fortunately, sales collateral has more benefits than just closing deals faster; the abovementioned points are why sales collateral is a must for every business.

• Increase brand visibility: Let’s face it, there’s no business without competition. You can only stay ahead in the game when your brand reaches more and more people. Powerful content is sufficient to build a brand image that makes you stand out.
• Educate your customers: You will only gain customers when they’re well acquainted with your company and its offers. Sales collateral enables you to educate your customers and provide useful information to help them make informed decisions.
• Increase salespeople's productivity: Salespeople have a lot on their plates. With sales collateral, they can forward the resources to the prospects to save time and increase productivity. This helps them focus more on prospecting and closing deals faster. Ready to drive sales excellence? Explore our guide on sales productivity tools for actionable tips and tricks.
• Making informed decisions: A business can only retain customers when they’re well-informed about every aspect of the company. With informational content and regular updates, you can inform your customers of upcoming offers and events to encourage participation.
• Stay connected at every touchpoint: Most customers need more than one touchpoint to purchase. This approach lets you stay connected with them at every touchpoint to ensure the sales process runs smoothly.

Well, sales collateral doesn’t seem negligible now.

Now that you know why leveraging sales collateral is imperative, we’ve compiled a list of the best tips to help your startup grow.

Essential Sales Collateral Tips for Growing Your Startup Business

Find out what the customer wants and then make it better.

Ain’t that the truth!

Every company’s efforts go into enhancing the customer journey and gaining clients for life.

This also includes delivering a little extra beyond what the customer expects from you. Hence, when you use sales collateral, you also need to optimize it for better outreach.

To deliver the best customer experience, follow these excellent sales collateral tips and never worry about growth!

1. Create Brand Awareness

When implementing sales collateral in your business, you must first work to create brand visibility with unique content and constant engagement.

Sales collateral is useful in every step of your sales cycle. You can create engaging content to share on your website and various other social media platforms to capture more prospects.

Have an event lined up? Then, images and banners will be created to attract a larger audience and convert them into customers. Likewise, you can also create videos using a video editing app that provides information and captures the prospects’ interest.

Take the example of FreshBooks - one of the most used accounting software in the startup world.

The brand published an explainer video showing what FreshBooks is to its prospects:

The video excellently shows what the tool can do for them, the features they can use, and the value it can provide in just under 2 minutes.

400K views are nothing to sneeze at.

2. Utilize Sales Collateral Templates

Not every customer is the same. Therefore, your strategy should also be different for each customer segment.

You can segment the customers based on their behavior and preferences to create sales collateral that resonates with them.

Moreover, to save time, you can create various sales collateral templates to personalize every interaction.

Multiple templates make you more likely to cater to your prospects’ needs by delivering personalized content.

You can create multiple videos for different audiences in addition to textual content. The best approach is to create a separate video for every industry you serve.

I understand you may have to invest much time and money in video creation. But video is the easiest way to consume content these days, and brands are not missing out on this opportunity. Besides, there are many affordable video editing options available in the market.

When you jump into the whole video game, pay extra attention to the quality of the video. Never compromise on the casting, script, audio dubbing, time limit, and overall video messaging.

I would advise jumping into the video segment when you are fully ready because compromising on any technical factor will damage rather than help your brand.

3. Create Contextual Sales Collateral

Does it get irritating when you receive an email or message out of the blue without any context? Well, that’s the reason why you need to create contextual sales collateral that provides value.

Therefore, you must inform your prospects of the content you’re sharing with them and how it can benefit them.

Having contextual sales collateral improves engagement and helps build long-term customer relationships.

4. Stay True to Your Brand

Whatever approach you take, always ensure that your sales collateral is connected to your brand and reflects its true value.

Is your company’s demographic, young people and millennials? If so, your focus should be on creating infographics, images, and videos that relate to them using social media platforms.

If you are targeting B2B, you can create an informational guide, ebook, or case study to add value to your proposition.

Your company’s value should be reflected in the sales collateral, so ensure you create resources that are closely connected to the brand.

5. Help in Decision-Making

Your website also plays a vital role in making or breaking a deal.

An easy-to-access website with relevant information is more likely to be preferred by visitors than a complex website.

Landing pages are an example of effective sales collateral; they bifurcate the product/service categories and deliver exactly what a customer wants.

For instance, take a look at what Close has done.

They have created separate landing pages for SaaS, Financial Services, Insurance, Real Estate, and other segments so that every prospect can relate to them.

6. Make Sales with CTAs

When you approach a prospect with any content, your motive for selling should be clear.

In marketing, precision and straightforwardness go a long way. So, add visible CTAs in your blog, email, or any landing page.

Your goal is to eventually convert prospects into customers, right? With CTA buttons, you can direct them to purchase the product/service directly from the content.

7. Use it for Promotion

Even when you’re not selling new products, you can use sales collateral to promote your upcoming offers and discounts to your existing clients to upsell or cross-sell.

If you have an upcoming product launch, you can create brochures and social media graphics to promote it and capture the attention of your customers and prospects.

Accelerate Your Startup's Growth with Strategic Sales Collateral Implementation

A small business tackles many challenges, including client, deal management, and marketing.

Sales collateral simplifies these challenges and enables you to build a solid brand image and make lasting connections with every prospect.

So, implement these simple tips when using sales collateral and witness how useful these resources can be.