January 28, 2025

How to Create Better Sales Documents in 2025

Admin Author on January 28, 2025

Every professional requires certain tools to excel in their role. Sales reps are certainly no expectation.

Sales documents are a key component of any successful seller’s toolbox. In fact, with the right sales content, sellers can engage any qualified prospect – no matter where they may be on the purchase journey.

But creating great sales documents is only the first step. Organizations must also ensure their sellers can easily sales content that’ll resonate with the prospect and compel them to take the next step in the purchase journey.

In this post, we’ll discuss sales documents and why they’re a powerful tool for engaging buyers and moving them through the sales funnel. We’ll also share proven best practices for creating effective sales documents and developing a sales content management strategy that ensures your sellers can find the content they need whenever and wherever they need it.

What are sales documents?

Let’s lay the foundation by exploring sales documents and why they are such an important tool for revenue organizations.

Sales documents: a definition

Sales documents are written materials used by B2B sellers to support the sales process. They convey information to B2B buyers and help guide them through the purchase journey.

They are often referred to by other names, including:

Sales collateral
Sales assets
Sales content

Sales documents can take many different forms. Sometimes, they are printed materials. But increasingly, organizations are leveraging digital sales documents. We’ll take a closer look at some common types later on.

The importance of sales documents

Now, we’re clear on what they are. But why are they so important?

Buyers and sellers alike depend on sales content throughout the purchase journey. In fact, research tells us more than half of B2B buyers rely on content more now than in the past.

When buyers share the right documents with the right prospects at the right time, they can:

Build trust

When a seller shares a relevant sales document, they show the buyer they truly understand their needs. This increases trust – and the prospect’s likelihood of making a purchase. After all, 86% of B2B buyers are more likely to purchase if a company understands their goals.

Convey relevant information

Buyers need the right information to make informed purchase decisions. With sales documents, sellers can share the right information at the right time.

Overcome objections

Most buyers will raise at least some objections throughout the purchase journey. With the right sales documents, sellers can overcome these objections – and move buyers closer to a purchase.

Convey value

Buyers only want to invest in solutions that’ll deliver ROI. With the right sales content, sellers can help buyers understand the value of their solution.

Deliver consistent experiences

Modern buyers expect consistent experiences, no matter who they interact with at your company. Documents enable organizations to deliver consistent, on-brand experiences – no matter which sales rep a prospect is working with.

In short, when sellers have a robust library of sales process documents (and can easily surface the right asset at the right time), they can increase engagement and conversion rates and accelerate sales cycles.

Common types of sales documents

Sales documents can take many different forms. It’s important to ensure your sellers have the right types of sales content to engage buyers at different stages of the sales cycle.

Some common types include:

#1 Case studies

These tell the story of a customer who has used your solution to overcome their challenges and meet their goals. Case studies must be relevant to be effective. For example, you might share a case study with a prospect that conveys how a business in the same industry or similar size used your solution to overcome its pain points.

#2 Sales battle cards

According to recent research, 57% of deals are competitive. That number is even higher for certain industries.

Sellers should expect buyers to bring up competitive objections – and be ready to address them.

Sales battle cards are a type of sales document that conveys how your solution compares to one or more competitors. Some are for internal use only, while others are meant to be shared with prospective customers.

#3 Sales presentations

These are documents you use to present your solution to prospective customers. Sales presentations should be tailored to each prospect’s needs.

#4 Pricing sales documentation

Pricing documents convey how much a customer can expect to pay for your solution. This information lets them decide if your solution is within budget.

Typically, pricing documents aren’t one-size-fits-all. This is especially true for businesses selling to enterprise customers. Instead, these documents should be customized to the needs of each prospect.

#5 Sales playbooks

A sales playbook is a type of sales documentation that outlines the strategies, processes, and best practices used at your organization. Research shows that sellers who use sales playbooks are much more likely to meet their sales goals than those who don’t.

Sales playbooks are an example of a sales document intended for internal use only. In other words, they are not meant to be shared with customers.

Enablement and sales documents: What’s the connection?

The right documents can help sellers engage buyers and move them through the funnel faster. But creating a library of sales documentation is only the first step.

Sellers must also be able to quickly find the right content for the right situation. Otherwise, they’ll spend too much time searching for sales content – or even creating their own.

Proper sales content management – which is one of the pillars of a holistic sales enablement strategy – helps ensure sellers can always find the documents they need, when they need them.

A sales enablement platform provides sellers with a single source of truth for all documents. Rather than searching through disparate repositories, sellers can find all approved, up-to-date documents in one central location.

Ideally, a sales enablement platform should have robust organization and search features so sellers can easily find what they need. Innovative platforms also leverage AI to recommend content based on data like buyer engagement and sales cycle stage. Then, sellers can personalize this content for each seller.

Of course, not all documents will have the same engagement and impact. Measuring each sales document’s impact is a key part of any sales enablement strategy. Then, you can focus on creating more content that works.

Best practices for creating sales documents

Not all documents are the same. While some will resonate with prospects and propel them to action, others will fall flat.

By adopting proven best practices (as well as a winning content governance strategy), you can start creating more impactful documents that’ll resonate with buyers throughout the purchase journey – and convert more of them to customers.

#1 Develop buyer personas

It’s important to develop documents that’ll resonate with your prospective buyers. But first, you have to understand who these prospective buyers are.

If you haven’t already, develop buyer personas, fictitious representations of the people your sellers interact with. You buyer personas should include details like:

Job title
Geographic location
Company size
Industry
Job responsibilities
Pain points

Your buyer personas should be rooted in data. For example, dig into your data to see what types of people your sellers are engaging with – and which are the ones who are converting to customers. Your sellers will also have unique insight that can help shape your buyer personas.

#2 Map the buyer journey

Sellers need sales content they can use with buyers throughout every stage of the purchase journey. As such, it’s important to determine what the purchase journey looks like.

Be sure to map your customer journey. In other words, outline what paths your prospects are taking to become customers. Your buyer journey should include every phase, from initial contact to signing the contract – and even beyond.

#3 Audit existing sales documents

Once you’ve mapped the buyer journey, it’s time to take stock of your existing documents.

Take a complete inventory of your documents. Then, map each piece of sales content to the buyer journey.

This exercise will help you identify gaps in your documents. For example, you may notice that sellers have few to no high-quality sales documents to use at a certain stage of the customer journey.

#4 Vary the format of your sales documents

When you hear “sales documents,” you might first think of assets like PowerPoint presentations and static PDFs. These types of assets certainly have a place in your content library. But consider incorporating different formats in your sales content library, too.

For example, consider incorporating videos. Or, use interactive formats, like an ROI calculator. Prospects can input their information and get a tailored report on the ROI they can expect from your solution. As a bonus, this data can be used to personalize future outreach and documents.

#5 Empower sellers to personalize sales documents

Recent research shows that two-thirds of B2B buyers expect fully or mostly personalized content when researching and exploring a company’s products and services. Generic documents simply won’t do.

Empowering your sellers to personalize documents to fit the buyer’s needs is important. With the right sales enablement tool, your sellers can personalize sales content – while maintaining consistent, on-brand experiences.

#6 Store sales documents in a single system of record

All too often, organizations store documents in multiple tools or locations. That means sellers have to spend time finding the right assets, and they’re never quite sure if they’re using the most up-to-date versions.

Instead, consolidate all sales documents into a single sales content management tool. That way, your sellers have a central hub for finding all the documents they need. If the sales content management tool uses AI, your sellers can even get data-based recommendations on what content to use for specific sales scenarios.

Rather than using a stand-alone sales content management tool, consider investing in an integrated sales enablement platform that has robust sales content management capabilities. That way, your sellers can find all sales enablement resources in one spot, without spending time switching between tools. In addition, you can create, manage, and measure your documents alongside your other sales enablement programs.

#7 Measure sales document effectiveness and refresh accordingly

A recent analysis found that the top 10% of revenue organizations update their sales content at least once every 3.25 months. This ongoing refreshment is worth the effort, as it’s correlated with greater engagement.

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It’s important to ensure your sales content is refreshed regularly to reflect changes in your business. For example, you must refresh your documents when you release new product features or update your pricing model.

In addition, be sure you’re regularly measuring sales document engagement and impact. You can use these insights to optimize your sales document library. For example, you may decide to rework the format of a sales document with a high engagement level but low impact. You may also decide to eliminate certain documents that have never been used by sellers completely.

Mindtickle equips your sellers with the right sales documents to engage buyers and close deals

Sales content is a key piece of the B2B purchase journey. When sellers share the right documents at the right time, they can accelerate sales cycles and increase conversion rates.

But all too often, sellers spend too much time searching for documents. Sometimes, they even take matters into their own hands and create their own unapproved documents.

With Mindtickle’s integrated revenue enablement platform, your sellers can spend less time searching for documents – and more time engaging with buyers.

With Mindtickle, sellers can quickly discover, personalize, and share sales documents that’ll resonate with any buyer – no matter where they are in the purchase journey. In addition to rich search features, Mindtickle also leverages AI to deliver data-based content recommendations.

Updating content is necessary and boosts engagement. With Mindtickle, enablement professionals can make real-time updates to sales documents. That means sellers always know they’re finding and using the latest, approved assets.

Mindtickle also delivers robust data and analytics that can help you improve sales outcomes. Sellers can get insight into how (and if) buyers engage with sales documents, which they can use to tailor their approach moving forward. Sales and enablement leaders can unlock insights into how buyers and sellers engage with different sales documents. They can use these insights to invest more in the most impactful content types.

Your sellers have only so many hours in the day. They shouldn’t waste them hunting down the right sales documents.

Sales Content Management in Mindtickle

Ready to see why leading B2B sales teams depend on Mindtickle to ensure sellers can always find and share the right sales content for any scenario?

Request Your Demo

4 Objectives of Effective Sales Coaching

Admin Author on January 28, 2025

The B2B purchase journey has evolved a lot. Today, many B2B buyers complete a large portion of it without the involvement of a sales rep. In fact, some prefer not to interact with sellers at all.

When sellers do have the opportunity to engage with a buyer, the pressure is on to make a great impression. With effective sales coaching, sellers are ready to make every interaction count.

But let’s face it: not all sales coaching is effective. What sets great coaching apart from the rest?

In this post, we’ll dive into the objectives of great sales coaching as well as some of the common pitfalls that hinder success. That way, you can start overcoming these challenges and build an effective sales coaching program that drives real improvements to reps’ behaviors and performance.

What is sales coaching?

Sales coaching is the ongoing, one-on-one mentorship of each rep on a sales team. It is a conversation between the rep and a coach, where the rep does most of the talking while the coach listens, observes, and offers feedback.

Coaching differs from onboarding, where new information is presented to many reps simultaneously. It’s also unique from sales training, which can happen in many different forms, including virtual training and micro-learning.

Here are a few characteristics of coaching that make it different from training:

Ongoing

While a training event provides a baseline education or a foundation, coaching builds on this foundation with continual sessions. Many successful sales organizations make coaching a weekly practice, and some even establish daily coaching routines.

Individualized

Unlike a training session that involves the whole sales team, each coaching session is tailored to the needs of an individual rep. The coach knows the rep, as well as their strengths, challenges, and areas needing improvement.

Focused on behavior

While training is designed to impart new information about products, customers, strategies, competitors, etc., coaching is behavior-based. It corrects a rep’s unfavorable behaviors and habits while reinforcing effective ones. In fact, quota attainment increases by 7% when coaches focus on sales rep behavior.

Why does effective sales coaching matter?

Having a strong coaching relationship is important to gaining employee trust and working together to develop sales skills. But the secret sauce to coaching is making sure to build a program and approach where reps are coached the right way.

Apart from building an environment where growth is supported, sales coaching can also:

Optimize sales training information and skills to be incorporated into day-to-day practices.
Show sales reps you care about their personal development and growth in their role.
Create personalized KPIs and development plans that are tracked with employees.
Share, in a safe environment, valuable feedback for improvement.
Teach sales reps to leverage sales enablement tools to track and monitor their skill development progress.

The 4 key objectives of sales coaching

Often, sales coaching is focused on open deals. Deal coaching is important, as it can improve the outcome of the specific opportunity. But on its own, it’s not an effective way to change a rep’s long-term behaviors; it’s not enough. The best sales managers prioritize delivering a mix of opportunity, skills, and targeted coaching to truly drive results.

Here’s how to build a coaching approach that focuses on developing long-term skills rather than just focusing on short-term deal remediation.

1. Ensure reps refine and improve their sales skills

Most sales reps forget 70% of their sales training, with 87% forgetting that 70% within the first month of training. Sales coaching helps with this by reinforcing training concepts and applying them to each rep’s unique needs.

Coaching starts with analytics that pinpoint each rep’s strengths and weaknesses. The sales coach might target foundational behaviors and best practices like empathetic listening and objection handling for new hires. Over time, the coach’s focus might transition to sales negotiation skills and effectively presenting value.

As the rep’s career progresses, they’ll flourish into a highly skilled advisor that buyers depend on and trust.

2. Build confidence and encourage skill development

Many sales leaders incorrectly assume that coaching creates discouragement and a lack of confidence. Such leaders often come from organizations that only coach their reps after they’ve lost a deal. In that circumstance, coaching is viewed as a negative, as it is often read as a type of punishment.

Proper coaching, however, is an integral part of every sales rep’s daily or weekly routine. Effective coaches build confidence by praising their reps’ daily wins, along with helping them overcome their weaknesses.

3. Provide consistent practices and expectations across the sales team

It’s common for sales organizations to lack standard best practices for their teams to anchor themselves to. Without a standard set of guidelines and repeatable steps to take, it’s almost impossible to help reps correct their courses of action.

Successful sales organizations use onboarding sessions to teach reps about the organization’s best practices, and they reinforce these standards with coaching. These one-on-one sessions are a great opportunity to identify and correct behavior that doesn’t fit with the organization’s vision or standard process.

4. Increase revenue

Organizations that provide effective sales coaching greatly impact the metrics that matter most, including conversion rates, quota attainment, and revenue growth. That’s why sales leaders need to resist the temptation to “be the hero” and take the reins of a lagging deal to score the big win. By taking over, sales leaders deprive their teams of the ability to refine their skills and improve.

Sales organizations that establish coaches rather than “heroes” can turn every member of their salesforce into competent deal closers. Having 100 highly skilled closers is more profitable than a handful of heroes.

The challenges of sales coaching

Recent research found that nine in 10 (91%) of managers feel coaching positively impacts their team’s performance. Yet, many struggle to find the time and support to implement an effective coaching program.

Here are the four most common challenges in sales coaching:

Some sales reps don’t feel they need sales coaching

Many reps want training and coaching because they understand it boosts their career development. Others, particularly those who consistently hit their sales quota, are hesitant.

Reluctance to sales coaching can be solved by instituting a culture of coaching in which everyone—including the coaches themselves—is mentored and coached.

Sales coaches and managers can lead by example by continuing to receive coaching and working to develop their skills. It’s good practice to balance formal and informal coaching, as this will let your sales reps know they’re not being graded and evaluated but can use the coaching session as a tool for improvement. It’s especially important early in the sales coaching process — when reps are hesitant — to reinforce a culture of continuous improvement.

Leaders are unsure how to measure success

Many sales leaders want to make a business case for establishing a coaching process at their organization, but they have no idea how to measure success or ROI. Fortunately, the right sales coaching platform provides all the analytics and metrics needed for this

With the right sales enablement tool, you can set goals for the entire team and individual reps.

When you understand an individual rep’s strengths and weaknesses, you can set performance goals and coach toward these. Whether it’s contract value, win rate, time to productivity, or another sales KPI, you can track the individual’s performance on a given metric over time to evaluate the effectiveness of your coaching.

Teams don’t want to put forth the time and resources required

Time and resources are common challenges for organizations looking to expand their sales coaching. It takes time for both the sales rep to be coached and the leader to do the coaching. It may involve implementing and learning new technology, adjusting schedules, and changing the department’s culture.

This investment seems daunting, but the long-term value far outweighs the initial investment of time and effort.

It’s a good idea to include a sales enablement platform that empowers sales reps and coaches with insights, centralized content, and courses to help save time and track improvement. This platform will give sales reps insights into their improvement and encourage continuous development.

Lack of understanding of what makes a strong sales coaching program

What makes a good sales rep often differs from what makes a good sales coach. Unfortunately, many organizations promote high-performing reps without investing in training and ongoing development for the sales coach in their new role.

Implement coach training in your organization to create an effective coaching plan. Have coaches complete their training before they begin coaching salespeople. Use one-on-one mentoring, virtual training, and other tools to ensure your coaches are well-equipped to develop sales skills in other reps.

The above challenges are temporary ones, and they are usually resolved as the coaching system progresses. Once all reps see the career advantages of coaching and top leadership understands the competitive benefits, you can encourage the entire department to embrace continuous development.

4 tips for measuring sales coaching effectiveness

Measuring the impact of sales coaching is important to help understand the ROI of time and other resources invested in coaching sales reps.

However, calculating sales coaching impact is a bit more tricky.

But don’t worry — we have four simple tips to help you measure your sales coaching effectiveness.

1. Keep track of sales performance

Many companies look at the performance of the overall team to gauge the success of sales coaching. This will help you understand how behavioral change and skill development translate to higher win rates and improved performance.

To measure the impact of sales coaching, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on the following sales metrics:

Sales cycle length
Quota attainment
Conversion by deal stage
Average revenue generation

Track the skills developed through coaching sessions to see their influence on quota attainment. This will help you understand where your training has been the most useful and what skills need more improvement.

2. Assess sales reps’ skill development

With sales coaching, the goal is to identify weak sales traits and skills and then support sellers to grow their skills and knowledge.

Part of calculating the impact of sales coaching is to see how learned skills pass from theory into practice. You’ll want to ensure sales reps use their new skills in all their interactions and note the impact it has on closing rates.

Keep an eye on the following measurements to calculate the impact sales coaching has on sales reps’ skills:

Number of sales skills improved
Behavioral changes around selling approaches
Amount of new skills learned

You can use skill tests and quizzes to measure skill improvement. And sales enablement platforms can help automatically keep track of interactions and score each seller on their skill level.

3. Create anonymous surveys and feedback polls

Employee turnover is expensive. However, sales coaching and training can increase employee engagement and improve employee experience.

Keep track of employee engagement through surveys and polls to understand the correlation between sales coaching and employee engagement.

Some good indicators to keep an eye on are:

Average employee engagement scores
Average employee turnover
Average employee satisfaction

Sales coaches also hear sales reps’ concerns and worries at the front line. This puts them in a position to proactively improve their employee experience and develop solutions with the reps being coached.

This not only helps with sales rep engagement, but it also empowers employees to succeed in their roles and improves company profitability.

Benefits of effective sales coaching

Chances are, you have several competing priorities vying for your resources and attention. So why should you prioritize effective sales coaching?

Because sales coaching – when it’s done well – delivers significant benefits. Here are just a few.

Skill improvement

Each sales rep needs to master certain skills and behaviors to be successful in their roles. Sales training plays a role, but it’s not enough. After all, many sellers forgot the information they learned in training.

Sales coaching helps reinforce skills and behaviors learned during sales training. It’s also a way for sales managers to provide support that’s focused on reps’ weaker skills.

Faster ramp time

Ideally, you want your new sellers to be up and running as quickly as possible. When you provide new sellers with effective coaching, they can more quickly master the skills they need for success. That means your new hires will be ready to hit the ground running (and close more deals) – faster.

Better sales performance

When sales reps are properly coached, they’re better prepared for success. They’ll start closing more deals, faster, and your revenue will grow.

Higher rep retention

A lot of time and resources go into hiring new sales reps and getting them ready to sell. When you have a high rep turnover rate, it can seem like that effort goes right down the drain.

By providing effective sales coaching, your sales reps will feel supported in their roles. This will increase their satisfaction — and their likelihood of staying with your company long-term.

Better customer experiences

Modern B2B buyers have come to expect outstanding experiences, no matter where they are on the purchase journey. Effective sales coaching will prepare your sellers to meet (or even exceed) customer expectations. That means buyers are more likely to become satisfied, long-term customers.

A sales coaching platform empowers your whole team

By now, the importance of sales coaching is well understood. But it can be challenging to deliver effective coaching that meets the needs of every seller on your team.

The right sales coaching software is a must.

Mindtickle is an integrated revenue enablement platform with robust sales coaching features. With Mindtickle, you can identify the strengths and weaknesses of each sales rep – and then deliver AI– and human-powered coaching that helps close gaps and improve performance. Mindtickle also delivers rich data and analytics so you can understand the impact of your coaching – and identify opportunities to improve your approach.

Sales Coaching in Mindtickle

Request a demo to learn how Mindtickle can help you develop and implement effective sales coaching in your own organization.

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This post was originally published in January 2020, updated in December 2022, October 2023, and again in January 2025.