AMA: Adobe Head of Product Marketing, Advertising Cloud, Ryan Fleisch on Sales Enablement

This is a tricky one because ultimately you want everything to tie back to revenue (usually in the form of new versus growth versus retention), but you can never fully hold PMM accountable for those top-line numbers since there are so many other forces at play. This is why you need a set of secondary metrics you can use to measure your efforts a little more directly. For starters, measure the attendance rate of your sales enablement sessions, measure the views/downloads of the content from it af ...Read More

I’m going to answer this question the same way I answered, “How do you measure ROI of sales enablement?” because ultimately success should be ROI in some form. Here’s my response again:  Ultimately you want everything to tie back to revenue (usually in the form of new versus growth versus retention), but you can never fully hold PMM accountable for those top-line numbers since there are so many other forces at play. This is why you need a set of secondary metrics you can use to measure your effo ...Read More

Great Our enablement decks follow this outline: Learning Objectives, Executive Summary/”Sales Play Made Simple”, Business Issues & Value, Key Personas, Key Messaging and Product Capabilities, Competitive Overview, Deal Examples, Customer Success Stories, Crawl/Walk/Run Sales Strategy, and Additional Resources.  To pick this apart, I would say the Executive Summary single slide roll-up is one of the most critical parts. You need someone that people can refer back to and reference easily, and ...Read More

First, divide your efforts into “sales plays” (or depending on your company’s terminology they might be “sales motions” or “use cases”). Sales plays should each have a revenue target attached to them, and collectively, the revenue across all your sales plays should total the entire new business revenue goal. Next, define your “bill of materials” (assets) for each sales play. For our business, we have a Conversation Starter (2-4pg PDF of key market problem and our solution), Discovery Questions/A ...Read More

This somewhat depends on the resources your company has on each of those teams. If you have a full sales ops team then partner with them to understand win/loss and pipeline health. What you’re looking for is how much you’re winning/losing, why you’re winning/losing, who you’re winning/losing against, and what the forward-looking pipeline looks like considering all of those factors. If you don’t have a sales ops team, then you need to take some of this on yourself. I don’t believe a PMM team can ...Read More

First, create content that’s in line with what you know they will use. I mentioned in one of my other answers here that oy need to understand their selling methodology and ensure the content aligns with it. If they use Demo2Win then know your content needs to follow a Tell-Show-Tell framework around problems, solutions, value for each mini-chapter. If they use ValueSelling, know that your content needs to anchor on a key business issue followed by the common obstacles standing in the way. The mo ...Read More

This is certainly a divisive topic. One school of thought is what I call “the Pepsi challenge” approach. That is, if you’re #2, you always mention #1, but if you’re #1, you never mention #2 (you don’t hear Coke bringing Pepsi into their ads, right?). While philosophically that might be the right approach, I believe the fact of the matter is you need to arm your GTM teams with targeted H2H approaches because that’s likely what the majority of their cycles entail. Do this with clearly defined inte ...Read More

Great question – let’s tackle it from two angles: the strategic approach and then the content within it. 1) Strategic Approach: For this side of the equation, let’s all pretend we are the sellers for a second, and that the actual account executives are our clients. If we want to “sell” them our enablement program, we need to approach it the same way as they would approach any successful sales cycle: understand the buyer’s motivations and goals, uncover what’s blocking them from achieving them, o ...Read More

Regarding enabling sales teams in general, please check out some of the other answers I’ve posted here in this AMA, but specifically for the global aspect, here’s my take: there’s a good chance that a lot of your program and material will apply globally, and you might even think you don’t need to do regional enablement because of how good and wide-reaching it is. However, I would highly encourage you to ditch that school of thought and lean into regional-specific enablement. First, you might lea ...Read More

Exciting! Build a three-prong strategy around how you’re going to directly promote it, how you’re going to get the industry to promote it, and how you’re going to get your client-facing teams to promote it. 1) Direct: showcase it our webpage and make it a gated asset so you can collect leads from it. We put our Forrester and Gartner reports front and center on our website with this approach. Send focused emails around the report, include it in newsletters, and put some paid advertising behind it ...Read More

Your sales enablement roadmap should be one piece of your larger PMM roadmap. If you can flight out upcoming product launches, new research reports that will be launching, etc… then you can tie an enablement approach and cadence to each of these. Aside from new enablement, it’s good to monitor and notice when your sales teams might need re-enablement on existing sales plays or content. Often times if salespeople have been around for a while they might stick to their approach out of familiarity a ...Read More

It should be collaborative and I would somewhat divide and conquer by you setting up the enablement you know will be needed based on your PMM roadmap such as product launches and other new collateral (comp intel, pitch decks, research reports, etc…), and by sales leaders coming to the table with where they see their teams needing more help. Maybe it’s in deals around a certain use case, for a certain industry, or against a certain competitor. All this should be clear from the sales op data you h ...Read More

Here’s how we’ve tackled this: first, set the expectation that the role of marketing is one-to-many and the role of sales is one-to-one. This will shield you from requests like “can we get a one-sheet focused on X” because you can then ask/vet if it’s truly a need of “many” or if it’s originating from one client in one sales cycle. If the latter, punt. Next, put a process in place around how requests are submitted and handled. We use Monday.com, and we set up a request form through it that we’ve ...Read More

Two things to consider here: if they are resisting your product messaging, it may be worth asking yourself if it’s the right messaging to being with. Then consider how you’re framing the messaging to the sales teams based on who they are talking with. Let’s look at both of those. To evaluate if you’re using the right product messaging/positioning do an audit using this formula: Positioning = Market Problems + Our Offering – Competition. In other words, what are the market problems you’re aiming ...Read More

Great question – I’d recommend 3 things to ensure you’re getting insights from the field: 1) Create a slack channel devoted to this so people have one place to submit insights from their client meetings (especially competitive insights), 2) conduct at least 1 client meeting ride-along per month. Get in the field and hear first-hand how content is being presented, how it’s resonating, what questions get asked, and what insights you might collect, and 3) conduct win/loss surveys for all deals each ...Read More