AMA: AlertMedia Vice President Product Marketing, Harsha Kalapala on Sales Enablement

Sales enablement effectiveness should have quantitative as well as qualitative measurements. Quantitative measurements should have lead and lag metrics. Lead metrics help you ensure you are on the right track early on in any enablement project and allow you to course correct as needed. Examples of lead metrics are - sales usage KPIs, training completion, opp open rate, sales stage movement, talk time on calls, etc. Lag metrics indicate how effective the project was and helps plan for the next en ...Read More

Any new product should have a “product brief” associated with it to help not just sales, but any internal stakeholder to be on the same page about the purpose and positioning of the product. Enabling sales can be done effectively without ever involving a deck. My focus is on content and training vs. deck creation. The product brief contains things like a problem to solve, buyer personas addressed, why it is important now (urgency), competitive landscape or what you are replacing, discovery quest ...Read More

If you have product marketing and sales enablement as separate functions, asset creation should be owned by product marketing for the most part. Anything sales enablement creates should be in support of helping sales consume the content that’s already built — such as talk tracks, discovery questions, conversation narratives, etc. I tried limiting to 5, but I’ll share 7 basics (lucky you) I would ensure sales have in their hands to sell effectively: Buyer personas - Can you really sell if you don ...Read More

There is no single golden arrow. Every piece of material has its role in the process. I look at effectiveness from two perspectives. One - did the salesperson use it? Two - did the prospect use it? Fortunately, there are tools for this today. You should be using a tool like Seismic, Highspot, or Docsend. These tools also allow for a third important measure - did the prospect pass it around to the buying group? Now you’re hitting the right notes. If the salesperson doesn’t use something, it doesn ...Read More

It sounds like the salesperson needs tools training. I wouldn’t get them all the resources they need to learn how to search in your asset database/software. I would assign them a “buddy” in sales who can answer their questions on this quickly. Seeing their peers being good at something this person needs to be good at should motivate them to catch up. Other than that, I wouldn’t waste my time getting one person to learn how to use a basic tool. It’s not fair use of time for the rest of the team w ...Read More

For startups building this from scratch, I’d throw out any best practices and build what’s needed for your unique situation. I would think about laying out the sales process and the buyer’s journey. Build your assets for the buyer’s journey overall and assess what parts of that journey are sales interactions. Refer to the top 7 core assets I mentioned in a different question in this AMA - that will be a good place to start. Overall, I highly recommend making your approach buyer journey-oriented ...Read More

The sales team is often at the front lines. They are the eyes and ears of your go-to-market strategy. Engaging with sales starts with the little things to build trust that you understand their world. Sit with the sales team at the office at a floater desk. Be a fly-on-the-wall in their meetings. Sit down next to a salesperson for lunch. Set up virtual coffee meetings. Look at their activity on LinkedIn. Dont just talk to the sales managers. Connect at every experience level and role in the sales ...Read More

Solution messaging is key. It’s not about what the products can do for you, but about what you can do with the products. Does your one product solve for one problem entirely, or do your customers use multiple products to solve for a bigger challenge? If the latter, you should be selling the problem and the full solution to it. Not the product features. A solution story requires telling a narrative from the perspective of the customer. Utilizing customer journey stories is essential in this appro ...Read More

If you build it, they won’t come. Product marketing assets are ineffective without proper sales enablement efforts - whether there is a separate team for it or not. The simplest analogy I use is that product marketing creates the juice, and sales enablement makes sure the sales team drinks the juice AND keeps it down. Now that’s oversimplified in some ways. The partnership between both functions begins at the problem identification phase. Both teams should be on the same page about the gaps in d ...Read More

I don’t incentivize sales for this. Any such incentives will be short-term band-aid attempts. I dont see them solving a problem.  A well-trained salesperson should know when to focus on product benefits in their sales conversations. It’s never the lead. If you want them to use specific product messaging, then the best incentive is to build trust that your output is reliable and effective for others on the team. Seeing proof of impact within the team is very effective in getting others to use you ...Read More

Listen to calls. There’s no other way thats really effective. We live in the world of Gong/Chorus - where we have unprecedented insight into prospect conversations. There is no excuse to not take advantage of this ability. You can set playlists based on topics, segments, keywords, competitive positioning - or any way your tool lets you slice the data. I would put up filters for the topics and keywords that reflect what you need your sales team to deliver consistently at scale to drive your ideal ...Read More

Qualitative measures require qualitative assessment. I don’t see a way around spending time listening to calls (at 1.75x speed of course) :) The best way to measure performance is to select a random sample of sales conversations - enough to be quantitative (10+) and assess the intangibles on a score sheet - objection handling, trap setting, etc.). I would try to make the scoring as subjective as possible—not how “ideally” it was delivered, but how the prospect reacted to it. You can learn a lot ...Read More