AMA: Asana Head of Global Product Marketing, Eric Bensley on Sales Kickoffs

Product marketing should own the story of SKO and it's activation throughout content. If I look back at my most recent company SKO, here's what my team owned: All keynote content and demos Enablement objectives and curriculum, in partnership with our field readiness team Demo activations in common areas Signage and messaging Rev/sales leadership alignment Stakeholder in look and feel of the event In enterprise B2B PMM, there are 2 tentpole moments every year: 1) SKO, 2) Your annual customer even ...Read More

Sellers are coin operated by nature. They have to deliver $$$ to the business to be successful. I'm hesitant to say you want to change their behavior. I think a better way to say this is you need to align product knowledge and sales technique to their objective: hitting quota. How do you do that? Showcase account teams that are seeing success with deep product knowledge or a specific sales technique. I like videos most for these to really communicate the process and impact. Make it easier to use ...Read More

There's a lot of ways to do this but the one you MUST do is win loss interviews. Focus group testing and stage presentations do not validate you have a differentiated value prop compared to competitors. If you're strapped for people resources, there are many companies out there that can do win loss interviews for you. These interviews do a few things that you can't get elsewhere: -Raw answers and insights, not influenced by any agenda other than being honest. -They are timely and change based on ...Read More

This may sound simple but: create the enablement with them, not for them. When sales reps, and especially sales leaders, are invested in the content they will use it. You know you have a winning enablement when sellers are organically using it in customer conversations. So, here's a checklist to make sure your next enablement lands: Identify your core objectives for the enablement: pipeline, product participation, win rate, etc. Run a kickoff with key sales leaders and stakeholders. Show them yo ...Read More

This is a tricky one. There are tangible and intangible metrics for every SKO. And to honest, depending on the stage of your company, leadership disposition, and company objectives...you'll lean harder into tangible or intangible. Let me list out a few in each category I've seen success with in my career: Tangible: Product participation - what percentage of ramped AEs sold a given product/sku/license/ etc in a given quarter. Pipe generation - pipe associated with a particular area of focus. Pipe ...Read More

This is the job of sales plays. Sales plays in their simpleist form should be repeatable conversations and deal programs that lead to successful customer ROI and company revenue. Start with the sales team when you ideate here, what are the most successful conversations your top sellers are having? Heres an example of a generic play name: Faster [business outcome] for [persona] Here's what a play should have: Pitch deck Out of the box demo Demo video Play overview: problem, value prop, use cases, ...Read More

Slight nuance here but I don't think sales teams feel motivated and inspired by "product updates." In my career, I've seen many PMM teams that push product updates to sales teams and consider it their job to make sure sales always has the latest features in their toolkit. You may reading this and thinking the same thing. But what I hear from Sales around product updates is they're noisy. PMMs need to start with more empathy for what it means to be a seller. They have to hit quota (which is hard) ...Read More