AMA: Transform Head of Marketing, Amit Bhojraj on Sales Enablement

B2d follows a whole different motion. A developer is not eager to talk to Sales (and they don't want to be sold to). Developers want to try out the product themselves, tinker with it, and only if they enjoy the experience (or get to the aha moment) will they evangelize the solution up the company's ranks. Developer motion strongly aligns with the product-led-growth (PLG) motion. The trial experience from onboarding to docs, inviting team members, and getting to the aha moments can play a pivotal role in converting them to customers. Growth marketing also plays a significant role because this team can run various experiments to remove the barriers to conversion and get to the aha moments faster. One tactic that works well with developers is the concept of "playgrounds". Playgrounds are places where developers get educational value on specific topics, and there is limited to zero selling motion. Check out jwt.io as an example. This playground is created solely for educational value around JSON web tokens. It provides a cool debugger, tutorials, and libraries for developers to engage and learn (and yes, also buy some cool sway along the way!!). When it comes to sales enablement, just like you have a typical training motion for the sales rep, it is equally important to have a technical track for your sales engineers. SEs, in the end, will make inroads in a sales call and build that relationship with the developer audience.

Considering your limited bandwidth, it is challenging to go broad. So, the answer, in my humble view, lies in "focus". When I think about competitive analysis, I usually think about one competitor that I call the "Next Best Alternative." The next best alternative may not always be a competing vendor. Your positioning (and messaging) should ideally focus on these 1-2 competitors. If you want to go broad, there are competitive intelligence platforms such as Crayon and Klue that you can use to track "changes" in the digital landscape and create integrations in your CRM or workflow tools that can help you scale. I think that there is a Gartner Magic Quadrant that you can use to analyze these vendors better.

It depends. Not the best answer, I know :) It depends because it comes down to how your org set up. Is your Demand Gen team closely working with the SDRs vs. the PMMs? If yes, and if you have a robust positioning framework (from the PMM team), it would be pretty easy for a DG lead to carve out a campaign and create the first draft of the email templates. In this case, of course, the lead is flowing through the marketing team (Demand Gen specifically). I have seen PMMs get more involved in this topic if there is a close working relationship between PMM and DG teams and if the tactics are visible at the onset. The x-functional team API here usually takes the form of an "integrated campaign." An integrated campaign would need positioning and messaging, and this should directly come from PMM. Suppose the tactics for launching the campaign are well defined early on. In that case, a PMM can influence different tactics right at the beginning and creating drafts for various topics such as webinar abstracts, email templates for a nurture campaign, etc. This end-to-end view is usually beneficial because it gives the PMM a lot of insight into how a specific campaign gets rolled out and can better influence campaign performance. In summary, I think this should be a joint responsibility between PMMs and DG teams.

Let's start with the difference between a platform and a product: Almost every SaaS product has APIs that let it integrate with other applications. A platform, however, plays a more active role in creating an ecosystem and acts as a central hub where how multiple products work and can thrive together. If the platform evolves to a point where it can serve up a marketplace for other products, then the sales enablement process must include the partners who are part of your ecosystem. In my mind, that is where the game changes for sales enablement. The sales rep now has to look at the combined value prop of the core platform and the partner products that will support a niche use case. For the sales rep, this is fantastic because it makes the solution selling approach a lot easier.

As you go upmarket, third-party influencers become crucial in the sales process—specifically, analysts such as Gartner and Forrester. Enterprises are lower tolerance for risk, and they can lean heavily on the magic quadrant or the Wave placement while making buying decisions. Your enterprise sales rep will care a lot about this topic. Sales enablement has to factor this motion at some point in the company's journey. The influencers and blocker persona become more relevant in the enterprise motion. For example, the security team may influence the buying motion even though your product is targeted to the engineering/development team. So, making sure that persona care-abouts are well covered and have materials for objection handling will be relevant. Enterprise customers also have complex needs. So, a platform approach or a product that can customize to both legacy and modern stacks can be critical.

Sales ops cannot be responsible for launching new products or features. Any topic directly related to the product or the GTM motion should fall under the purview of PMM (since they will be closely attached to the product management team). PMMs create the training/launch materials and are responsible for rallying the internal teams and the market towards a launch. So, this separation should be pretty straightforward. PMMs should also strive to share insights from the ongoing sales motion (customer interviews, win-loss analysis etc.) to equip the sales team better to challenge the customer during a sales conversation. In my experience in SaaS, more than 80% of the sales enablement training materials should be coming from the PMM team. I've given a generic response above, and I would love to understand a little more about your organization to provide more explicit guidance. On a side note, I recently read this book called "The Challenger Sale." It is an excellent read on how Marketing (especially PMM) can play a critical role in equipping the sales team to challenge the prospect (using insights/patterns) and make them think differently.

One of the KPIs for the PMM team should be around sales enablement. I have seen this KPI measured when a PMM delivers sales training. After every live session, we would do a survey where we check two dimensions: Quality of the presentation and usefulness of the material. Though this was interesting initially, we noticed that there is general fatigue over time, and most people would give a high average rating of over 8 (scale:1-10). There are sales enablement tools like Highspot that provide more visibility into the content impact by "stage," but I've not seen this action.

I would tailor the cadence and materials to your audience. You need a general track for all sales reps to highlight the 90-day roadmap updates, highlight key launches and other relevant topics. It would be best if you had a separate technical track for your technical field teams that will go deeper into the technical side of the feature. A bi-weekly live call (for 60 min) seems to do the magic from a cadence standpoint. I've seen PMMs do loom videos and try for an offline education track, but it does not work. Also, avoid the last week of the month for a sales enablement call :)