AMA: BetterUp Former Senior Vice President, Product Marketing, Sahil Sethi on Sales Enablement

The ultimate metric for measuring the enablement success is a revenue metric, or its proxy - which is shared by sales and product marketing. The actual metric depends on what the focus of the enablement is e.g. Company ARR, Product ARR, $ win rates, # win rates, Competitive win rates, Deal size, Time to close, # of reps making quota etc. etc. Until those revenue metrics are realized, you can use the following leading indicators - Pipeline movement, Stage 2 to Stage 4 conversion, SKU mix etc. Fin ...Read More

The best sales relationships come from the top. Where the PMM leadership, or marketing/product leadership is aligned with sales leadership on key OKRs and where and how product marketing can come in. If you are truly not getting that support from your leadership, or you are in charge of building a relationship - there’s a few ways you can gradually build a relationship with sales First - if you don't want to be known as the "collateral team" , then stop talking about collateral in your interacti ...Read More

General best Practices surrounding enablement of any product launch, irrespective of Small, Medium, Large. The large launches get all of these and hte most attention. Small launches may only get some digital self-learning content, or slideware updates. But the best practices generally remain consistent First - make the launch enablement less about the product, but more about how it impacts them. Do they have another SKU to sell and meet their quota. ? Is this launch improving your competitive di ...Read More

Some tips for creating useful sales plays Be clear on what success looks like - Have you made it clear why we want them to use a certain playbook ? Is it to drive more pipeline ? Improve win rates ? Get to the decision maker ? Improve ASPs ? Defining, and sharing, that success metric is the first step to getting their attention. If reps don't know what you are doing, why would they care ? Get support from sales leadership - You will have to find a way to get the blessings of sales leadership bef ...Read More

If your product tiers are naturally cannibalizing each other, then you likely have a product strategy problem , or a pricing & packaging problem. The product strategy should build more differentiation for your enterprise plan, and a good packaging/entitlement structure, or pricing barriers, should create differentiation paths But if you truly don't have those levers at your disposal, I would focus on helping your sales teams understand the difference between the three tiers less in terms of ...Read More

Product marketing plays a crucial role in sales kickoff by energizing the team with the product roadmap and vision, sharing value prop or simply presenting new tools for sales to win. The goal is to build confidence and energy, showing investment in the right things to help Sales succeed. I've been doing Product Marketing for 12+ years, and there hasn't been a single year where PMM wasn't an active participant or presenter at Sales Kick Offs. Here are some examples In every FKO I've seen, PMM ha ...Read More

The best practice for good enablement calendar planning is to understand what the business needs from a GTM perspective -and this alignment needs to happen at an executive and functional leadership level, between product ,marketing, sales and ofcourse product marketing. It is dangerous for either sales, or product marketing to be dominating the conversation Now that is an ideal state. In reality, I often see the following models of enablement planning (Goal is to strive towards the ideal state) ...Read More

I personally don't believe that reps need to be incentivized to use messaging that wins. If messaging works (aka helps brings quality revenue and bring more new logos/expansions/customers/users faster, reps will ofcourse be using it If reps aren't using your product messaging, its mostly because of three reasons Your messaging is at the wrong altitude. (e.g. it is too technical and doesn't speak value), or too generic (e.g. generic value statements without going into differentiators), or too inc ...Read More

I am going to expand the question to be about being included in customer calls in general, not just discovery calls. Personally, I don't think PMMs should be in discovery calls. These calls are often with prospects , with no relationship leverage. If you as a PMM want to learn about what happens in a discovery call, just use a tool like Gong or Chorus If you don't have access to Gong, and you really want to be on a sales call to learn, here are three framings you can use with your sales counterp ...Read More