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

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 interactions with them, and start using the language they use everyday. Talk about sales stages. About discovery or solutioning. About contracting and negotiation. About demos or discounting. About competition and next meetings. About buying committee and champions. Collateral is simply an enabler for helping the right kind of deals move faster. Focus on the underlying struggles, and you will invariably get a seat at the table Second - Understand the sales agenda and problems. Do they have a pipeline problem or a conversion problem ? Break it down even further….are they having trouble facing access issues to the buyer? Is the 1st meeting to demo conversion rate poor ? Are the demos not working ? Are they getting stuck in competitive comparisons ? Are they struggling to tell a value story ? If you want to help them at a strategic level, you almost have to diagnose their problem for them, or have them share their diagnoses with you. Then solve it for them. And measure and prove that solution. If you are building a demo narrative, then measure how that has improved conversion and win rates. Bring back that measurement to everyone in the company. And develop a virtuous cycle where you go from being 'content creators' to 'strategic partners in my sales process'. This will help you develop credibility both with sales leadership as well as frontline sales reps Finally - There’s no shame in being an order taker, especially if you are just beginning to form a relationship. Particularly in very enterprise sales heavy cultures , sales reps are the frontline teams that bring in revenue. My mantra in such cultures is that Product marketing, but even Product, or rest of marketing, is there to help sales win. Our work on messaging, or launches, or enablement, or campaigns, is only as relevant as its applicability and use by sales teams in growing revenue. Frontline reps know what they want - particularly if the need is coming from multiple frontline team and their leaders. If there are obvious content gaps, you can develop credibility by filling them and that helps you develop the relationship and the trust to have a deeper partnership conversation

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 the features within them, but more in terms of the value they represent e.g. Some cases, Lower tier is for individuals, Middle tier is for Teams, Highest tiers for entire functions / multiple organizations. Focus on capabilities and their benefits that stress upon this difference In some cases, highest tier packages contain the kind of security/compliance/governance/privacy/role based access/user management controls that only become meaningful for large enterprises/above a certain scale. Focus on those differences, than individual features For enablement, bring this to life not just via messaging statements but also via customer stories

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 counterparts, imagined in how they would introduce you to customers. Note it is generally easier to be on CS led calls with existing customers as there's an existing relationship Supporting - Perfect when you are supporting a technical discussion, a demo, a roadmap deep dive, or any topic where the rep may not feel super comfortable and can proudly introduce as you as an expert "Alex is from our product / product marketing team, and he is here to support any questions around our roadmap, or feature xxx etc." Pitching - Perfect when you are rolling out a new value prop, a new product, a new sales play which hasn't yet seen broad enablement. You could do some sample pitches and show them how its done. Time to walk the talk! Easier with existing customers than prospects "We've just launched this new product XX which solves problem YY. The product is brand new, and I have invited Alex from our product marketing team to give a bit of an overview " Learning - You aren't really adding value but could be a fly on the wall. Possible with large group meetings, QBRs, solution presentations etc. "Here we pride themselves on our customer centricity and Alex from our product marketing team is joining us to learn from these discussions, and make sure we are building the right things and positioning them properly for you. Even with these framings, if reps are reluctant to invite you -let them be. There are other ways to learn what happens in a customer call, or other ways to talk to customers than impose upon sales teams

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 differentiation ? Is it giving access to a new use case or a buyer and new budget line item ? Anchor the reps on the benefits first before you launch into product capabilities and how to sell * Second - Building on this, make sure the content and collateral is useful and packaged in a manner that they can immediately use it. Don't just bring a messaging framework to launch enablement. Make sure their pitch decks and playbooks and copy scripts are ready as well. Capitalize on the mindshare and momentum that a launch generates by arming your reps with the best collateral right away * Third - A good launch should always have some degree of testing- either product testing with beta customers, or message testing for new value prop. If you've done any testing - share those results/quotes/anecdotes. Bring any and every social proof you can bring to the launch, and make reps' lives easier * Fourth- Similar to external social proof, also share any internal social proof. Bring those reps on stage whose customers are happy with the beta product. Or who have already started to use the messaging in their customer conversations. Peer validation works * Finally - Make sure you make the enablement sessions highly memorable, and retainable, by raising the bar on internal storytelling - particularly with product launches. Particularly with major launches, we made our enablement sessions fun and highly engaging - that reps would want to start selling those right away

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. Finally, the two most important metrics i look at after every training session is - confidence index and Usefulness index. It is basically a response to a question "On a scale of 1 to 5, how useful did you find this session?" and "On a scale of 1 to 5, how confident are you in using the tools provided by the session?". We would aim to keep all session scores >4.2, whether it was an interactive training session at SKO, or a pre-recorded training delivered via a tool like Lessonly

Some tips for creating useful sales plays 1. 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 ? 2. Get support from sales leadership - You will have to find a way to get the blessings of sales leadership before you roll anything new. Reps are always bombarded with some ask of their time - a new training, a new play, a new webinar, a new certification. The one sure way they know what to prioritize is to listen to their bosses. If you are trying to get sales to adopt something and you don't have their leadership buy-in - you must re-evaluate your entire approach and fix that first 3. Move beyond content - I find that PMMs, particularly in smaller companies, expect that sales playbooks, or any playbook for that matter, is simply a matter of creating high quality content. If you really want that content to move the needle, or even get used, you have to drive some enablement around it. In-person trainings, workshops, Lessonly, 1:many training calls etc. are various forums you can create. Make these sessions memorable. Talk about success stories. Create time for role plays and practice 4. Use social proof - I have a simple rule. Every enablement session i lead must have some 'internal' social proof- where i invite another sales rep to validate my message. This could be a peer who's been given sneak peek into the content, someone who's tested the message/play with customers, ideally someone who's actually seen success with that. Peer validation is extremely important in every aspect of selling- but is particularly useful for convincing sales reps to adopt something new 5. Repeat and reinforce - After you have done everything above, it is time to do it again and again . As reps find success with your newly prescribed plays, share those success stories. Celebrate the wins. Repeat the message. Every all hands. Every team call. Every win-wire

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 1. In every FKO I've seen, PMM has presented product roadmap and energized the reps on the new innovations to come. This was relevant both for new products (and SKUs) that were launching that gave them an additional product with which to win. This also gave them visibility into feature innovations for existing products that solved competitive gaps and could improve win rates. Either way, a product roadmap and vision session was on the SKO/FKO mainstage agenda 2. In multiple instances, we used SKO to do a value prop and content refresh. We realized there wasn't much new innovation to introduce, but reps weren't fully bought in to all the messaging changes we had made. We had them look through the new materials in advance and used SKO breakout sessions as practice time, as role play time, for Q&A and even as a pitch competition. It is rare to get all reps in one place, and that too with a fresh mindset of beginning a new year - and we found it very helpful to refresh our product value prop during SKO 3. The most impactful work we have done as PMM at SKO is where we talked about less PMM deliverables, but more about Sales tools. The narrative was simple - here are new tools coming this year that will help you win. These included new product launches, new marketing campaigns, new selling resources (e.g. a team of solution experts, or more sales engineers), a new buyer focus, new sales playbooks etc. And once we landed these tools, we focused on the content and collateral pieces underneath that. Reps want to leave SKO with the confidence that they will make their numbers and these sessions were very powerful in doing just that. These sessions were almost never branded as PMM sessions but were run by the GTM leadership with PMM as presenters or influencers of the strategy

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) 1. The committee model - Typically in larger companies, there is a central enablement team that runs an enablement council or committee to guide on enablement calendar. They work with both product marketing and sales, to build an enablement calendar in advance - covering onboarding, refreshers, new products, new plays etc. Inputs could come from any source - sales may demand something urgent, or PM/PMM may want to push something urgent 2. The "Just-in-time" model - Typically in smaller companies, all enablement is often 'Just-in-time" being pushed by the executive team, or functional leaders, depending on the initiative. Nothing wrong in this approach - that's how startups remain agile as long as you are comfortable with context switching 3. The "Build the plane as we fly it " model - This is often when you are asked to fly with a half-built plane. e.g. a new product is launched with just a web page. And everything else - its pitch decks, special demo, call scripts, competitive comparisons, videos, etc. come later. Since you can't build everything at once, you end up picking the most important artefacts, or training needs, every quarter - and then go down the list. This model is also true when you are doing a complete messaging overhaul or major pivots In all cases, I find that the natural rhythm of the business influences the enablement roadmap for the year, broken by the the quarter. For example, at a company I was in where sales cycles were 6 to 9 months long, Q1 and Q2 ended up being about new sales plays and new campaigns focused on pipeline creation. Ergo, enablement was centered around that (e.g. new value prop, new approach to discovery, new demos etc.). Q3 and Q4 were often about helping close existing pipeline, or 'firedrill' campaigns to fill any pipeline gaps and the content favors that (e.g. objection handling, competitive battlecards, pricing and packaging changes etc.). Product launches create their own enablement needs anytime of the year. Massive enablement happens around user conferences (Spring/Fall) or around SKO/FKO as they are the right forums to land the message

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 1. 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 incomplete (e...g not backed by proof points, or case studies) 2. It may be complete, at the right altitude but is just not helping them win. Maybe your product needs some innovation, or you need to rethink your messaging altogether My suggestion would be to do some internal listening on why they aren't using what you'd like them to use. An enablement best practice is to involve them in feedback, in testing and validation and ofcourse during enablement and rollout