AMA: Canva Ecosystem Marketing Leader, Indy Sen on Sales Enablement

Good question. As a product marketer, I would say the key thing around building case studies is to 1.) work backwards the market perception you want to create is and 2.) ensure the story you come up with is defensible and aligned with what your product delivers AND what your sales team can confidently say about it. If you take that approach, it's still a marketing exercise at its core, but you'll be enabling sales, which I think goes to the spirit of your question.Let's break it down1.) Working ...Read More

This is a great question, and also a good one to answer early, as its sets the tone for what the relationship between PMM and Sales will be over the next months, quarters, if not years to come for teams and organizations of any size. IMO, PMM should absolutely be on the hook to support sales with all the self-serve materials (e.g. decks, battlecards) and resources (e.g. case studies, landing pages) needed to help navigate the early stages any every deal (lead -> opportunity) that can technica ...Read More

Yes, sales definitely appreciates customer persona research in my experience, but it has to be actionable. This means that, no matter what type of research or how much good stuff you have in there, PMM has to package it up in ways that is digestible and relevant to sales. I’ve often seen great and thoughtful research get glossed over just because of the way it was presented. It’s tempting for PMM to package up research with an executive summary/tl,dr on Slack, and then hope that sales will click ...Read More

I’m going to assume that by GTM you mean the overall go-to-market process which spans 1.) product launch and announcements to sustaining 2.) the lifecycle of your product. The short answer is that sales enablement should be a constant throughout. 1.) Product launches and announcements: For any upcoming product launch you should make sure, as product marketing, that sales and any other customer-facing team is informed and trained at least one or two weeks before the go date. This is because there ...Read More

You should take a similar approach to how you'd partner with market research, per my answer to the AMA question re persona research. Partner with sales enablement to deliver competitive intelligence (CI) insights in a way that fits sales training heuristics, or find clever ways to embed them in their day-to-day workflow. Done right, CI is a great lever for sales to deposition competitors in the prospecting and opportunity phases, potentially yielding better win rates. It can also shine a guiding ...Read More

This is a good question and I think I covered some of the criteria in my previous answer above, here. That being said, the one thing I would add is that you should try and provide a clear and open forum by which asks can be managed or responded to. This is for a few reasons: It doesn’t hurt and at the very least it’s good hygiene, no matter how big your PMM team is. It could be as easy as setting up a PMM/Sales request channel on your company Slack or setting up a Google form that invites sales ...Read More

Good question, and the last one I'll be able to answer today. The way I think about sales enablement across PLG vs sales-led motions is to not forget the spirit of what you're trying to do as a product marketer, which is enable. Both motions call for enablement, but for PLG, you're enabling the customer, while for SLG, you're enabling sales to enable the customer. Breaking it down: PLG: just because you don't have a salesperson attached to new user acquisition doesn't mean you shouldn't do your ...Read More