AMA: Coupa Software Former Director, Product Marketing, Charlene Wang on Sales Enablement

Sales enablement success should ultimately drive sales success, including the size & number of deals closed won and win rates. Leading sales enablement indicators of sales success include adoption of content, sales feedback, and feedback from prospects/customers as part of win/loss analysis. In particular, if messaging is done effectively and rolled out properly to the sales team, then the win/loss analysis should show that the messaging ultimately resonated with the prospect upon deal close ...Read More

There's two parts to keeping all the above content up to date, including content creation and content delivery: Content Creation: This is all about capacity planning of the Product Marketing team on the capacity of the team to update content vs. the amount of content that needs to be updated. First, you need to define what content must be kept up-to-date and how frequently these updates need to happen. For example, some product marketing content needs to be updated frequently (e.g. information a ...Read More

Different companies will define product marketing and sales ops / sales enablement in different ways. The distinction tends to run along a spectrum where on the one hand, Product Marketing will lead the creation of content that focuses on market positioning and differentiation, and on the other hand, Sales Ops will lead specific activities or content that helps translate that marketing positioning in a way that resonates with the experience of being in sales. For example, a Product Marketer may ...Read More

Great competitive analysis comes from access to the right information, meaningful insights into the data, and addressing the needs of sales in real-time.  From an information access perspective, it's important to find the right sources of information first and to do this efficiently. This should come from figuring out both what you can easily access from sources available to you (perhaps online research and analyst perspectives) and where it makes sense to put in th effort to dig out further inf ...Read More

I always start with the outcome that matters to the company then back out what needs to happen to drive that outcome. For example, if we need to launch a product that drives XYZ in revenue over the first year, I will try to back out how much pipeline is needed and what kinds of win rates need to happen in order to hit that goal. From there, I will focus on the exact metrics that PMM can directly impact (often win rates, with some collaboration with Demand Gen / Growth Marketing on pipeline gener ...Read More

Product documentation can be owned by several teams, most commonly split between a documentation team, product marketing, and product management. Who manages each piece of content depends on the primary function of that content: Documentation Team: This team is dedicated to educating customers on how to use or implement product capabilities. They provide a standard set of detailed information on what each feature does, intended behavior, configurations, and other information to help internal sup ...Read More

The answer to this question will depend to an extent on the type of people that you have on the Product Marketing and SDR teams. That said, in general, Product Marketing owns the messaging and positioning and will be more familiar with what's going to stand out compared to other solutions or substitutes in the market in the eyes of the target persona that the SDR is emailing. Based on this, Product Marketing should be providing key talking points and content that will help move the email recipie ...Read More

In this case, you would first want to enable your sales teams on the new persona, including what this persona generally "looks like", relevant pain points, and other information to help sales successfully reach these personas. You will have more a heavy lift in educating sales on how to successfully sell this product compared to a product that's built for the personas that your sales team is already used to targeting. Beyond sales enablement, new target personas will sometimes require a broader ...Read More