AMA: Datasite VP - Product Marketing, Content Marketing, Pricing, Axel Kirstetter on Sales Enablement

This question sits better with Sales than product marketing. Also, sales strategy sounds like an oximoron to me. WHo cares how you sell as long as you make revenues (and its legal/ethical). That said, to better plan and align a company needs to decide a few things. Choices to be made: - what is the channel or distribution strategy - what is the Account/Territory plan - what is the targeting/segmentation appproach - how will Sales get compensated this list can further be expanded with Revenue planning. then you also need to factor in things like: - price and discount levers - win rates and pipleline - packaging levers Sales enablement is an execution function in my opinion. It executes upon the strategy chosen by either exec team or Sales leadership. It does not formulate the Sales strategy. I always like to come back to how a function is measure to determin what its accountable for. Sales enablement is measured on time-to-productivity. Nobody other than sales enablement owns that. 

Love this question. Here is my 5-stepper 1. Identify your corporate dates. sales offsite, management offsite, product launches etc. are time based anchorpoints. Key decisions get made or updates occur. Execs get together etc. (pro tip: avoid end of quarter) 2. Identify your key business priorities (more coverage, more sellers, increase avg ticket size, new CRM etc.) 3. Identify the steps to complete the key priorities and estimate how long they take 4. Reverse engineer from your anchor dates, baring in mind iterative and parallel efforts 5. Align sales leadership around roadmap

Given that you are resource constrained I would highly recommend you explore using CI software. There are a few out there. Do a little research. For $20k you can be up and running. Team up with Sales to fund it. In PMM you dont always need to own everything. You can have can also impact by facilitating the path to the solution.

Should Sales not create the Sales Playbook?! This seems to be a case where PMM is doing Sales Ops' job. I understand with smaller companies responsibilities stretch across departments. In this case I would have thought the right answer is to work with Sales on the playbook. If they co-authored it or had major input, they are more likely to use it.

Budget wise, PMM is a straight up expense. Sales enablement on the other hand more of a Sales opportunity cost. THe function sits in Sales and that department needs to decide if it wants more 'feet on the ground' or 'hands in the air'. If ability to make revenue is slowed by complex non-documented processes or if there is a wave of new hires or a transformational product launch coming up, its definetly worth investing in a stand alond department

Great question! Firstly I question the assertion here. there is NOTHING wrong with a tactical list of activties. Sales enablement owns time-to-productivity. If that means doing a preset task list, that is not necessarily a bad thing. In terms of swimming more upstream I would suggest getting more specific about the definition of time to productivty. Is it the first deal, the first 10 deals, the fist $1M booked etc. To articulate the differences you need to dig into the value each milestone provides to the business. From there you can adjust format. Online vs 1:1 vs group. frequency like bootcamp, ad-hoc, peer based etc. 

Its OK for the line to be muddy. Make sure you have a good working relation with your sales ops counterpart. Usually sales ops and enablement are slightly different functions. sales ops has also revenue ops elements in it around contracting and quoting for example. One common metric outright owned by sales enablement is time to productivity. THis comes from good onboarding, based on Sales understanding the market, product, customer, tools, pricing, quotation process, SOW terms etc. Most of that has little to do with PMM and we should be grateful for sales ops' exisitence. If you find yourself in a situation where there are competing interests, draw an accountability chart. For example, PMM is crealy responsible for creating assets/content acorss the buying journey; sales enablement is clearly responsible for sales process knowledge. Dis/agree with your counterpart and align hierarchies around the RACI. 

Great question. Context matters. Larger companies have a dedicated sales enablement department. They are subject experts at the process of passing on knowledge to Sales. PMM are experts in the subject at hand. For example in the context of a launch, PMM would define message, positiong, pricing etc. with Sales enablement determining the best method of passing this information on. FOr example via a global townhall, a regional sales training or through managers etc.. Subject to format, content may need to be adapted. In smaller companies that lack a dedicated group the process of enabling sales is often mixed with the content sales needs to know.

Are you perhaps stretched too thin with multiple/various buyers. Do you need to do a buying persona exercise vs accelerated sales enablement? Sometime Sales Enablement is over thought. Ultimately it is about facilitating/suppporting the selling process. If you are pursuing many varied buyers, what is the lowest common denominator that covers them and work backwards. For instance, can you get away with the same proposal template? Can sellers be trained at the same time? Is there a common use case? In the abesence of this, simply aling yourself with a few sales leaders and take it from there. 

1. Many companies have a form of President's Club. Congratulate every single awardee. Ask to join them on the next drive-by with prospects/clients. these are the best reps you company has. there is probably a reason they are good 2. Listen in to tele conversation (be it inside our outisde sales). these are always extremely insightful and eye opening. Succinctly telling your story in 20 seconds is so hard. 3. Get to know the sales ops / rev ops team. they are critical partners in providing you with lead / pipeline data 4. Check-in with field marketing. they hvae their feet to the ground in terms of events and campaigns and can give great insight to personality traits of individual sales department members