AMA: Brandfolder Former VP of Marketing, James Winter on Sales Enablement

Pat and Sean did a great job answering with some more tactical approaches so I'll be brief with a couple tips. There are purpose built tools like Inkling that can be a great way to enable massive sales teams, but they require a ton of investment to do well. Webinars and quizzes are things that work well remotely. Salespeople are competitive so use that to your advantage. If you have a massive sales team, you should also have the budget to get some outside help to help train them. I’d recommend hiring a professional services firm to make sure the training doesn’t consume all of your time.

INTERNAL TRAINING MATERIALS/DECK Education should always be a big part of launching the product. The first thing you need to accomplish is getting the sales team to actually care about whatever it is that you're launching. Try not to make this overly academic, make sure you're getting the point across as to what the opportunity is for the sales person to make money. BETA/EARLY ADOPTER CASE STUDIES I always try to avoid launching products without a couple of well produced case studies from early adopters/beta users. LEAVE BEHIND MATERIALS Could be a deck, a one pager, something that you can leave with the customer after pitching. RELEVANT PERSONAS This may not always be relevant, but if you're going after a new segment, decision maker, user etc.. It's important for the sales team to be able to conceptualize and empathize with the person they're going to be selling to. VIDEO I'm a huge believer in video. Video content gets more engagement than any other type of content. You can get more information across in a well produced two minute video than you can often do more damage with a two minute video than a long ebook or whitepaper. WEB CONTENT Gotta have a good representation on the product page! There are of course more, but I agree with Steve that it's better to wait a little after the product launches to see where the needs are. For example,