AMA: Castlight Former Director of Product Marketing, Dave Kong on Sales Enablement

For requests in general, the very first thing i recommend doing is evaluating if the request is within your defined set of PMM responsibilities. If not, I would turn down the request because accepting those sets an unsustainable precedent. If it does fall within your scope, then I generally look at: * Alignment with PMM or business goal * Impact * Reuse-ability * Effort * Confidentiality I, actually, no longer let content requestors set the requirements for content. The requirements you’ll often get typically have a narrow point of view and a specific use case built around the current prospect a sales rep is talking too. As the request comes in, I suggesting talking with the requestor, to understand the goals, desired impact, use cases and then determine your own requirements. For competitive initiatives, yes- they typically fall in the realm of Product Marketing. However, I would go ahead and define the program as a Product Marketing initiative and not let it be defined largely by “one pager requests”. To do that, determine: * What general intelligence is needed? (Most value) - Win/Loss analysis and sales feedback can help with this * What format is appropriate? (Least value) Ask the question: Do you really want to create an external-facing leave-behind that contains competitive intelligence? You can assume that leave behind will be circulated to a competitor. What I regularly remind myself of: Product Marketing has the best ears in the company, so it’s up to you to determine if what you’re hearing is really what your company and market needs. 

I'd break this question out into two separate ones: 1) How do you track internal adoption of sales enablement content? and 2) How do you track internal adoption of sales enablement? 1) How do you track internal adoption of sales enablement content? (heard quite often) If you have a tool (e.g. CMS, other platform, intranet, etc.), * Most tools will have several metrics built-in or capable of being extended: * Clicks / Downloads * Social Feedback * Comments * Reports If you don't have a tool, * Sales surveys / training surveys * Ad-hoc reporting 2) How do you track internal adoption of sales enablement? (the actual question) Content is a piece of the story, but are just indicators to business impact. During GTM Launch * Certification (e.g. pitch, demo, solution-ing, etc.) * If no certification, sales survey / ad hoc feedback GTM Post-Launch * Indicators: revenue, attach rate, content metrics (see above), etc. (based on your GTM goals) * Win/Loss analysis * Sales survey / ad hoc feedback

* Tie to your Pitch — ...so that your combined pitch and demo tells one cohesive story. Tell-show-tell. Tell = pitch where you describe the value of your solution. Show = demo where you demonstrate the capabilities that align to your value. Tell (again) = summarize and connect the value together between pitch and demo. * Use User Scenarios — Think of specific user scenarios that you can tell a story around. This makes it easier to follow and easier to remember. By using a set of core scenarios, you can draw out the value of what you're trying to show. * Check the Language — Simple language / use your buyer’s language — This helps your audience quickly relate to your demo. If you use a term they don’t understand— they’ll likely not ask what it means and thus not understand what you’re trying to say. * Script Formatting — This may not be as intuitive, but I would treat formatting of the demo script to almost the same degree as formatting other marketing collateral. The actual demo script document will need to be easy-to-scan through, easy-to-follow (with labeled sections, images side-by-side by talking points, a demo summary, etc.) and very, very clean. This is often underestimated and the result is that good content and talking points are lost within a densely formatted document. Personally, I use different colors to denote talking points vs customer stories vs stats. Take advantage of the fact that this is an internal document, but treat this like it will be an external one.

For me, I generally start with questions to determine if new content is actually needed (versus piling on to an already long list of requests). In addition, to your examples above... Evaluating If Content Is Needed * What is the asset that you're requesting? * Ask yourself: Does it exist already? =D * What is the goal of the new asset? * Ask yourself: Does it exist already? =D * What part of the sales stage do you think it would benefit? / When would this be used? * What is the main message that you had in mind? Once you get the baseline information, you can then determine if this will fit in with your GTM plan. If it does, you can go further with the goal of developing that new asset.

Well, it’s difficult to “ensure” that anyone is going to use any set of materials. I would look at it from the point of view where PMM's job is to create messaging and materials that sales would want to use. Understand/Build your Voice of the Customer To build initial credibility, it’s essential to champion the voice of the customer. You need to make sure you understand the buyer as well as they do, or your credibility will never get off the ground. Understanding the voice of the customer also means that you're empathetic to what’s going on with your buyer. When you visibly demonstrate this, you can start on a solid baseline when working with sales. Involve Sales in the Process Again, get out of the ivory tower. As you develop core materials, involve them in the process. Heck, they might have some great suggestions, nuggets and insights that may be useful. Do this with good reps that have demonstrated previous success and have a “repeatable style” where lessons can be translated to other reps. Share Usable Insights Sales loves easy to understand insights and anecdotes that they can pull out of a hat. As part of your work stream, build a library or inventory of these where you can use them in messaging and materials. Example: User stories, customer/buyer stories, case studies, data points, etc. 

Check out my reply here, in a previous question. Building on my previous response, I do think about this in those two phases: At launch and post-launch. At Launch At launch, you need your teams to be ready and aligned to the GTM strategy. If a rep cannot effectively pitch, demo, solution with a prospect or a customer, that will extend your sales cycle at the very least. Also, if only some reps are ready, your GTM will end up sending varied or multiple messages to your buyers and influencers in your market... which can have long-term implications. Because this step is so important, I do like a certification process that jointly owned between Sales and Marketing. However, I know that this is not possible at every organization. So in lieu of a certification process, be able to gauge readiness through a survey or other means of feedback is an alternative option. Post Launch When your offering is in the market, I really like making adjustments to your GTM based on Win / Loss analysis and sales feedback. The combination of both should at least give you a baseline of market feedback to form several hypotheses on how to adjust. I also think other traditional sales metrics such as attach rate, revenue, average deal size, etc. can also help as indicators on how your GTM is doing.

Ah, this sounds like a fun prioritization exercise! If sales enablement was just kicking off, I'm assuming that generally marketing and PMM functions are relatively new as well. There's probably a lot of marketing and enablement debt that you're working through right now. I would be really disciplined about identifying initiatives that are going to meet your business goals-- and you'll hate this answer... but it's going to be different for every organization. But in general, I would assess: * Readiness for sales reps * Readiness for sales engineers * Readiness for customer success * Readiness for other channel teams and supporting functions I would think about their readiness across: * Baseline product knowledge * Pitch * Demo * Baseline industry / market knowledge Ask Sales What a nice tactic is to go directly to your sales leadership and ask "If you had a magic wand and could enable your sales team on one thing, what would it be?"

I know that this is sometimes an incredible challenge. I think the challenge specifically is around balance. A balance between: What are metrics indicative of your business / GTM goals? AND What you can control? This requires leadership buy-in from multiple groups — ideally they would understand Marketing and Product Marketing (this is not always the case!) Based on Your Goals, I would then identify metrics. Some examples below: * GTM / Revenue Initiatives —> Before and After Analysis (ideally based on something specific) * Content —> Content Metrics * Support —> NPS