AMA: Dovetail Product Marketing Lead, Alissa Lydon on Sales Enablement

I think the pillars of a great sales enablement program are: Regular touchpoints - sales enablement is a never-ending program. So you must create rituals to show how important the program is and to create the habit where the sales team expects to engage with enablement regularly. Build the habit early and often! Meaningful content delivery - building and maintaining a content library sales can self-service to find what they need can be difficult. But if you take the time to create and continuall ...Read More

This depends on the needs of the sales team that I am working with. But no matter the type of content, what makes it useful for sales is how it can fit into their preferred ways of working. For example, let's say that you want to train the team on updated messaging. You probably have an in-depth messaging guide that tells the broad narrative of your product (problem, solution, and value). You might think that you can just train the sales team on this new story, and leave behind the doc as refere ...Read More

This is a real challenge, and I am curious to hear how other PMMs do this! My suggestion would be to take the onus off of sales in manually tracking how often they are using assets and how effective they are, and instead find ways to proactively get that feedback. One thing that I have done in the past is survey the sales team on which assets they use most frequently. It was a basic Google form that had them rate various assets in our content library (pitch deck, ROI calculator, product one-page ...Read More

The first thing to remember in situations like this is to lead with empathy. Sales is the toughest job in the business. It takes a lot of guts to be on the front lines of go-to-market - cold calling people who don't want to talk to them, pitching solutions to teams that are inherently skeptical, and constantly having to chase the number that determines whether or not they get paid. Just like everyone in the organization, they have a lot on their plate, and it's hard to keep a lot of things in yo ...Read More

Let them do the talking! The longer you present slides, the more likely they are to tune out and not engage. There are a couple of different ways I like doing this: Find a champion within the sales org to help present new information and build credibility. For example, if you want to train the team on a new pitch, recruit a rep with lots of influence who can do some early tests in market, and then have them deliver the pitch and share their learnings in the enablement session. This is a win on s ...Read More

The first thing I would do is take the time to deeply understand what the biggest gaps are for the sales team, and what their immediate needs are. Enablement is such a broad program, and the last thing I want to do is waste cycles building things that the team won't find useful. Where are the quick wins that can jumpstart my enablement efforts? The second thing I would do is make sales enablement a reliable ritual with the team. Set time aside to be in direct contact with the team regularly (per ...Read More

If there's one thing you want to avoid when developing and launching a new sales enablement program, it's rigidity. Too often, I see product marketers who are used to doing things a certain way. They have a framework that has worked in a past life or a playbook that was successful at another company, and they simply want to apply the same process to a new context. Doing this leads to friction that can doom a sales enablement program before it's even started. Instead, I encourage product marketer ...Read More

Sales enablement content planning is a constant push and pull of what's coming from the inside-out (e.g. product launches) versus what's coming from outside-in (e.g. competitor updates). You must address both in your roadmap. Focusing too much on the inside-out will create tension with the sales team as they feel like their needs aren't being met. The risk is that they stop engaging with your content, and no longer give you the valuable feedback your team needs to improve. Focusing too much on t ...Read More

I've found that the best way to get sales excited about giving feedback on how messaging is resonating is two-fold: Make it an ongoing ritual. Set aside regular time that is devoted purely to feedback. Don't wait for sales to take the initiative, and set the expectation that they should prepare feedback for product marketing regularly. Set an agenda beforehand and give them the structure to ease the burden of preparing feedback. If you make things too open-ended, then you won't get the insights ...Read More