AMA: Mastercard Director of Product Marketing, Mandy Schafer on Sales Enablement

There are multiple ways I've tried to measure content usage and effectiveness. The most obvious is to be able to have platforms to help you, but I've not always been so lucky to have access to these. Thus, other ways are to set up programs and also do your own analysis. For platforms, I've used Guru and Highspot. I used both of these to store the enablement tools and track the usage (downloads, views, etc). I also really like being able to have access to Gong, which enables me to read transcript ...Read More

Sales enablement should be thought about throughout multiple parts of the GTM process. I like to break these down into 4 stages - Prototype/Design, Early Adopter/Beta, Launch/GA and Post Launch. In the early stage/prototype, sales enablement isn't really a big part, as we don't want to distract sales with early stage ideas that aren't fully thought out. But I would make sure the concept is included in a roadmap/vision to ensure our sales teams understand where we are building and thinking about ...Read More

Often times I find the most vocal sales reps are actually not the best ones to provide you with feedback, and often end up distracting you. I like to form relationships with the most successful sales reps, and the leaders. Those are the ones you can learn from to help the more vocal ones (that are sometimes struggling the most). I also find being close with the sales engineering/solution engineering teams crucial. Most of the time the sales teams are mainly the door openers. They are great at re ...Read More

"Guarantee" is tough one, but a good way to make sure the official product message sticks is to make it stupid simple. I like to keep it to a 3 statement message. Early on when I worked at Oracle, this was a core rule for all PMMs, all our messages must follow a 3 pillar approach. And it all layered back up to the core 3 pillar Company message. So for my product, and this is YEARS the message was Scalable, Reliable and Secure. Then you think back and remember, ok how is it scalable? The story th ...Read More

A good way to ensure alignment between product marketing and sales teams is to set up pre-meetings well before any trainings. Ideally if your company has a sales enablement team, this is where they can come in to help facilitate what is truly required out of the sales enablement. With a launch, this is usually pretty easy since everything is brand new, and you are essentially sharing mainly new material. Often larger sales teams have specific sales methodologies (ie Challenger, MEDDIC, SNAP, Sol ...Read More

As PMM becomes more prominent in the industry, I think it's important to establish what our roles are. The last thing you want to be is a catch all for sales, or end up helping them run their discovery calls. The fine balance between creating the value, but still stepping back enough from the sales calls so the teams can learn to do it on their own is important. Thus to do this, I like to position myself as the strategic partner that comes in when needed, meaning we can come in to answer industr ...Read More

This is bias, but having worked at Miro, I definitely having an interactive whiteboard experience is a great way to deliver sales training in a hybrid environment. A combination of Miro and Zoom/Teams/Google has been my go to method. I like the ability to include polls and have teams interact with stickies on a board. Keeping a sales training interactive is crucial to making sure information retains. If there is the ability to be in person, I also find that much more effective. Again, creating a ...Read More