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

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 next. I would keep this very high level. This helps align our sales team with our overall north star and strategy. This goes for the marketing teams as well, who will need to also understand our high level roadmap goals so they can align it to their marketing strategies. During Early Stage/Adopter, this is when I would start training the core teams that would help us with getting beta customers and implementation of the new product. By this time, an initial messaging doc, pitch deck and set of FAQs about the product should be complete. I would train the CSM, Customer Support and Sales Engineering team. At this time I would involve AEs or BDRs until the product is more developed and ready. During this time I would refine my Sales enablement collateral, ensure the messaging is working, identify objection questions and discovery strategy and start building more concerte sales strategies so our salses teams can effectively "hunt" when we go live. The launch is when we go forward with everything in full force. By this time, regional teams should have the right tools including the battle cards, pitch decks, FAQs. A well designed training program should be ready to go for each different group of the sales team- CSM, AE, BDR, SEs (more technical). Post Launch - Once the teams have been armed with the material, this is where we do early sales performance analysis and redesign any training as needed. I would also continue working on scaling the program and collateral with the sales enablement team (if you have one) to ensure there is constant support provided to sales as the product continues to grow in the market and new customers come in.

"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 there was that our databases could handle more data than anyone, and grow, so the product could be used for years to come = a good investment. Reliable - That one was easy, when you sell to DBAs, they want to make sure they didn't make a mistake choosing your product. Their core job depends on data being available when you they need it. This message reminded the sales team to talk about everything that helps makes sure the DBA did not make a mistake choosing Oracle. Secure- This one brought the sales team's minds back to everything we offered from a security aspect. The fact that we had an Identity Management solution, firewalls, our vault product etc. Thus by breaking down key value props you want the sales team to remember, having them categorized into 3 pillars and then expanding on them helps tremendously. I know because I would sit down with the teams and drill them and when they got stuck, I'd go back and say what were the 3 pillars, if you can't remember anything, just focus on the three pillars. From there they can get their brains turning and remembering all the core stories and messages we wanted to say. To this day, I still follow this concept and while it hasn't been a "guarantee" it's been pretty close.

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 transcripts and listen back to sales calls. This saves me a lot of time rather than sitting in on sales call to hear how teams are using the sales enablement collateral. From here I can easily make adjustments or understand what messages have been sticking and what has not. Leveraging Marketing/Sales campaign platforms help as well, as your marketing teams will be sharing your message, content, etc via their email campaigns. BDRs will often use Salesloft to automate their sales emails and you can also track from there what's working and what's not. When these platforms are not fully available, I've set up Win/Loss analysis and interviews, both internally and then with customers. This helps me again understand what content is working and what's not, how it's been affecting the sales process. Continuous and consistent meetings with sales teams is crucial and I think PMMs often don't do this enough. Regular syncs with sales leaders will help see what's working and what's not. I think we often meet with Marketing teams since content creation on the demand generation side is much more frequent, but a lot of times I just see Sales enablement being a one and done thing and continuous feedback is crucial to be able to attribute PMM to sales success.

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 relationships, keeping the accounts engaged and happy, but when digging into the core understanding and usability of the product, your sales engineers are often the ones that have those conversations about how the product works and can help your customers. If you can get a better understanding of what works for them, you can create more relevant messages for the rest of team. Finally, I would focus my time on meeting with the sales leads/leaders. It can often get very loud from all the requests that sales teams have, and hard to filter what's really important. Effective sales leads/leaders can help you break this down, otherwise you'll end up running from one request to another and it becomes hard to prioritize what's really important. Your sales leads can really help you prioritize key initiatives that truly require PMM help, this could be based on the strategic customer size, how the deals are moving, insights into which team members really sell well and those that don't. The biggest issue is when the sales team starts using PMM as a service center and a crutch to them selling. PMMs are there to help, but we can't be beside every sales rep and building unique messages for them.

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, Solution selling, etc) and it's important to align your enablement to this methodology. Thus prior to launch, I would set up meetings to align on: 1) Alignment on target audiences, GTM strategy and messaging. 2) Timing of training and how it should be broken down 3) Who should attend the trainings, who should do the training. 4) Review cycles, who should be included and cadence of review of the sales enablement materials prior to trainings and launch. 5) Identify core competitors, discovery questions, objection handling 6) Core KPIs, how should we be measuring what's correct? Follow up meetings/ trainings, etc. For updates/enhancement to existing products, I would follow the same suit, except to a lesser degree and focus more on understanding what's working, what's not, looking at data to better identify where PMM can make adjustments.

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 industry related questions, or be a product expert. PMM is often talking to Analysts and we can provide that angle to the customer in helping describe where the market is going, why we've built our product the way we did and our strategic vision. These are important points to help move the sales along as it's often a big investment, and customers want to understand the key differentiator of what your product can offer. PMMs work on core differentiators, positioning and key value props, we are often the best to help explain these points during prospect discovery calls.

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 theme, right now we use a University type of training theme with 101, 201, 301 trainings and office hours. Following the education route, having breaks and interactive sections where you play Kahoot, or toss prizes at the crowd helps a lot again to ensure everyone is paying attention and retaining the information. I try to go through the entire sales training before stopping to take questions. You as the PMM worked hard to create a well designed training and it's important you have the opportunity to go through it. By stopping and taking questions along the way can easily throw off the dynamic and lose the momentum you want to keep as you deliver the sale training and narrative. Questions should be either left at the end, or in another session (office hours) where you can keep things conversational and at this time also point back to your initial training to help answer questions. This also gives you more time to think through and work with the sales team on what's not working and what may have worked from the training.