AMA: Meta Product Marketing Lead, Facebook for Business & Commerce, Alex Lobert on Sales Enablement

I recommend a two-part approach to getting sales feedback on sales collateral: 1. Create a sales council: Identify a small set of sales team members that are motivated to provide feedback on sales collateral — what’s working, what isn’t, what’s missing. These sales members are often the ones responsible for accounts that are heavy users of a particular product. These people will typically have deep, actionable feedback that will drive immediate results with your key customers. 2. Collect always-on feedback that is periodically reviewed: Have a mechanism for collecting always on feedback on sales collateral — this could be a slack group, a google doc, a workplace post. But to make this scalable, set expectations that feedback won’t necessarily be implemented immediately, but rather on a schedule like quarterly or once a half. Using both of these approaches gives you a way to get deep, focused feedback from a small motivated group, while also leveraging the collective insight of your broader sales organization.

To create your sales enablement roadmap identify the opportunity you need to capture, uncover the barriers to adoption, and then deliver new materials and activations that address those barriers. 1. Identify the Opportunity: Which segment or customers do you need to drive action from? And what action do you need them to take? If you start from a clear target (who + what), you will be able to craft tactics that get you to that outcome. 2. Uncover Barriers: What is holding back your target customers from taking the desired action? This can be identified for qualitative research with customers and sales teams. Be sure to fully evaluate your pitch / sales motion. Are customers struggling with implementation and require new set-up materials? Do sales team members struggle to pitch you product and need more education? Are sales teams unable to prove to customers the value of your product and you need new proof points? 3. Address the Barriers: Create a plan to launch your new materials and education programs. Once you know what you need to build, this is typically the easy part. Don’t forget to build measurement into your plan.

I recommend a combination of training, support, and ongoing refreshers / support. 1. Comprehensive Training: First and foremost, you need to develop a training program. This might as simple as a webinar / presentation to your sales organization or as involved as an on-demand training course. You will want to discuss the features and benefits of the product as well as how to use resources to support the sales process. If possible, make sure the training is hands-on and interactive to keep the team engaged. 2. Documentation: Provide clear, easily accessible documentation for both the selling tools and the products. With my teams, we regularly provide pitch materials (presentations), quick reference guides (1-pagers), FAQs, and supporting video content. 3. Ongoing Refreshers & Support: Products evolve, so it’s important to update trainings and materials to ensure the sales team has the latest information. Also, ensure that sales people have experts they can go to for support in pitching the product. This might be technical resources like sale engineers or product experts within the sales team / broader organization.

To assess the performance of sales enablement materials, I recommend using a mix of feedback and usage data. 1. Feedback. Regularly gather feedback from the sales team through surveys or interviews about the usefulness, relevance, and user-friendliness of the materials. This type of direct feedback can highlight what’s working and what’s not. This approach also allows you to target feedback from critical sales representatives / customer segments. 2. Usage Data: Leverage analytics tools to track how often sales enablement materials are being accessed and used. High engagement levels can be a good indicator of perceived value by the sales team. Usage data like downloads can miss insight into repeat use of a material though, also it is blind to “why” a given item is used. This information can further guide feedback gathering though.

My team is probably tired of hearing me tell them to “think like a business owner.” But that is the frame I recommend when making prioritization decisions — including sales enablement. Very tactically, I believe this means using your finite resources to get the biggest return for the business. In this case that means asking two questions: 1. Which product lines have the largest incremental opportunity for the business? 2. And which would benefit the most from improved sales enablement? 3. What is the investment to implement the sales enablement Product opportunity is a function of business strategy mind you. In some cases you may want to grow a product that does not have the highest short-term revenue opportunity if it is important to the long-term success of your business. Determine which product benefits from sales enablement is often a function of product and /or sales cycle complexity. For example, ads products that only require a check-box to implement typically benefit little from sales enablement. However, more complicated solutions — like setting up a data integration — may require in-depth and regularly updated materials and training. Finally, it’s important to assess how difficult it is to create the required sales enablement materials. Highly-produced videos require more time and money than a summary one-pager. Be sure to evaluate cost when making your prioritization decision.