AMA: Quickbase VP of Product Marketing, Sarah Din on Sales Enablement

This depends on what needle you are looking to move with enablement - are you hoping to shorten your sales cycles or are you hoping to help sales win more competitive deals? Define your KPIs first. The end goal of sales enablement is to move the needle on an actual sales metric - which your team should already be tracking. A secondary measure is measuring sales confidence. If your sales team is enabled well, they should have higher confidence in things like pitching the value of your product. I ...Read More

You want to spend time and resources on creating sales content that will actually be useful to the sale team, and here are two things you need to understand first Have a really good understanding of your sales process, and have a map of what assets you have for each step of the process so you can understand where the gaps are Understand what type of content is working best (for instance, what types of customer stories resonate the most with prospects) so you can double down on that The best way ...Read More

If you have limited resources, the only thing to do is to prioritize. You cannot try to do it all at once, so focus on the ones that will make the biggest impact.  For instance, if you are moving into new sectors - chances are you already have existing enablement materials for existing sectors - so for a quarter or two, you can potentially just focus on the basic list of deliverables you need to get the sales team selling into the new markets. Figure out what is doable with the resources you do ...Read More

There are likely several tools out there that I do not know of, but the ones I liket: - Highspot for hosting and managing sales content - Guru for sharing messaging, content, and things like product information - Loom can be a great way to do quick self-serve enablement - Klue for sharing competitive battle cards - Uberflip can be great for hosting specific content streams  - Notion or Confluence are also great for creating sales content hubs if you don't have a huge budget for an enablement too ...Read More

First, you want to leverage the sales team to get content ideas as you plan. The ideal partnership between marketing and sales is when you are having regular conversations so you always have a pulse on what is resonating in the market. You can also Run a regular survey to gather specific input - whether its on what competitors they come across the most or ideas for topics, etc. Tools like Gong are great because you can passively listen to sales conversations and get ideas  Sometimes Slack channe ...Read More

PMMs should be partnering very closely with sales enablement teams.  The role of PMM is to bring subject matter expertise -such as product knowledge or competitive messaging. PMMs should be responsible for creating sales content and leading training sessions The role of enablement is to understand enablement needs and own the process, and the execution of sales enablement. Sales enablement teams are often thinking much more holistically about sales enablement - its not just product training or m ...Read More

The best way to encourage the sales team to use the right product messaging is to create useful and actionable sales materials with that messaging. If your messaging is simple, easy to understand, and battle-tested to work with prospects then you won't need incentives. Good messaging should make the sales teams' jobs easier. Secondly, make sure you have done a ton of training - just giving the sales team messaging is not helpful if they don't know when and how to use it. Creating certifications ...Read More

The key is to make it easy for them to share this information with you - so make sure you are creating the right channels of communication. Whether it's creating slack channels where these discussions can happen or having more formal sessions to capture that feedback or creating the right fields and processes in Salesforce - whatever you do, you need to make it simple and easy for the sale team to transfer that knowledge to you. Secondly, you want to show the sales team that the insights they gi ...Read More