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

I don't think there is a magic list of items you must have for B2B sales enablement. Every product is different and likely has a different sales process - which will impact the assets you develop. But the most typical ones can be: * A master pitch deck that can be customized by the sales team * A ton of great case studies * Competitive battle cards against your top 5 competitors * Demo videos - videos are always high on every sales list * one-pagers to summarize your value prop

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 messaging training - they are also focused on onboarding or training teams on sales methodologies like Sandler, etc.

This is a typical issue when you have both a self-serve item and an enterprise item. The most important thing is to have clear differentiation in your packaging and then clearly articulate that differentiation for the sales team so that they understand how to pitch the value of your enterprise package. It is also really important that you have a very clear GTM strategy for Enterprise with a very distinct ICP - you should not be targeting the same audience for both packages, to begin with.

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 have run quarterly sales confidence surveys that really help you understand if your efforts are making a difference.

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 is one way of doing that as well.

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 give you are actually taken into consideration and make an impact - whether you update your messaging to reflect their feedback or whether it shows up on the product roadmap in some way - you want some positive reinforcement that will encourage the teams to share more feedback on what they're learning!

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 tool

The only way to ensure that is to have a really strong and clear messaging strategy that is documented and shared across your entire company. That should also consistently reflect in any sales content you create to make that more actionable - so if you deliver really great sales pitch materials, the team will actually use them Secondly, do continuous training.

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 channels can be a great resource for ideas * Have more formal cross-functional meetings between sales/GTM enablement and PMMs to discuss content as you do things like quarterly planning Secondly, you want to involve sales in the content review process. Your sales team is your internal customer so you want to make sure to get their input as you develop content and make sure it is useful to them

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 have and then focus on a few things at a time!

I have never worked at a company where the sales team did not get excited about a new product or persona - this typically means a larger market for them to sell to. The goal with any enablement is to make sure you are clearly defining why this is important, and how it will help them sell more to hit their numbers.

The best way is to use sales feedback to show improvement over time. You can easily do that by measuring things like sales confidence using a survey to show performance improvement over time. You can also just run feedback surveys post-training to capture feedback on the training itself. The other things you can directly attribute to sales enablement can be things like shorter sales cycles over time, improvement in win-rates or improvement in competitive win-rates, etc.

The best way is to use tools that give you these analytics. I have used tools like Highspot and Guru that make this much more automated. The other way to do that is using some sort of intranet, like Confluence to host this content so you can track use. At the end of the day, you always want to augment any of that with actual sales feedback. You can run monthly or quarterly sales feedback surveys and directly ask the team which pieces of content have been the most effective and why.

As a PMM your job is not just to create the content, but you also want to make sure you are training them and providing the right context. * You can do self-serve training using LMS tools or video tools like Loom - and share that as you launch new content * You can run live (virtual or in-person) training workshops and sessions (if you have an enablement team, partner with them) * Host office hours so people who have questions can come to you for answers

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 1. 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 2. 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 is to simply ask your sales team what they want/need to be more successful - you can do surveys or get anecdotal input or if you use tools like Guru or Highspot then you can look at analytics for more data to inform your content planning.