AMA: Snorkel AI Director Of Product Marketing, Molly Friederich on Sales Enablement

This is a passion area for me! I work to carve out time for learning and exposure. It's always tough when you have pressing timelines for deliverables, but that work will be far more efficient and strategic when you invest in time for the fundamentals. Here are a few things I invest in doing: Know the team. Be of value to them. * Go where your sales team is, be a fly on the wall in the places they discuss their goals and strategies (live or async). Have Gong? Download the app. It's a treasure trove. * Build off of your familiarity from these team settings to reach out to a diverse sampling of your Sales teammates. Ask them for 30 minutes 1:1 to talk through a deal they're working, and brainstorm how you can help support them. Listen for where they've discovered great strategies and where they're strugling. Know the customer. Be present with them. * Create channels for yourself and your team to get regular insight to your prospects and customers. The more direct, the better. * Set up a win-loss program (start by doing a call or two informally!) to get feedback from prospects about their path to purchase, goals, etc while it's fress. Capture this information, make it visible internally, and take action. You have 2 periphery jobs here: 1) build a relationship with the champions among new customers to plant customer story seeds and 2) be a markedly positive "last touch" among lost deals to keep doors open for the future. * Identify and lurk among the forums, medium digests, etc. where your audience lives. Steep yourself in what they're soaking up. Get inspired. 

If the playbooks are insightful and get used... I'm not frustrated! ;) Creating sales playbooks is frustrating when we're in a loop of perfection over progress. Oftentimes we forget how powerful a small amount of clear, digestible insight can be over an incredibly robust, in-depth asset. I picked up a mantra from a consultant that I love: "consumable over comprehensive." Adding depth over time is both more sustainable for you as a PMM and more digestible and actionable for your stakeholders. Get the most important concepts landed, then expand.

This is a big question, but my simple answer is they're part of an ongoing, mutually-informing cycle. As PMMs we need to inform sales strategy in terms of ICP, personas, motivations, positioning, competitive insights, etc—all the fundamentals. This work only matters if we're able to deeply enable the team by bringing those insights to life and reinforcing them regularly, and then gathering feedback to inform fine-tuning. 

Congrats! Can you share more about your current context? Is this a new role for the team, or are you stepping into an established function? This will likely inform how much/what type of expectation your stakeholders have... Are there critical existing deliverables to keep in the air? Do they have pent up anticipation for key value you'll bring? If it's new, I'd start with evaluating the biggest gaps and start where the impact will be the largest. Does everyone fumble through an inconsistent pitch deck? Do they have trouble positioning against competitors on calls? Form an opinion yourself, and then present options to your stakeholders for input/alignment. 

This is tough to measure quantitatively without tooling in place to track how often collateral is used, so if that's an option for you, start there. Then be curious about what assets are used most often because they're familiar/readily available, and what assets are actually the most strategic. Without tooling, the goal is to create regular (e.g., quarterly) opportunities for your sales team to provide feedback on what they use and why. This doubles as an opportunity to reinforce everything that's available and gather ideas for high-impact new assets! This is also a great topic for win/loss interviews you're able to schedule. Ask the prospects about the collateral they've seen, what they took away from it, and what (if anything) they shared themselves. It's also a key opportunity to ask what they "learned the hard way" (or were never able to learn at all).

This is tough to measure quantitatively without tooling in place to track how often collateral is used, so if that's an option for you, start there. Then be curious about what assets are used most often because they're familiar/readily available, and what assets are actually the most strategic. Without tooling, the goal is to create regular (e.g., quarterly) opportunities for your sales team to provide feedback on what they use and why. This doubles as an opportunity to reinforce everything that's available, how it maps to core positioning and messaging priorities, and gather ideas for high-impact new assets!

We have been experimenting with a monthly recorded demo presented as a webinar. Our teams can then share out that latest recording with customers and they're never more than a month out from the latest product greatness. By nature of being a webinar, it saves us from the curse of perfection—we record it live, it does a great job of conveying the value, and we don't obsess over every phrasing. 

Great question! I am biased, but I LOVE having a dedicated Sales Enablement partner, so I'd say the sooner the better. They're able to focus entirely on the enablement strategy, what's working well for sales, what isn't, the biggest opportunities for impact, balancing their cross-team learning priorities, etc., and share that back to PMM to optimize effectiveness. PMM will always be juggling sales enablement with product messaging, core positioning, customer research, etc. 

Repetition is so important; it's about embodying the messaging in everything PMM produces, and as you enable on different assets, tying it back to the strategy. Show examples of how key points can come to life in an outbound email, provide them with quick-reference bullets that they can use as reminders of what to always reinforce in their communications. If you're rolling out a new deck, don't just train on it one time. Introduce it, have strong reps or leaders demonstrate delivery. Show it working in the field. Give opportuntiies for them to role play and practice pitching. Ask the team what makes sense and doesn't. Lastly, we use Gong, and I love sharing snippets of calls where the messaging was delivered well (and even where customers essentially play back our messaging to us!). 

Love what you have already! Do you have budget for qual research incentives? This is a huge gift if you can offer $100 to target personas to provide feedback on messaging, or to prospects for win/loss interviews, etc. Also consider a recruiting tool like Respondent.io if you are running out of low-hanging fruit from networking / site pop-ups / LinkedIn recruiting.

Regular reminders and reinforcement! Sales teams obviously face a ton of pressure to hit quota, and they need to be as efficient as possible... And while some are awesome at experimentation, many will struggle to adopt new assets/messaging when they're moving fast and rely on what's familiar. On the flip side, be sure to manage outdated materials as best you can... If there are old decks/n-pagers floating around, label them as such, and if you see things pop up from people's "private collections" send them a note with the latest and greatest and ask them to replace. Make it as easy as possible to use a new asset (discoverable, clear guidance) and then showcase where it has been impactful for other reps. Nothing like an internal case study to motivate your team! 

I'm excited to hear others' thoughts here... I've tried a number of approaches in the past, but haven't nailed a totally scalable one. In an ideal state, it starts with Product Marketing doing the critical work of establishing positioning and messaging, including the key long-term themes for market comms. Your sales team is a critical conduit to defining this together. Once you have your platform defined and documented, then it's about inventorying what you have available and discovering from your team what they're aware of, what they use, and what's working/not. You'll also use this step to map what you have to your positioning/messaging priorities. From there, grounded in a collective understanding of current state and priorities, you're ready to take ideas from the team! You can do this in group sessions on a quarterly basis to ideate what the best use of PMM calories will be for the quarter against an appropriate number of deliverables. Be transparent about the effort required and ask them to think about the impact in a stack-rank fashion... Using a prioritization framework like RICE is a great tool here. As with anything, pick off 1-2 things you can try at a time, tackling the entirety of this post at once could be daunting!

Congrats, scrappy startup phase is exciting, lots of opportunity to make a big impact! I suggest starting by getting a baseline understanding of their sales cycle today. What has their approach been? Where are they seeing success, and where are they bottlenecked? Your focus should be different if they're not able to get in the door (help them with ICP insights and positioning for outbound targeting!) vs. struggle to get from first call to pitch (work on discovery questions!). As you go through the sales cycle with the team, "feed two birds with one scone" by mining for customer stories among the wins they've landed. Package those up into callouts for outbound emails! Given you asked about process, I'd focus on a regular cadence of connection between you and the sales team to build a relationship and shared understanding of priorities in an ongoing manner. Use that time to learn what the latest experiments have been, and how you can build on what they're seeing works.