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

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  On the flip side, be sure to manage outdated materials as best you can...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 collection ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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. Ge ...Read More

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 th ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 wor ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 tro ...Read More

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 pitc ...Read More