AMA: Splunk Sr. Director, Product Marketing - Observability, Michael Olson on Sales Enablement

This is a tough one, and it has been a journey to figure out how to measure the success of the sales enablement work PMMs do. In larger companies with a dedicated field enablement team, there's often better instrumentation and PMMs can partner with another team to activate enablement programs (like certification programs or sales enablement platform/portal implementations), whereas in a start-up, you're much likelier to be DIY'ing it. Here, I think it's critical to look at both leading and laggi ...Read More

Speaking as someone who has created a lot of bad sales playbooks that have collected dust during my career :-), this is a topic that I'm passionate about. Here are the main ingredients that I've found make for a sales playbook that will actually get used by sales teams. Market Primer: Particularly for sales reps who are new to your company or space, I've found it useful to 1) define the market in which we play, 2) the market context/dynamics that are impacting our buyers, 3) the market problems ...Read More

I think this is a symptom of bad persona guidance more than anything else. I have seen a lot of persona guides created by marketing teams that get too cute – with whimsical fake names, esoteric archetypes, information that isn't actionable for sellers (like how prospects feel and how they want to be engaged with), and guidance that's too high level (for example, stating goals like "they want to grow their business" or "they want to save money" are not at the right altitude to be useful for sales ...Read More

I'm a proponent of standardizing the core bill of materials PMM teams produce for sales enablement, both to keep your PMM team focused and avoid one-off requests, and to align with sales teams on what they need and what they can expect. Here are some of the foundational materials that I've found to be most essential at improving the sales team's confidence positioning and selling my products. Depending on what works best for the sales team, I either package all of these components into a cohesiv ...Read More

This answer might come across as tough love, but you need to establish credibility with sales teams and prove your value by demonstrating a deep understanding of 1) the market in which you play, 2) the ideal customer profiles and personas who care about your stuff, 3) their needs, and 4) the competitive landscape, and 5) your differentiation. If you can consistently show up in internal meetings, sales training sessions and sales kickoffs with a mastery of your market, your buyers and how your pr ...Read More

Good sales messaging + proper enablement is the solution to this problem. More often than not, when I've seen a lack of messaging consistency in my sales teams with every sales rep offroading and rolling their own, it's either because our messaging wasn't credible/didn't resonate, or we had an awareness/enablement gap. Here's what good messaging needs to do: Be Relevant: is it germane to your target audience's day job and the things that keep them up at night? Be Differentiated: does it sound di ...Read More

Expanding into an adjacent market (whether via new product introduction, acquisition, or a GTM strategy change) is one of the most fun and challenging resume builders for a PMM. Like with an early-stage startup seeking to establish product-market fit, focus is so important. Don't try to boil the entire ocean all at once. You want to focus your positioning, your messaging, and your sales team's attention on a specific market problem that your new product solves really well, in addition to giving ...Read More