AMA: SurveyMonkey Senior Director, Head of Product & Solutions Marketing, Morgan Molnar on Sales Enablement

There are several small ways to measure whether Sales is properly enabled: training quizzes, shadowing sales calls, 1:1 conversations with reps. But my favorite way to do this at scale is with sales confidence surveys. SurveyMonkey has a template you can get started with: https://www.surveymonkey.com/templates/sales-enablement-template/ We measure sales confidence every quarter to help us identify where we are improving as well as gaps in knowledge. This helps us shape our enablement roadmap for ...Read More

We are lucky enough to have someone on our product marketing team dedicated to Competitive Intelligence today, but before she joined, this is how we approached it with shared resources: Our strategy team was in charge of broader market level analyses, while PMM produced research and content for specific competitors. Each PMM was responsible for a specific product area and persona. In many cases, those product areas aligned with specific competitors. For example, the PMM aligned to our market res ...Read More

To be hiring sales enablement at all, the sales team is likely a size where scaled processes & training is needed. There are likely marketing resources in charge of things like content and collateral. There are likely already other resources on staff who can speak to the technical aspects of the product and implementation. So, even though I'm in product marketing, I'd actually advise against starting with product training. If I were to make my first-ever hire in Sales Enablement, here's how ...Read More

If you've worked with sales teams before, you know that there is no shortage of ideas they have for marketing ;) Here are a couple scalable forums we use to gather feedback on enablement, content, collateral, and other marketing programs: We have a "sales-suggestion-box" Slack channel. Our head of sales personally monitors that channel, responds to reps, and prioritizes the action items. We send a couple different surveys throughout the quarter. We have a sales confidence survey that asks reps h ...Read More

The best way to make the space for balancing larger, longer term strategic projects with reactive, transactional projects is through transparent roadmap planning. Some advice for doing this well would be: Gather inputs from your sales stakeholders as you begin planning. Especially from the leadership level. Make sure you account for that balance in your roadmap. Carve out time for small things you know will arise, but also leave room for strategic projects and trainings. Associate your roadmap i ...Read More

I see it all the time! I am a researcher-turned-product marketer at a tech company in the research industry. When I joined SurveyMonkey, I started as a solution consultant with technical research methodology expertise. I was a subject matter expert that was brought in to "talk the talk" with prospects and clients. Being in a customer-facing technical role HUGELY prepared me for a role in product marketing. I became an expert in our industry, product, methodology, and customer. I knew what custom ...Read More

Ohhhh man, I've been here! I cringe thinking back to when I would help sales reps customize individual sales decks. Never again! I started to break free of this first by only saying 'yes' to requests that could help the ENTIRE team. For example, if there was a request for a slide that made sense to include in our comprehensive pitch deck, we'd consider it. If the ask was for a piece of collateral that would resonate with an entire persona (not just one client), we'd consider it. The way you real ...Read More