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

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 how equipped they feel talking to prospects about various topics & the resources they have available. And we run a quarterly Sales Team NPS survey which goes into all aspects of employee satisfaction, including leaving room for feedback. * We also have a regular meeting cadence with sales leadership. So anything that's being talked about in team meetings gets bubbled up in that meeting so we can align on whether its a priority that quarter, or something for our backlog.

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 I would prioritize what they tackled: 1. Go on a listening tour. Talk with every sales leader and rep 1:1. Gather what's working & what's not. Assess onboarding, processes, sales methodology, tools, content, etc. Shadow some sales calls, follow-up AND what a rep does in the system to log activities and move deals forward. 2. As you start to scale your sales channel, creating efficiencies with the headcount you have is critical before you hire a lot more people. Start by partnering with sales ops to document clear, efficient processes that make your funnel really clean. Funnel hygiene will be important for making strategic decisions as you grow. 3. Partner with PMM to make sure reps are well-educated on the target buyer, pain points they have that your product can solve for. Create a pitch certification program. (Note that this is NOT demo training but higher level persona/value training) 4. Evaluate and roll out a sales methodology like MEDPICC, Challenger, or Sandler that the whole team will use - anything that creates rigor and clearly defines the what's needed to move a deal into the next stage. This will help your entire salesforce speak the same language, and will help your sales managers enforce consistent requirements. 5. Before ramping up BDR/AE headcount, get an onboarding program in great shape. 6. Now that you have your fundamentals in place, you can start to get creative by enabling the team with fresh sales plays, larger-scale events like SKO, and product boot camps.

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 items with the expected impact (e.g. will a specific training help increase win rate or deal size?) * Socialize your plan once you have it. To all levels in sales. Make sure they know how you're supporting them and get them excited about your plan. * Publicly celebrate your wins! Think about how you "launch" things internally - what you delivered & the impact it had. The exposure will help you get buy-in for more of these types of initiatives in future quarters.

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 customers needed and how our products solved those problems. If you're looking to transition to PMM from a more technical role, I would lean into your technical expertise in that field while building up other softer skills like: * Communication: all PMMs need to be able to create clear, compelling messaging. If you can clearly explain technical concepts to people, that's a great start. * Project management: PMMs are constantly tackling complex, multi-faceted projects, especially when it comes to product launches * Collaboration: PMMs work with SO many teams and lead by influencing others.

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 research solutions owned keeping tabs on market research companies, while the PMM aligned to the CX persona was responsible for monitoring CX platforms. Whenever there was a main competitor that spanned all product/persona areas, we just assigned an owner. The owner would manage the creation of landscape presentations, product research, and sales battle cards. * We had 1 PMM in charge of our win-loss program, and we rotated focus areas each quarter. For example, one quarter we'd focus on prospect experience, another would focus on a specific product area. * We leveraged a competitive intelligence platform (At SurveyMonkey we've used both Crayon and Klue in the past) to produce feeds for our top competitors. Our Comms team would also flag anything they caught. * We had a public #industry-chatter Slack channel where anyone could drop in competitor news for all to see. At some point, it wasn't effective for CI to be everyone's "side hustle", and we had more than enough work to justify a dedicated person driving the program.

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 really get out of this cycle is by elevating your relationship with sales from the rep level to the leadership level. * Reset the expectation with sales & enablement leaders for how PMM can effectively spend their time supporting their teams. Scaled asset creation and trainings are the best use of time. Ask that individual rep asks get funneled through management. * Document the asks that come in, and ask yourself "how could I uplevel this ask into something that could help the ENTIRE sales team?" is it a new templated asset? a training for how to customize the assets? * Set the expectation with reps in 1:1 conversations when they come to you that there is a new process for working with PMM. If a rep knows they need to ask for something via their manager, that alone may dampen the volume of requests. And that way, requests that DO get through management are the most important to tackle.

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 future quarters. Things we capture in our sales confidence survey include: * Role and tenure for filtering during analysis * Confidence in speaking about the different products in our portfolio * Confidence is speaking to our various personas/buyer profiles * Confidence in speaking to our differentiation across our top competitors * Confidence in the various aspects of the sales process/tools: discovery, pitching value, mapping the right solution to customer need, scoping, pricing & bundling, demos * Ability to identify up-sell / cross-sell opportunities * Satisfaction across content/collateral: one-pagers, pitch decks, thought leadership, case studies, example deliverables, events to share with prospects * Ability to find what they're looking for * Customer hand-offs