Vanessa Thompson

AMA: Twilio Senior Director, Product Marketing, Vanessa Thompson on Sales Enablement

October 27 @ 10:00AM PST
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Twilio Senior Director, Product Marketing, Vanessa Thompson on Sales Enablement
Top Questions
Vanessa Thompson
Vanessa Thompson
Twilio Vice President MarketingOctober 27
I love this question, <3 Developers! The fundamentals of sales enablement dont change, it's more the way you communicate the needs of your audience to your sales team that changes. If we unpack developers and what they want, then it makes it really easy to figure out how to approach sales enablem......Read More
1962 Views
3 requests
Vanessa Thompson
Vanessa Thompson
Twilio Vice President MarketingOctober 27
Get out in the field as often as you can and meet with customers but also seek out the super star sellers and find out their secrets to success. Your goal should be to become a trusted advisor to the sales team. This means you have the ability to diagnose problems and challenges that the sales te......Read More
1307 Views
3 requests
Vanessa Thompson
Vanessa Thompson
Twilio Vice President MarketingOctober 27
1) A (first call) pitch deck. This is a fantastic unifying asset that will help you hone your narrative and it can also serve as an educational tool for the sales team. You can use the pitch to walk through your logic and approach and then refine it based on specific feedback from your sales team......Read More
2600 Views
4 requests
Vanessa Thompson
Vanessa Thompson
Twilio Vice President MarketingOctober 27
This is really dependent on your org, how big you are, and your overall coverage model. In general though, it's a partnership. I view the relationship with my sales enablement partner as one of the two most important relationships I need to build in the company (the other being product). You need......Read More
1458 Views
2 requests
Vanessa Thompson
Vanessa Thompson
Twilio Vice President MarketingOctober 27
There is a bit to unpack in your question here so i'll focus on the product release element. We ‘size’ each release and the associated size determines a list of activities for that release.  We use tee-shirt sizing so as an example, if a release is defined as a Large (where we go from S to XL),......Read More
1619 Views
5 requests
Vanessa Thompson
Vanessa Thompson
Twilio Vice President MarketingOctober 27
We are heavily involved in the Sales Kick off so that's where we focused our time and energy. At Twilio, we break out Sales Kick off from the main Company Kick off so I make sure to participate in all the forums where decisions are being made as well as listen to my stakeholders (and listen to th......Read More
1746 Views
1 request
Vanessa Thompson
Vanessa Thompson
Twilio Vice President MarketingOctober 27
This is a great tactic. Research is a great way to drive energy and excitement around a ‘theme’ you want to focus on. I have done this before and it was the single largest pipeline driver for us. We connected the campaign and promotion with another in-person event so that we were streamlining and......Read More
1058 Views
1 request
Vanessa Thompson
Vanessa Thompson
Twilio Vice President MarketingOctober 27
The best tool you can ever have is a great relationship with your sales leaders and super star sellers. Building empathy and truly understanding their challenges is critical to your success. We use Highspot as our knowledge base and document repository. It works well for us and each product PMM ......Read More
1827 Views
6 requests
Vanessa Thompson
Vanessa Thompson
Twilio Vice President MarketingOctober 27
I meet with someone in sales, in some capacity, every few days. Before I hopped into this AMA, I was listening in (live) to a roundtable discussion with some key customers hosted by a product leader. Even though I was in “listen” mode, it was great to hear directly from customers about what they ......Read More
1440 Views
5 requests
Vanessa Thompson
Vanessa Thompson
Twilio Vice President MarketingOctober 27
Similar to the response around growth, adding some color here.  I encourage my team to be the ‘mini CMO’ for the products they cover. That means the single biggest metric to measure is pipeline (with a focus on pipeline generation). Depending on the specific in-quarter activities we have goin......Read More
1864 Views
5 requests
What is your approach to building, managing, and using competitive intel for product/ sales/ marketing strategies without dedicated resources?
For companies without dedicated resources for competitive intel/ analysis, how do you ensure its contribution to product development and/ or sales & marketing strategies? How should this be regularly practiced/ managed by PMMs?
Vanessa Thompson
Vanessa Thompson
Twilio Vice President MarketingOctober 27
This is a great question too. Competitive is one part of the “swiss army knife” of skills a product marketer needs in their skill belt (others being, storytelling/narrative building, relationship building, public speaking, data analysis, etc). My approach is that every product marketer needs to ......Read More
2545 Views
2 requests
Vanessa Thompson
Vanessa Thompson
Twilio Vice President MarketingOctober 27
The ultimate goal of sales enablement is to make sure the sales team is equipped to sell but also, they should “sell what's on the truck.” You can use the same mental model to justify the amount of sales enablement as you do when prioritizing: 1) Where are the biggest areas of opportunity? Are th......Read More
2165 Views
2 requests
How do you measure the contribution of Product Marketing to the growth result?
Oftentimes, PMM does not directly execute the campaign but rather provides a foundation or collaterals for sales and marketing to use. How do we calculate our percentage of contribution to the final results?
Vanessa Thompson
Vanessa Thompson
Twilio Vice President MarketingOctober 27
I encourage my team to be the ‘mini CMO’ for the products they cover. That means the single biggest metric to measure is pipeline (with a focus on pipeline generation). Depending on the specific in-quarter activities we have going on around sales enablement, we can see a dedicated focus on sales......Read More
2180 Views
3 requests
Vanessa Thompson
Vanessa Thompson
Twilio Vice President MarketingOctober 27
Prioritization is always tough. Every stakeholder has a different perspective on what they are looking to achieve. The ultimate goal of sales enablement is to make sure the sales team is equipped to sell and i’d also add they should focus on “selling what is on the truck.” To share a bit more of......Read More
1111 Views
1 request