AMA: Twilio Senior Director, Product Marketing, Vanessa Thompson on Sales Enablement
October 27 @ 10:00AM PT
View AMA Answers
Twilio Vice President Marketing • 5y
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 criti...
2530 Views
6 requests
Twilio Vice President Marketing • 5y
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 customer...
2108 Views
5 requests
Twilio Vice President Marketing • 5y
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). D...
2553 Views
5 requests
How does sales enablement change when your company is b2d (business to developer) vs traditional enterprise?
What should I do differently? Developers do not want to be sold to.
Twilio Vice President Marketing • 5y
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 ...
2156 Views
3 requests
Twilio Vice President Marketing • 5y
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 m...
1923 Views
1 request
Twilio Vice President Marketing • 5y
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 be...
1378 Views
3 requests
Twilio Vice President Marketing • 5y
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 enabl...
2181 Views
2 requests
Twilio Vice President Marketing • 5y
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. Y...
3042 Views
4 requests
Twilio Vice President Marketing • 5y
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 activitie...
1662 Views
5 requests
Twilio Vice President Marketing • 5y
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 larges...
1136 Views
1 request
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?
Twilio Vice President Marketing • 5y
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/narrati...
3192 Views
2 requests
Twilio Vice President Marketing • 5y
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 mod...
2727 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?
Twilio Vice President Marketing • 5y
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). D...
3248 Views
3 requests
Twilio Vice President Marketing • 5y
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 t...
1697 Views
1 request