AMA: Visa Former Senior Director, Fintech Product Marketing, Charles Tsang on Sales Enablement

This is a bit of an oversimplification, but I boil down measuring sales enablement success into three categories: Usage: This would be the volume of assets developed as well as ways to measure how often they’re utilized. For example, maybe you post your sales collateral to a sales team portal where downloads / views can be tracked. Quality: This is about getting feedback from sales on how useful the collateral you've developed is, which can be gathered informally in discussions with your sales t ...Read More

The answer depends a bit on the situation. Here are two scenarios/examples.  Scenario 1: Sometimes sales has a ton of institutional knowledge around their target customers. This might be because of the history they’ve had around this sales motion/target audience and how long the company has been focused on selling a particular type of product or solution. Using a Visa example, our sales team has had years of experience working on selling our core products to heads of card programs at financial i ...Read More

Fintech is definitely a dynamic and ever evolving space – which makes it super exciting! What’s interesting about Visa’s role here is that we sit at the center as a network and have exposure to and partner with fintechs of various shapes and sizes. So speaking a common language is less of an issue at Visa given our extensive engagement in fintech (we like to think of ourselves as the world’s first fintech). That said, this is a super valid question. Standard messaging documents that sales reps c ...Read More

This is likely something that can differ a bit depending on company and organization, but in general: Sales Ops functions are focused on strategies, systems, and processes related to stuff like sales forecasting, quota assignment, sales comp design, sales coverage, and administration/maintainance of a company's CRM and lead management systems. All this is of course done in service to not only enable sales, but also execute on the desired sales strategy.   Product Marketing's focus on sales enabl ...Read More

I meet with Sales at a minimum once a week, but most of the time several times a week.   What I like to do during these sessions is to: Begin to understand their needs and where they need the most help. For example, as they work on engaging with prospects, are there common sticking points that come up in sales conversations (e.g., pricing, competitive differentiation)? What are those sticking points and why are they occuring? Share a point of view or strawman. Blank sheet discussions to collect ...Read More

This is particularly relevant to Visa given our global nature and the 200+ countries we operate in. The biggest challenge I encounter is how unique each country / market is, and by extension how that influences the customer mindset and how sales should engage with them. That said, although different customers in different countries may think about things in different ways, there are always common denominators. Most companies with global sales teams have some notion of regional hubs or regional H ...Read More

A couple of factors come to mind here. In general, consider what stage of the product lifecycle a particular product is in. That is usually a key factor that will inform the volume of sales enablement support you provide. Another factor to take into account is which product have largest business/revenue opportunity in terms of TAM and growth potential? Most companies have a view on this as budgeting and resourcing decisions (beyond product marketing) have to be made from a top-down level.   So i ...Read More

A lot I could go into here, but I'd oversimplify the steps into a few areas:  Sales strategy and sales model: Start with understanding how this works at your company. How is sales structured - e.g., is it all direct sales, or a mix of direct and indirect? What is the sales coverage strategy - e.g., generalists vs. generalists + specialists? Inside sales vs. outside sales? Do you have named account coverage or do the reps cover territories? These factors play a big role how you'd structure your s ...Read More

In my experience it’s a healthy mix. A few key factors (not exhaustive) can should influence the type (and volume) of sales enablement content you deliver in a quarter: Stage of product lifecycle: How mature is the product and where is it in its lifecycle? This usually will dictate the volume and fidelity of the content you produce. For example, for early stage products, it’s best to keep sales enablement content light as you’re still in the process of assessing early customer feedback Sales fee ...Read More

It's difficult to paint a broad brush stroke answer on this, but as a general rule of thumb: Meet with Sales to understand their expectations and where they need the most help. It all starts with a conversation to understand gaps/opportunities.   In most cases, Sales will look to Product Marketers to help ensure they have impactful content/assets (informed by research/insights) to help them sell. I have not met many sales reps that are interested (or have the time) to develop sales content on th ...Read More