AMA: Zeplin Director of Product Marketing, Calvina Cheng on Sales Enablement

The roadmap deck should be created by PM and PMM. Ultimately PM will have the best understanding of the upcoming features with dates of releases, but PMM is responsible for ensuring that the messaging and benefits are clear in the roadmap deck (you don’t want just a punch list of features).  Once the features are clear, we also include a talk track for Sales/Success teams so they are comfortable presenting the information. The flow of the roadmap deck starts with current features that have been ...Read More

Below are just a few metrics that are useful when tracking sales enablement success: Lead-to-opportunity and/or lead-to-customer conversion rate. If more leads are converting to opportunities over time, and/or if more leads are converting to customers over time, then Sales is getting better at delivering the right message and closing their deals. Competitive win rate. Overall win rate is good to track, but that depends on many other factors. Competitive win rate is more specific to the content a ...Read More

I’ve created competitive webpages in the past and that’s been a huge success with sales. Whether you make these webpages easily accessible on your website (top nav or elsewhere) is a good discussion to have with your growth team. These webpages are so useful to sales because any time they are asked about our (top x) competitors, they can easily bring up those pages, talk through the key differentiators, and then follow up with an email to share these pages with their prospects. Slides and/or one ...Read More

The more time, the better! We just had a Tier 1 launch at the end of January, and we had our first enablement session back in October! Our GTM Crew always wants to know more information, earlier, so we always try to start early and include a steady drip of enablement sessions up until launch day. Depending on how big the launch is, you could have an enablement session every 4-6 weeks with topics like (1) Kick-off: [New product launch], (2) Messaging & Competitive, (3) Product demo & reso ...Read More

I meet with the sales leaders and sit with the AEs on a regular basis to understand what’s useful, how they’re using the enablement materials, and where the gaps are. Even though sometimes we think we’ve done a ton of training on a certain topic (new feature launch, competitor), if it’s not relevant for sales in the moment, they might not remember the training or that we even have certain assets to help them. At that point, PMM can join smaller team meetings to review material and/or hold anothe ...Read More

I’d say it’s 50/50. Sales will always have lots of ideas and requests :) On the other side, I don’t want to spend my time creating content that Sales won’t use. It’s a good practice to understand WHY Sales is requesting certain content. Sales might request a detailed feature-by-feature competitive matrix, when you have your key competitive differentiators on a LP/webpage that’s easier to share with prospects. Then, it’s good to have an agreed calendar (w/ the Sales leads) of what you’ll produce ...Read More

I have a running list of all the sales collateral requests that come in. The list always gets longer, as you can imagine! The sales leads also have access to this list, so there’s full transparency on the ask, who requested it, the level of effort required, and expected due date.  I’d recommend meeting with the sales leads on at least a quarterly basis to review these requests (and any new ones that may come in) and expected date for deliverables since that helps with prioritization. Also, by jo ...Read More

We recently held a GKO (GTM Kick Off) with Sales/CS; Marketing attended the ones that were most relevant for them. Here’s a rough schedule: Day 1: CRO kick off, Marketing 2022 Roadmap, Customer story 1, Product 2022 Roadmap, Sales Methodology / Rev Ops, 1st Call Deck training, Customer story 2 Day 2: Pop quiz, Customer story 3, Product demo training, Competitive workshop, Discovery questions session, Storytelling workshop, X-func. panel discussion (topic could be how you use your own product) Da ...Read More