Sales Enablement

Good question - to have to pick is tough but if I must, here are the main things I think every sales rep needs in their bag to be successful:  (1) First Call Deck / Pitch Deck  (2) Competitive Battlecard(s) (including how to place traps / how to arm against competitor's traps - shields/swords type of thing) (3) Tough Q&A Log with really hard questions that a likely customer is to ask (4) Value Map(s)  (5) Customer Stories

First, divide your efforts into “sales plays” (or depending on your company’s terminology they might be “sales motions” or “use cases”). Sales plays should each have a revenue target attached to them, and collectively, the revenue across all your sales plays should total the entire new business revenue goal. Next, define your “bill of materials” (assets) for each sales play. For our business, we have a Conversation Starter (2-4pg PDF of key market problem and our solution), Discovery Questions/Answers, Customer Pitch Deck, Internal Enablement Deck, Competitive Positioning, and Customer Success Stories. These are the assets I would prioritize creating, but this can be a lot, so you should also prioritize against your sales plays in terms of respective revenue goals.

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. 2) A mid-funnel eBook. It might sound a little strange that this is on the line up so high, but now that we are all working from home, the selling cycle is a bit different. Leaving a prospect with something they can consume on their own time is critical to move the sales cycle along. The benefit for you as a PMM in building an asset like this is that you get to keep refining your narrative, while expanding on some of the specific benefits. 3) A two-page leave behind. This is an asset where you can focus on your value prop, customer benefits, and highlight the success of current customers. 4) A short and pithy internal asset that covers detailed discovery and objection handling. Starting the conversation can be the most challenging for a rep so giving them really solid evidence and empathetic discovery questions can give them confidence to ask the tough questions. 5) A high-level competitive landscape. Do you know the major companies you are competing against and why you are better positioned? It's never a good idea to get caught up in what your competitors are doing, you should always be focused on your customers. But it's good hygiene to know what gotchas to look out for from a competitive perspective.

If you have product marketing and sales enablement as separate functions, asset creation should be owned by product marketing for the most part. Anything sales enablement creates should be in support of helping sales consume the content that’s already built — such as talk tracks, discovery questions, conversation narratives, etc. I tried limiting to 5, but I’ll share 7 basics (lucky you) I would ensure sales have in their hands to sell effectively: 1. Buyer personas - Can you really sell if you don’t thoroughly understand who you sell to? 2. Solution summary 1-sheet - send ahead or leave behind. This is essential in getting sales on the same page on the product benefit story, and also having a quick way to answer product questions for the prospect 3. Core pitch and product demo  - this is typically a deck with a narrative. But you don’t always need a deck. Some of the most effective salespeople I know never use a deck. They talk through discovery and use the company’s website and product demo to show and tell. 4. Discovery questions - Most deals break at discovery. Having a playbook to consistently understand the prospect is absolutely key. 5. Outbound sequences - I think everyone in sales should be prospecting, no matter their role. Providing consistent email templates and call scripts will be very helpful in driving consistent results. 6. Customer case study - you can toot your horn all you want. But buyers like me will want to see evidence of your claims. Providing a scrappy case study of a customer story that includes testimonials and proof of ROI is essential. 7. Competitive battlecards - you rarely sell in a vacuum. Helping your team prepare for the forces that influence the sale outside of your control is important.

My answer would change depending on what we're talking about (B2b Marketing program vs Sales enablement program). For a sales enablement program: 1. Pitch Deck 2. Product use case glossary 3. Case study 4. Discovery question list or Demo video 5. (this isn't necessarily an asset) Prospecting lists / target account lists w/ enriched data

I don't think there is a magic list of items you must have for B2B sales enablement. Every product is different and likely has a different sales process - which will impact the assets you develop. But the most typical ones can be: * A master pitch deck that can be customized by the sales team * A ton of great case studies * Competitive battle cards against your top 5 competitors * Demo videos - videos are always high on every sales list * one-pagers to summarize your value prop

Are you perhaps stretched too thin with multiple/various buyers. Do you need to do a buying persona exercise vs accelerated sales enablement? Sometime Sales Enablement is over thought. Ultimately it is about facilitating/suppporting the selling process. If you are pursuing many varied buyers, what is the lowest common denominator that covers them and work backwards. For instance, can you get away with the same proposal template? Can sellers be trained at the same time? Is there a common use case? In the abesence of this, simply aling yourself with a few sales leaders and take it from there. 

Prioritize the top sectors - pick 2-3 and then build a playbook you can replicate. I would also say, set realistic expectations with your GTM teams so they understand your limited bandwidth and be clear on what you can get to and what you can't. Work with your sales and CS leadership in terms of focus and priority (product training, onboarding, systems training, etc.) so that there's clear alignment as well! 

If you have limited resources, the only thing to do is to prioritize. You cannot try to do it all at once, so focus on the ones that will make the biggest impact.  For instance, if you are moving into new sectors - chances are you already have existing enablement materials for existing sectors - so for a quarter or two, you can potentially just focus on the basic list of deliverables you need to get the sales team selling into the new markets. Figure out what is doable with the resources you do have and then focus on a few things at a time!

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 to build tight alignment on what each team does and doesn't do. At the highest level, I think about the division of duties as an input and output model. We (PMM) work on all the enablement inputs, content, decks, objection handling, other assets and collateral, and the sales enablement team works on the output, i.e. execution and alignment with the sales team. The enablement team owns the enablement editorial calendar and the ultimate delivery to the field.

Here’s how I see both roles coming together  * Both: Either can bring up if there’s a topic of interest either from sales or there is a specific product activation/training need * Sales enablement – Expertise is to ensure curriculum design and also project managing the entire process; They tend to have a broader view on what other trainings are happening and are invaluable to ensure that our teams are not overtrained. * Product marketers – Working on the content and bringing it to live for the teams taking the training. They tend to have specific expertise on a topic/product There are certain grey areas around who designs the decks, who invites other people to co-present etc. But in these cases, what I’ve found worked well is discussing this early on who to take on which aspect of the process.

* Generally, product marketers and sales enablement should work hand-in-hand as they are some of the most cross-functional roles in any organization. Because of their cross-functional nature, these roles need to be closely connected in order to coordinate messaging, launches, new asset distribution, new campaigns and more across multiple functions and departments.  * Organizationally, it’s not uncommon to have sales enablement and product marketing sit in the same org, with some of the roles of sales enablement (such as time to ramp, % of reps at quota, etc.) owned by a sales or revenue operations role which sits in the sales org.  * Functionally, Product Marketing is going to own the narrative. PMM typically works across the organization to help understand and give shape to the vision, and then translate that into a mission, values, and positioning that form the narrative which then guides all asset and collateral development. Sales Enablement ensures that the sales teams are fully trained on how to communicate that narrative, and how and where to most effectively use those materials in the sales process.

If you build it, they won’t come. Product marketing assets are ineffective without proper sales enablement efforts - whether there is a separate team for it or not. The simplest analogy I use is that product marketing creates the juice, and sales enablement makes sure the sales team drinks the juice AND keeps it down. Now that’s oversimplified in some ways. The partnership between both functions begins at the problem identification phase. Both teams should be on the same page about the gaps in driving effectiveness for the sales teams - whether it is a recurring challenge in core performance, or an opportunity to train on a new product launch. Having a sales enablement roadmap is essential in making this partnership effective. This is typically owned by sales enablement with input from product marketing. For instance, if product marketing creates a new pitch deck for sales, it requires adding a ton of context, talk tracks, discovery questions, role plays, follow-up playbooks, and other preparation to make the pitch deck effective. Most of this is led by sales enablement with input from product marketing. SE also determines how much repeated exposure and training the sales team needs and how much ramp time it takes for the sales team to be effectively using the new pitch deck. Sales enablement schedules these training sessions and invites product marketing as subject matter experts to help drive the training sessions. Measuring the effectiveness of these steps in the process and incorporating that into future sales enablement efforts for continuous improvement is what makes this partnership effective in the long run.

This depends on how your organization is structured and what responsibities you define for Product Marketing. Sometimes product marketing plays a big role in enablement, while at other companies they just provide the messaging/value props/etc that enablement then uses as a framework for their enablement. But generally, product marketing focuses on: * Product positioning * Value props * Feature naming * Pricing and packaging * Talk tracks * Overview of what a product is and why it matters * Core assets, such as pitch decks While enablement might focus more on: * Creating trainings on how to sell a product * Creating collateral for products * Communicating new releases / updates to the sales team

PMMs should be partnering very closely with sales enablement teams.  * The role of PMM is to bring subject matter expertise -such as product knowledge or competitive messaging. PMMs should be responsible for creating sales content and leading training sessions * The role of enablement is to understand enablement needs and own the process, and the execution of sales enablement. Sales enablement teams are often thinking much more holistically about sales enablement - its not just product training or messaging training - they are also focused on onboarding or training teams on sales methodologies like Sandler, etc.

Two things to consider here: if they are resisting your product messaging, it may be worth asking yourself if it’s the right messaging to being with. Then consider how you’re framing the messaging to the sales teams based on who they are talking with. Let’s look at both of those. To evaluate if you’re using the right product messaging/positioning do an audit using this formula: Positioning = Market Problems + Our Offering – Competition. In other words, what are the market problems you’re aiming to solve, how does your offering solve for them, and how is it different from what your competition is claiming? If you land on that as your product messaging, your sales teams should lean into it, not resist it.  If you feel you already have that nailed, and you’re still getting resistance, then consider the audience of your salespeople and make sure you’re framing your product messaging at the right level. Do you have messaging created for your product that’s appropriate for C-level, decision-maker, mid-manager, and practitioner? Better yet, have you tied these together as a “chain of pain” or “pain chain” (look up this concept and apply to your messaging – it’s one of the best frameworks to use).

The best incentive is to show them the opportunities it will unlock for them.  Example: Let's say you are trying to shift reps from talking about single products to a suite. There is resistance because they worry that will make it a tougher sell since it's a bigger decision. What do you do?  First, acknowledge their anxiety and triage that effectively. In this case, that means making sure you deliver a way to make sure that new messaging continues to support existing sales motions.  Secondly, show them the potential for what the messaging can unlock. In this case, potentially higher ASP and future cross-sell opportunities. 

I think if messaging is done right, the incentive lies in buyer comprehension and ultimately more closed opportunites. Great messaging means understanding the buyer and their pain points and being able to speak to those pain points with the value propositions of your product. This type of value based selling will resonate with buyers in a way that is proven to have impact - and therefore being able to highlight that to the sales org, and showing them the impact of selling product values - should be incentive enough. 

I don’t incentivize sales for this. Any such incentives will be short-term band-aid attempts. I dont see them solving a problem.  A well-trained salesperson should know when to focus on product benefits in their sales conversations. It’s never the lead. If you want them to use specific product messaging, then the best incentive is to build trust that your output is reliable and effective for others on the team. Seeing proof of impact within the team is very effective in getting others to use your messaging.

The best way to encourage the sales team to use the right product messaging is to create useful and actionable sales materials with that messaging. If your messaging is simple, easy to understand, and battle-tested to work with prospects then you won't need incentives. Good messaging should make the sales teams' jobs easier. Secondly, make sure you have done a ton of training - just giving the sales team messaging is not helpful if they don't know when and how to use it. Creating certifications is one way of doing that as well.

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 can utilize to ensure there is a common talk track are beneficial. These sometimes operate as standalone documents or could be anchored with a product/solution pitch deck (as a part of the speaker notes). What I’ve also seen work well, especially when it comes to ensuring sales reps have a common understanding of relevant industry dynamics, is to create an internal education content series. For example, when I was working at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, our Sales Enablement teams did a phenomenal job of creating internal training content on different industry trends impacting our customers – e.g., Cloud Transformation, Big Data. These helped to get reps educated on the latest industry trends and also how to talk to customers about these topics.

The only way to ensure that is to have a really strong and clear messaging strategy that is documented and shared across your entire company. That should also consistently reflect in any sales content you create to make that more actionable - so if you deliver really great sales pitch materials, the team will actually use them Secondly, do continuous training.

Medium- to large-sized companies typically have a sales enablement team that focuses on this exact problem. In a smaller company, sales enablement often falls on product marketing. In that case, how can you make sales enablement work?  1. Collaborate closely with sales leadership. Make sure that the sales tools you're producing will actually help sellers. 2. Make sure that your sales tools are self-explanatory (in spite of recommendation #4). Include clear and concise messaging, answers to any questions or objections they may encounter, and frequently asked questions. Include detailed speaker notes on presentations. (I can't believe I have to say this, but I see slides delivered with no notes all the time!) 3. For anything that you expect a seller to read out loud, read it out loud yourself. Multiple times. Get rid of tech jargon and wordy descriptions that don't roll off the tongue.  4. Test sales tools with a few key sellers before rolling them out. 5. Do a live training. Recruit a seller to co-present with you and encourage questions. Record the session for those who can't make it.  6. Answer your email and Slack messages when people ask for help! Better yet, create Slack groups dedicated to specific types of sales tools (e.g. competitive-plays, sales-play-1). 7. Encourage feedback and release new versions on a regular basis (but not so frequently that people lose track of what the latest version is).

* Have regular meetings in which you invite all relevant parties and review the newest updates, how to find them, etc.  * Make sure to use the tools already available in the company if/when they're available  * Have regular meetings with Sales leaders to ensure they're "fluent" in the items you want their teams to understand and ask of them their support on an ongoing basis 

As a PMM your job is not just to create the content, but you also want to make sure you are training them and providing the right context. * You can do self-serve training using LMS tools or video tools like Loom - and share that as you launch new content * You can run live (virtual or in-person) training workshops and sessions (if you have an enablement team, partner with them) * Host office hours so people who have questions can come to you for answers

This is a tricky one because ultimately you want everything to tie back to revenue (usually in the form of new versus growth versus retention), but you can never fully hold PMM accountable for those top-line numbers since there are so many other forces at play. This is why you need a set of secondary metrics you can use to measure your efforts a little more directly. For starters, measure the attendance rate of your sales enablement sessions, measure the views/downloads of the content from it afterward, and run quick surveys to measure the effectiveness of the session (even a one-question 1-10 satisfaction survey will do). Next, look at the metrics that you have more (maybe not full) control over that should ladder up to revenue. Are win rates increasing against a certain competitor? Are there more in-quarter sales-stage progression of deals? I love this one because a deal may not close for a number of reasons out of your control, but if you can say “we moved X% more deals from discovery to solution validation” (or whatever your sales stages are), this is a powerful metric to hang your hat on.

Sales enablement effectiveness should have quantitative as well as qualitative measurements. Quantitative measurements should have lead and lag metrics. Lead metrics help you ensure you are on the right track early on in any enablement project and allow you to course correct as needed. Examples of lead metrics are - sales usage KPIs, training completion, opp open rate, sales stage movement, talk time on calls, etc. Lag metrics indicate how effective the project was and helps plan for the next enablement initiative. Examples - revenue, quota attainment, opp close rate, time to close, contract value, etc. Qualitative measures can be: * How confident do they feel about a topic/process/demo? * How prepared do they feel with materials necessary? * How willing are they to share feedback and collaborate with you on improvements? A huge advantage we have today is using call recordings from tools like Gong or Chorus - where you can create playlists for mentions of keywords, pitch analysis, follow-ups, etc. In the end, it has to come down to revenue generated as the ultimate effectiveness metric. Otherwise, nothing else you measure matters.

This depends on what needle you are looking to move with enablement - are you hoping to shorten your sales cycles or are you hoping to help sales win more competitive deals? Define your KPIs first. The end goal of sales enablement is to move the needle on an actual sales metric - which your team should already be tracking. A secondary measure is measuring sales confidence. If your sales team is enabled well, they should have higher confidence in things like pitching the value of your product. I have run quarterly sales confidence surveys that really help you understand if your efforts are making a difference.

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 can own and update their own product spot, which makes it easy to keep content refreshed.  We also use Showpad for the online training element.

There are likely several tools out there that I do not know of, but the ones I liket: - Highspot for hosting and managing sales content - Guru for sharing messaging, content, and things like product information - Loom can be a great way to do quick self-serve enablement - Klue for sharing competitive battle cards - Uberflip can be great for hosting specific content streams  - Notion or Confluence are also great for creating sales content hubs if you don't have a huge budget for an enablement tool

There is no single golden arrow. Every piece of material has its role in the process. I look at effectiveness from two perspectives. One - did the salesperson use it? Two - did the prospect use it? Fortunately, there are tools for this today. You should be using a tool like Seismic, Highspot, or Docsend. These tools also allow for a third important measure - did the prospect pass it around to the buying group? Now you’re hitting the right notes. If the salesperson doesn’t use something, it doesnt necessarily mean it’s an ineffective asset. Sometimes it means they need more awareness and training on the value an asset can add to their sales process. On the other hand, more usage by sales doesn’t necessarily mean it is effective. It is important to track what role the asset played in the prospect’s buying journey.

This is always a difficult one. Sometimes it can be easier to solve with technology, while other times it's a bit more difficult to track/measure. With technology: * You can track which content is being sent out/used * You can track how many reps are 'customizing' a deck in their workspace * etc. * However, the issue with this is that you might see a pitch deck you worked hard on isn't being used at all. In that case, you need to evalutate whether its an adoption issue or a quality issue (ie. not the right pitch) Without technolgy: * You really need to rely on feedback loops and finding sales champions to work with * Meet regularly with those champions to review assets and listen to them on what's working, what's not, and what they'd suggest improving * Ask your reps to surface and share with you the assets they're creating on their own. Oftentimes reps are creating materials on their own, because they have a need and don't want to wait for marketing. So ask them! Then take those materials as guidance for how you can optimize, improve, and standardize them as 'approved materials' that are on-brand. At the end of the day, every company and sales team will need the same core assets/materials. Things such as an approved pitch deck, a few core one-pagers, a pillar page on your website, or a tool such as an ROI calculator. So it really comes down to a matter of quality over trying to figure out 'which materials to create' and this can only be figured out through sales rep feedback and working with them. So in short = work with your sales counterparts to listen, learn, and then create.

The best way is to use tools that give you these analytics. I have used tools like Highspot and Guru that make this much more automated. The other way to do that is using some sort of intranet, like Confluence to host this content so you can track use. At the end of the day, you always want to augment any of that with actual sales feedback. You can run monthly or quarterly sales feedback surveys and directly ask the team which pieces of content have been the most effective and why.

Great question – I’d recommend 3 things to ensure you’re getting insights from the field: 1) Create a slack channel devoted to this so people have one place to submit insights from their client meetings (especially competitive insights), 2) conduct at least 1 client meeting ride-along per month. Get in the field and hear first-hand how content is being presented, how it’s resonating, what questions get asked, and what insights you might collect, and 3) conduct win/loss surveys for all deals each quarter. Ensure these surveys ask more than the raw data you can get our of your CRM system. Ask for real insight into why the prospect went with another option, or what positioning was used in the deal cycle to win.

The key is to make it easy for them to share this information with you - so make sure you are creating the right channels of communication. Whether it's creating slack channels where these discussions can happen or having more formal sessions to capture that feedback or creating the right fields and processes in Salesforce - whatever you do, you need to make it simple and easy for the sale team to transfer that knowledge to you. Secondly, you want to show the sales team that the insights they give you are actually taken into consideration and make an impact - whether you update your messaging to reflect their feedback or whether it shows up on the product roadmap in some way - you want some positive reinforcement that will encourage the teams to share more feedback on what they're learning!