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can you break down when in the GTM process sales enablement should come?

Mandy Schafer
Mastercard Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Miro, Dropbox, Drmandbase, Autodesk, Oracle,September 27

Sales enablement should be thought about throughout multiple parts of the GTM process. I like to break these down into 4 stages - Prototype/Design, Early Adopter/Beta, Launch/GA and Post Launch.

In the early stage/prototype, sales enablement isn't really a big part, as we don't want to distract sales with early stage ideas that aren't fully thought out. But I would make sure the concept is included in a roadmap/vision to ensure our sales teams understand where we are building and thinking about next. I would keep this very high level. This helps align our sales team with our overall north star and strategy. This goes for the marketing teams as well, who will need to also understand our high level roadmap goals so they can align it to their marketing strategies.

During Early Stage/Adopter, this is when I would start training the core teams that would help us with getting beta customers and implementation of the new product. By this time, an initial messaging doc, pitch deck and set of FAQs about the product should be complete. I would train the CSM, Customer Support and Sales Engineering team. At this time I would involve AEs or BDRs until the product is more developed and ready. During this time I would refine my Sales enablement collateral, ensure the messaging is working, identify objection questions and discovery strategy and start building more concerte sales strategies so our salses teams can effectively "hunt" when we go live.

The launch is when we go forward with everything in full force. By this time, regional teams should have the right tools including the battle cards, pitch decks, FAQs. A well designed training program should be ready to go for each different group of the sales team- CSM, AE, BDR, SEs (more technical).

Post Launch - Once the teams have been armed with the material, this is where we do early sales performance analysis and redesign any training as needed. I would also continue working on scaling the program and collateral with the sales enablement team (if you have one) to ensure there is constant support provided to sales as the product continues to grow in the market and new customers come in.

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