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

As I wrote in a different answer, Revenue and Sales Enablement can be a double edged sword. On one hand, Enablement is a critically important and effective channel to scale Sales impact, when done right. But when we ask tens or hundreds of Sales people to spend an hour (or more!) of their time away from finding and closing business, Enablement might appear to be 'costly' to the business from a salary perspective. (Just for fun, if you want to put more concrete numbers behind what I mean, check o ...Read More

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 ...Read More

I always say the earlier the better when looping in cross-functional teams for GTM. There's a lot to learn from each other on positioning and messaging. Often times, our sales team has valuable insights from merchants that we can incorporate into our messaging early on. Here is a rough timeline for a mid-size launch. Bigger launches will need more time! Sales Enablement GTM Timeline: Pre-Launch (4-6 weeks out): Foundation building - Core messaging, positioning, value props Sales team input - Wha ...Read More

I’m going to assume that by GTM you mean the overall go-to-market process which spans 1.) product launch and announcements to sustaining 2.) the lifecycle of your product. The short answer is that sales enablement should be a constant throughout. 1.) Product launches and announcements: For any upcoming product launch you should make sure, as product marketing, that sales and any other customer-facing team is informed and trained at least one or two weeks before the go date. This is because there ...Read More

Mandy Schafer's four-stage framework is really solid. I want to add the dimension that often gets missed: the difference between when to start enablement and when to go broad with it. The instinct most PMMs have is to wait until they have a polished story before briefing Sales. That instinct is wrong. At Tableau, we brought the core sales team into the messaging process during beta, not just as an audience for the final pitch, but as a reality check on whether the story held up against real cust ...Read More