For a product marketer who only spends a portion of their time working on sales enablement with little face-to-face time with sales, what's the best way to get buy in from a large sales team?

Get out in the field as often as you can and meet with customers but also seek out the super star sellers and find out their secrets to success. Your goal should be to become a trusted advisor to the sales team. This means you have the ability to diagnose problems and challenges that the sales team run into and then make the right recommendations to improve their situation. Showing up and being in the trenches alongside them is the single best way to build your partnership with the sales team - ...Read More

Getting buy in is an exercise on understanding who to influence and what to do to influence them. A couple of things I think about are  How do I align the sales enablement plan with sales leads to get a commitment on either revenue, adoption or being the executive sponsor for what you plan to do Will this plan be in line with their goals; if its not, how do I frame it in a way that best meets them?  Will the sales enablement training address concerns/questions from sales (and by extension the cl ...Read More

There are no shortcuts to getting buy in from a sales team; and, every product marketer needs to know how their product gets to market. To get buy-in from a large sales team you need to demonstrate empathy with the sales process, and be useful in accelerating pipeline. If you’re selling a B2B product, then you also need to know your sales team well. This means understanding how they’re organized (by region, by segment, by vertical), understanding what the pipeline looks like at a given point (ma ...Read More

Find a few successful, well-respected sales reps and cultivate strong relationships with them. Get their input on what you're working on, ask for advice on how (and with whom!) to socialize your work with, and use that political savvy to focus on the key stakeholders within sales that have more influence. The key is to focus - not dilute - your energy and build a small number of strong but impactful relationships. Build your consensus from the ground up; many managers and sales leaders will look ...Read More