How do you draw the line between sales enablement that product marketing is responsible for vs. sales ops?

This somewhat depends on the resources your company has on each of those teams. If you have a full sales ops team then partner with them to understand win/loss and pipeline health. What you’re looking for is how much you’re winning/losing, why you’re winning/losing, who you’re winning/losing against, and what the forward-looking pipeline looks like considering all of those factors. If you don’t have a sales ops team, then you need to take some of this on yourself. I don’t believe a PMM team can ...Read More

Sales ops cannot be responsible for launching new products or features. Any topic directly related to the product or the GTM motion should fall under the purview of PMM (since they will be closely attached to the product management team). PMMs create the training/launch materials and are responsible for rallying the internal teams and the market towards a launch. So, this separation should be pretty straightforward. PMMs should also strive to share insights from the ongoing sales motion (custome ...Read More

This is likely something that can differ a bit depending on company and organization, but in general: Sales Ops functions are focused on strategies, systems, and processes related to stuff like sales forecasting, quota assignment, sales comp design, sales coverage, and administration/maintainance of a company's CRM and lead management systems. All this is of course done in service to not only enable sales, but also execute on the desired sales strategy.   Product Marketing's focus on sales enabl ...Read More

Its OK for the line to be muddy. Make sure you have a good working relation with your sales ops counterpart.  Usually sales ops and enablement are slightly different functions. sales ops has also revenue ops elements in it around contracting and quoting for example. One common metric outright owned by sales enablement is time to productivity. THis comes from good onboarding, based on Sales understanding the market, product, customer, tools, pricing, quotation process, SOW terms etc. Most of that ...Read More

I break it down as follows: product marketing's main role in sales enablement is to educate salespeople on the target customers/market segments/buyer personas & needs, etc., how to position value (not benefits or feature/function) for those customers, and provide competitive intelligence (battlecards, training on what to know and what to say, objection handling, etc.) There is also a technical marketing component to it of course, which is training sales engineers (typically) on features &amp ...Read More

Sales Enablement is a very broad term. But, content and messaging is an important part of sales enablement.  We believe that product marketing is the best positioned to drive content enablement because, product marketing is responsible for the messaging and majority of the content (directly or indirectly). They know the buyer personas, target markets, own product positioning, and competitive intelligence.  product marketing is better aligned with the other teams than the traditional sales enable ...Read More

The lines between sales enablement and product marketing will always ebb and flow between different organizations. There should be a more clear line between sales op and product marketing.  Sales ops focuses on data analysis, training and support, revenue forecasting, and general sales process optimization. I would say this role likely has more ovverlap with sales enablement than with product marketing.   No matter your situation, sit down and map out the R&R boundaries. If you're at a small ...Read More

Different companies will define product marketing and sales ops / sales enablement in different ways. The distinction tends to run along a spectrum where on the one hand, Product Marketing will lead the creation of content that focuses on market positioning and differentiation, and on the other hand, Sales Ops will lead specific activities or content that helps translate that marketing positioning in a way that resonates with the experience of being in sales. For example, a Product Marketer may ...Read More