How do you ensure alignment between product marketing and sales teams in terms of sales enablement?

A good way to ensure alignment between product marketing and sales teams is to set up pre-meetings well before any trainings. Ideally if your company has a sales enablement team, this is where they can come in to help facilitate what is truly required out of the sales enablement. With a launch, this is usually pretty easy since everything is brand new, and you are essentially sharing mainly new material. Often larger sales teams have specific sales methodologies (ie Challenger, MEDDIC, SNAP, Sol ...Read More

One common misconception about product marketing is that it's solely about aligning with the product and marketing teams, but it's just as important to align with sales. I've been lucky to work with great sales enablement teams, and early conversations about release plans and enablement strategies help ensure alignment. For teams with different business segments or regions, a one-size-fits-all approach may not work for enablement planning. Scheduling deeper dives with each team often helps get t ...Read More

To ensure alignment and that your sales enablement activities align with your sales team's needs, you must first understand the pain points. Here are the same ways to identify enablement gaps: Listen to sales calls: Spend time listening to sales calls. How do your salespeople pitch your company/product? Are they all the same? Are they different? Do they seem confident? What's the prospect sentiment after the pitch? What questions are being asked? Dig into CRM data: Where do prospects stall in th ...Read More

Kelly, Mandy, LeTisha, Jeff, and Sharon have covered the mechanics well. What I want to add is the frame I've found most useful at Microsoft, Salesforce, and UiPath for sustaining alignment past launch day, because most alignment breaks down not on the first enablement session but on the second. The core problem I've seen repeatedly is that PMM treats sales enablement as an event. We do the launch training, ship the battlecard, and consider the job done. Six weeks later, a new competitive threat ...Read More

It is helpful to look at what needs to be achieved and how to achieve it to effectively ensure alignment between product marketing and sales for sales enablement. This framework may be applied to what each person is responsible for in product marketing. What Needs To Be Achieved Define shared goals. Examples include revenue targets (new customer acquisition, retention, upsell opportunities), lead generation (target and quality), and/or product adoption (adoption and usage rates for successful la ...Read More