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

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 launches)

How To Achieve It

• Understand business performance. With my first job in finance, I often seek knowledge on how the business is performing versus the plan, from sales to budget figures. Being well-informed can create more credibility and productivity when connecting with sales, and other cross-functional stakeholders.

• Conduct a listening tour. I’m a huge advocate for being customer-first, and similarly, I consider my key stakeholders, sales, as a customer. I encourage product marketing to learn what’s working and what can be improved to effectively capture that as part of informing plans and deliverables.

• Utilize existing communication channels. It’s best to maintain existing meetings and include discussion topics such as training, launch announcements, and dashboard reviews.

• Develop a shared GTM roadmap. Priority product launches, marketing campaigns, and sales initiatives help ensure all activities are coordinated and complementary, and in part, limit the “surprises”. This would also include sales enablement collateral for review for alignment, from a sales playbook and training to customer-facing collateral.

• Identify common KPIs (as feasible). At a large fintech company, one of the main KPIs for each team was revenue; as the lead marketer, focusing on prospects and existing customers was critical. While the way to achieve the common KPI was different, the commonality did deepen the relationship for greater success.

Keep in mind that every company operates differently which may further inform how work gets done; this implies it may not just be solely the need for alignment between product marketing and sales.  I’ve worked at major tech companies that take a general management approach to others where one function leads more than others on how work gets done.

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, Solution selling, etc) and it's important to align your enablement to this methodology. Thus prior to launch, I would set up meetings to align on:

1) Alignment on target audiences, GTM strategy and messaging.

2) Timing of training and how it should be broken down

3) Who should attend the trainings, who should do the training.

4) Review cycles, who should be included and cadence of review of the sales enablement materials prior to trainings and launch.

5) Identify core competitors, discovery questions, objection handling

6) Core KPIs, how should we be measuring what's correct? Follow up meetings/ trainings, etc.

For updates/enhancement to existing products, I would follow the same suit, except to a lesser degree and focus more on understanding what's working, what's not, looking at data to better identify where PMM can make adjustments.

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 the traction needed.

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 the sales cycle? Why?

• Conduct quarterly enablement surveys: How confident is your sales team pitching differing products? How confident are you in different use cases? How confident are you against certain competitors? What competitors do you see more often?

Based on this data, you should be able to build an enablement calendar that addresses some of the weak points. You won't be able to solve everything in one quarter. You'll need to rerun the same enablement sessions a few different times to help get things to stick. Mix up the training styles. Some people like to learn in bigger groups, others like small groups. Some like slides or handouts, and some thrive with open QA sessions. Diversify your sessions to ensure you're helping everyone. You should also offer periodic quizzes to see if the sessions are effective.