How do you ensure your entire sales team gets the messaging?

Great question! You can easily spend a lot of time on building the perfect messaging framework, but it can be useless if other teams, especially sales, do not understand it or believe in it - so here are a few things to keep in mind as you work through messaging: Involve them at the start of the process. The first step in any new messaging project should be doing research and gathering input. Do a focus group with your sales team and gather their feedback - they are on the front lines every day ...Read More

This is a tough one. I work mainly on Southeast Asia which is made up of multiple regions and languages. With minimal resourcing, we tend to do a large online training once a week with the intention to reach as many sales folks as person.  We then try to get feedback from the team or the sales leads to see where are the gaps and what do we need to tweak If necessary, we will conduct local market office hours or specific training sessions targeting to individual markets.  We also try to enable ou ...Read More

This continues to be an evolving process but we leverage a few things: Lead time - sharing the info early so the sales team can disseminate it via the right channels with enough notice (for example, some teams meet just once a week so if you miss that cycle, they may not see it until after launch) Central POC - we have at least one person on sales who has the responsibility of reviewing key messaging and ensuring that updates relevant to sales are flagged via an internal dashboard Visibility - i ...Read More

This largely depends on the size and distribution of your sales team. On one end, if you have a small, locally based sales team then this is managable and usually lower effort than what you'd need to do on the other end of the specturm for a massive sales team that is highly geographically distributed, and that is also aligned to customers in different segments and/or industries. In general, ruthless consistency and over-communication via multiple formats (one pagers, slide decks, websites, FAQs ...Read More

Repetition is so important; it's about embodying the messaging in everything PMM produces, and as you enable on different assets, tying it back to the strategy. Show examples of how key points can come to life in an outbound email, provide them with quick-reference bullets that they can use as reminders of what to always reinforce in their communications. If you're rolling out a new deck, don't just train on it one time. Introduce it, have strong reps or leaders demonstrate delivery. Show it wor ...Read More

Aside from what Anjali is recommending, you will need to understand how your team sells. (e.g. their sales process) You will need to make sure how messaging can play in 1st Call Deck, Battle cards, and other assets and collaterals that will help them win deals. You will need sales champions who will evangelize your messaging, and champions will include Head of Sales, Regional Managers, and Highest performing reps. The reason for champions is because you will need theHead of Sales and Regional Ma ...Read More

One of the things I think many PMMs struggle with is realizing that different styles of messaging resonate with different people. Investors like to hear one thing, prospects another, influencers something different, and so on. And there are professionals — who usually aren't PMMs — whose job it is to influence those audiences. You can do all of the research, leadership alignment exercises, and testing in the world, but sometimes your sales messaging just doesn't stick because the salespeople don ...Read More

My favorite approach to ensuring the sales team gets messaging is two-fold: Work with sales leadership: Get alignment from sales leadership early and often. If they are bought into the messaging and feel they were part of the process, they will make your life a hell of a lot easier by supporting the messaging indepdently and holding reps accountable.  Work with sales enablement: Work with SE to understand the gaps, confusion, and lack of trust that may be existing within the sales team and work ...Read More