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

This continues to be an evolving process but we leverage a few things:

1. 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)
2. 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
3. Visibility - important messaging is delivered and reinforced when possible in sales leadership meetings to ensure that busy sales leaders can take note and flag critical news to their teams

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 and likely have great insight into what challenges customers often bring up, what they respond to, what has worked in the past, etc. In addition to getting useful information, you are also bringing your sales team along the journey.
• Get sales leadership involved. Make sure they understand the value of messaging, and then make sure that once you are ready to roll it out, that they will support it and make sure that their teams participate. For example, when we rolled out new messaging, we launched a pitch certification program for each of our sales leaders (Manager and Directors), as well as the AE’s.
• Make sure that messaging is part of the onboarding process. This applies to the entire org, but especially for sales. As they get trained on your product(s) or services - you want to make sure they are learning the right messaging and positioning from the start
• Make it actionable. At SurveyMonkey, we have developed very detailed internal messaging docs, but we do not expect sales to use those to learn how to position our company and our products. Instead, we used those messaging docs to develop sales pitches for each of our buyer personas/products, including talk tracks, and we also recorded a few videos with sales leaders delivering that talk track - all of this was packaged and launched via a training program for the sales team, which includes role play and pitch competitions. By creating all of these materials - you are giving them something actionable that they can start using right away.
• Use multiple touchpoints. Treat this like a campaign. You have to get creative and think of multiple touchpoints and various formats to deliver this information internally. Use a mix of in-person workshops, office hours to answer questions, internal podcasts talking about the new messaging, pitch decks they can actually use, one pagers to highlight the company or the product value proposition, etc. Different people learn in different ways, so you want to make sure you are giving them a variety of opportunities to learn.

Lastly, your messaging should be easy for anyone - in or out of your org - to grasp. If your messaging really tells the right story, sales will WANT to learn it.

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 our partners on the client solutions team to help be an extension of us so we don’t have to do this ourselves! It’s a good way to work with XFNs and also build up product champions who are also working in the market to help get the message out to the local teams!

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, enablement videos) goes a long way, as does getting them to actively participate (ie. through messaging certifications, having their peers coach and test them on the messaging, etc) in fun ways--you'd be surprised what infusing a fun theme or some costumes can do. It can also help to align the messaging to different stages of their selling methodlogy. 

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 working in the field. Give opportuntiies for them to role play and practice pitching. Ask the team what makes sense and doesn't.

Lastly, we use Gong, and I love sharing snippets of calls where the messaging was delivered well (and even where customers essentially play back our messaging to us!). 

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't trust that you know how to sell. 

In other words, the sellers don't trust you yet. 

One way to short-circuit gaining that trust is by obviously having a sales background. But few of us have that.

Another easier way is to offer up your subject matter expertise to sellers and be available to join their calls. When they watch you explain a new feature with customer storytelling, answer some technical questions usually only handled by a sales engineer, or help close a deal, they start to trust you more. 

And then they not only listen to your trainings, but also give you real feedback on your messaging and how to work with them — a dynamic that sometimes only comes from toiling in the trenches with someone. 

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 Managers because it's a bit of top-down. But importantly, you will need the highest Performing Reps because sales reps only listen to other sales reps who are closing deals because they want to make money too. 

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 together to create an action plan for success.