How do you prioritize sales enablement needs across different product lines?
Prioritization is always tough. Every stakeholder has a different perspective on what they are looking to achieve.
The ultimate goal of sales enablement is to make sure the sales team is equipped to sell and i’d also add they should focus on “selling what is on the truck.” To share a bit more of my mental model about the elements to consider when prioritizing:
1) Where are the biggest areas of opportunity? Are there any specific products or use cases where we are differentiated and we have a clear runway of opportunity? We should prioritize our efforts here.
2) Are there some products that are just ‘easier’ to sell? We should give our sales team the opportunity to get some quick wins in. They run on a commission basis so make them happy by giving them some easy to get opportunities closed out of the gate.
3) Are there emerging product areas, or a market that your company wants to break into and you need to generate energy and excitement around? If yes, then this should also be an element you consider.
Work with your stakeholders to balance all of these elements and come up with a weighting about where you want to direct your sales team. What falls out of this is a prioritized list of product areas to focus your energy around.
You have several products with release dates next to each other and limited resources, so what do you do? Here’s how you can think of this: first, identify the releases with the highest ‘tier’ or ‘priority’ (classification of release tiers vary company by company). The highest priority feature is typically the one with the highest impact in the market and that should get more enablement focus.
Really good question and there are many ways to address this. The best way in my opinion is to zoom out and look at it through the lens of the company's main goals (usually revenue goals). Are those areas being served well?
Also, where are there the biggest knowledge gaps? You have to be careful on this one though since while there may be a knowledge gap in one space if reps are not going to prioritize that space, it will likely be wasted effort. So alignment with the business goals and sales strategy/level of rep mindshare you will get is important.
I am not sure I understand this question but let me try. It starts with the corporate objective - what is the revenue goal for each product. Sales Enablement will need to focus on the product by priority.
You also need to consider the lifestage of the product. For example, a new product may need additional focus as you evangelize it with the sales team.
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My team is probably tired of hearing me tell them to “think like a business owner.” But that is the frame I recommend when making prioritization decisions — including sales enablement. Very tactically, I believe this means using your finite resources to get the biggest return for the business. In this case that means asking two questions:
Which product lines have the largest incremental opportunity for the business?
And which would benefit the most from improved sales enablement?
What is the investment to implement the sales enablement
Product opportunity is a function of business strategy mind you. In some cases you may want to grow a product that does not have the highest short-term revenue opportunity if it is important to the long-term success of your business.
Determine which product benefits from sales enablement is often a function of product and /or sales cycle complexity. For example, ads products that only require a check-box to implement typically benefit little from sales enablement. However, more complicated solutions — like setting up a data integration — may require in-depth and regularly updated materials and training.
Finally, it’s important to assess how difficult it is to create the required sales enablement materials. Highly-produced videos require more time and money than a summary one-pager. Be sure to evaluate cost when making your prioritization decision.
I would prioritize based on business outcomes. Across the various product lines with sales enablement needs, which one is the most impactful in terms of getting customers to choose you as their provider?
Are there also ways that you can combine the various product lines into themes of value props, so that your enablement assets are speaking to a need customers have, as opposed to single features. This also allows you to tie together needs across different product lines.
Prioritizing enablement is such a difficult question but ultimately I would ensure that you have alignment with: where you see the business is focused, timing of upcoming launches, and complexity of content. I've shared a tiering structure as well in a prior comment based on a variety of delivery methods.
Ideally you have a tight connection with your Sales / Sales Strategy team - but if you don't, a good rule of thumb is to follow the $. Understand the price points of your products and what the business intends to sell in the coming quarter. Sales will likely prioritize high ADS products that will help them hit quota - so aligning to that isn't a bad start.
Timing of launches are important as well - hopefully there is a natural throttling that will make it easier for you but if it is one massive launch, I would think about a plan that builds up to the launch day. Work closely with Product Marketing to understand what updates can be groups together, what must be live versus in a lab course, etc. Having regular touch points with your content creators will certainly help bring predictability which is great for everyone.
When prioritizing sales enablement needs, you should look at the business goals. Which ones are most important and how is your field team tracking towards those goals?
If the field is having trouble meeting those goals, you'll need to connect with the team to figure out where the problem is (messaging isn't landing, confidence selling to a certain buyer or against a competitor, lack of understanding of product or space, etc.). Do this in smaller groups so individuals feel more comfortable sharing their own gaps and questions. You can also run an anonymous survey. Based on this information, you should be able to build out some enablement content.
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