How do you roll out new collateral, content, and product training to a remote sales team?

Question

Amy Loh · Accepted Answer

I'm lucky that we have great partners in Sales who have developed processes for sales training and enablement. The main challenge is once you roll it out - how do you get them to retain the knowledge and utilize the content?

* Highlight how your product can help them achieve their targets - Sales teams have aggressive quotas to hit, so when you showcase how your product sales can help them close the gap, they are more likely to adopt. Use examples of key wins that have really helped achieve the team's success.
 * Make the content easy to adopt - help them craft cadences that incorporate your content and collateral 
 * Use data to increase usage - pull data on the number of views/downloads and tie it to the impact on the sales funnel
 * Continue the engagement - once you've rolled something out, ensure you have forums where you're regularly connecting with the Sales team to hear what's going well. These are good forums for additional training while gaining a better understanding of your customers.

Jam Khan · Answer

These days everyone is remote is it's important to establish a process that works for your organization. Content and collateral can exist in so many places it can overwhelming. A sales enablement platform is essential for evergreen content. Tools like slack are great for quick updates and real time knowledge sharing (e.g. Sales just had a call where they discoverd a competitive weakness, or ran into an obstacle).

Easy access tools like battlecards are useful for regular consumption. For things like a top level strategic narrative and value centric messaging you can go as far as sending printed material to everyone in the organization. We are inundated with so much tech, there is some value in old fashioned print material in some cases.

But for the most part I would rely on the combination of work collaboration software and sales enablement platforms to deliver content and training.

Arianna Schatzki-Mcclain · Answer

As a PMM, Sales is a main stakeholder that we help support. You can think of them as a "buyer" or consumer of your work so many of the same tactics and best practices that you use to roll out communications externally can be used internally. I'll also note that I have worked with many amazing enablement teams that make this part of the PMM job so much easier, but have also been the one and only PMM in an org. that didn't have an enablement team yet so I'll try to share ideas that are helpful for both scenarios.

1. Launch Tiers. Just like when we launch products to buyers, we tier our internal "launches". This helps us rightsize our efforts and ensure the sales team is spending time on what's most critical and valuable. 
 2. Say it seven times. If you have an important announcement, content update, or training, make sure to over communicate across multiple channels. Here's an example of how I've approached the comms for a large update to a sales team. Email announcement from CRO, webinar update with more details, slack and email follow up, team meeting road show, required online training, office hour Q&A. 
 3. Keep it engaging. Consider the format and content. Is there an opportunity to make it more of a panel discussion or gamify it? Can you focus on using moving user stories that capture their attention? We often times have a question for the sales team every few slides to keep it engaging and change up speakers so it's not one person talking for an hour. (No one wants that.) I also recommend taking the time to prep for a sales training in the same way you would prepare for a customer webinar. Also, you're never going to cover everything so instead of packing in a million facts no one will remember in a live presentation, focus on the few things that are most important and direct sales where they are learn more in their own time. 
 4. Calendar it out. Surprises will always pop up now and then, but I would recommend putting a calendar together that outlines when you expect to have new content, training, and announcements. Then you can try to group updates into a monthly cadence or whatever makes sense for you. We have weekly GTM meetings and once a month we use that time to highlight the most important PMM updates.
 5. Tooling. We use Sales eLearning tools for onboarding as well as ongoing updates. PMM records videos on a variety of topics or we work with stakeholders throughout the org. to put together presentations that they record. We also use confluence heavily for organizing and sharing out content and updates of all types. With remote teams, all content and comms need to be early searchable anytime.

Amanda Groves · Answer

We have an established cadence of enablement with our internal teams where we bundle features/collateral into market themes. When rolling out a new feature, we organize content into two buckets: technical (CS) and value story (sales). For the value story elements: we create "how to sell" slides and a launch packet that includes case studies, demo overview videos, and other relevant material for the sales cycle. We then quiz the remote sales team on their learnings (via Kahoot!) to keep folks accountable before GTM push.

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